Traditional agroecology in Kona: a mixed-method approach to understanding the crops, production, and distribution of Kona's ancient food system

Tommy is currently a postdoc in the Indigenous Cropping Systems Lab at UH Mānoa where he is working with the NRCS to incorporate concepts from traditional Hawaiian agroecology into NRCS Ecological Site materials. Originally from California, he graduated from UC Riverside in 2019 (B.S. in Environmental Science) and recently finished his PhD at UH Mānoa in 2025, where he studied the relationship between soil formation processes and Hawaiian rainfed agricultural systems. Tommy's talk will get into his different approaches to understanding the Kona Field System, the ancient, diverse food system of the Kona region which supported large populations of people for hundreds of years up until the 19th century. These approaches include looking at soils, ecology, historical accounts, Māhele records, and archaeology