Growing the Next Generation of Hawaiian ʻAwa

Every ʻawa plant growing at Pūʻiwa Farms Hawaii is here because someone before us chose to keep it alive.

Cultivated kava (Piper methysticum) is generally sterile, which means the ʻawa varieties we know today have survived through deliberate human propagation. For thousands of years, people throughout the Pacific selected plants they valued, took cuttings from them, planted those cuttings, and eventually passed them on to others. As Polynesian voyagers crossed the Pacific, ʻawa traveled with them, eventually reaching Hawaiʻi and becoming part of Hawaiian agriculture and culture.

That history is important to us, but Pūʻiwa Farms Hawaii is ultimately about what happens next.

Today, our job is to keep those plants growing, understand exactly what we are growing, produce exceptional Hawaiian ʻawa, and make sure the cultivars entrusted to this generation are available to the generations that follow.

Keeping Hawaiian ʻAwa in the Ground

Thirteen recognized traditional Hawaiian ʻawa cultivars remain today. Pūʻiwa Farms Hawaii maintains all 13 on our farm on Hawaiʻi Island.

For us, preservation does not mean simply maintaining a collection of a few plants. Agricultural varieties remain relevant when they are actively grown, propagated, studied, harvested, used, and replanted. Our goal is to build healthy populations of Hawaiian ʻawa cultivars and continually produce new propagation material from established plants.

Every harvest therefore has two purposes. Mature plants provide ʻawa that can be enjoyed today, while selected stems become the planting material for tomorrow. Cuttings are propagated into new plants, those plants return to the field, and the cycle continues.

It is essentially the same process that has kept ʻawa alive for thousands of years. The scale, tools, and agricultural practices may have changed, but the fundamental act has not: take a plant worth preserving and grow another one.

Knowing What We Grow

Preserving Hawaiian ʻawa also means preserving its identity.

This is one of the reasons cultivar documentation is so important at Pūʻiwa. Once 'awa has been harvested, chopped, dried, ground, and moved through a long supply chain, much of the information contained in the living plant disappears with it. A bag of dried root cannot show its stem color, leaf morphology, internode configuration, or growth habit.

At Pūʻiwa, traceability begins before harvest. We know the plants while they are still growing. We document cultivars in the field, propagate known plants, maintain their identity through cultivation, and control the process through harvest and processing.

That is the idea behind one of the simplest statements we make about the farm: We Know What We Grow.

For us, that isn't just a marketing phrase. It describes a fundamentally different relationship with the product. We aren't beginning with a bag of kava and trying to determine where it came from. We begin with the living plant.

Making Fresh Hawaiian ʻAwa Available

We also want people to experience ʻawa as an agricultural product rather than only as a dried commodity.

Drying has made it possible for kava to travel around the world, and it will remain an important part of the kava industry. But when the farm and the processing operation are connected, there are other possibilities. ʻAwa can be harvested, processed, and frozen fresh without first being dried for international transportation and long-term storage.

That is what we are doing with our Fresh Frozen Hawaiian ʻAwa. Each bag comes from a known cultivar grown on our farm, harvested and processed under our controls, and frozen fresh on Hawaiʻi Island. This allows us to preserve more of the character of freshly harvested ʻawa while giving people far beyond the farm an opportunity to experience it.

It also changes the relationship between the customer and the source. Instead of a product whose agricultural identity becomes increasingly distant as it moves through the supply chain, fresh frozen ʻawa can have a direct connection back to the field where it grew.

Grown here. Known here. Harvested here.

Growing for the Future, Not Just the Next Harvest

ʻAwa requires patience. It takes years to produce a mature root system, which means the decisions being made at Pūʻiwa today are really decisions about what the farm will become several years from now.

We are continually propagating and planting more ʻawa, expanding our populations of Hawaiian cultivars, improving our agricultural systems, and developing better ways to handle fresh root after harvest. We are also increasing the amount of propagation material available so these plants do not have to remain confined to our farm.

That last part matters. Success for Pūʻiwa is not measured by becoming the only place where these plants can be found. Hawaiian ʻawa is more secure when healthy plants are growing in more places, in the hands of more people who value them. As our cultivar populations grow, we want to help put planting material back into the community and contribute to the continued cultivation of ʻawa throughout Hawaiʻi.

Preservation through isolation is fragile. Preservation through propagation is much stronger.

Becoming Part of the Chain

Pūʻiwa itself exists because of that same process.

Mike Munsell planted ʻawa near this land in 2016. When Mike passed away in 2020, some of those plants survived him. They were propagated, their descendants were planted, and they became part of the foundation from which Pūʻiwa Farms Hawaii grew.

We think about Mike's place in the story differently today. He is not simply the person who started a farm. He became one of the many people in the long lineage of ʻawa who received living plants, cared for them, propagated them, and made sure they reached the next person.

In that sense, Mike has joined the ancestors and stewards who helped carry the tradition of growing ʻawa forward. The plants he cared for are still growing, just as the plants cared for by generations before him continued after those growers were gone.

That is a humbling way to think about farming.

The 13 Hawaiian cultivars growing at Pūʻiwa do not belong only to this moment, and our responsibility is not simply to harvest as much root from them as possible. We have inherited living plants with histories much older than our farm. Honoring the people who preserved them before us means doing the same work for those who will come after us.

So we plant them. We document them. We propagate them. We learn from them. We harvest them carefully. We make fresh Hawaiian ʻawa available to people who may never have experienced it before. And, most importantly, we make sure there are more plants growing tomorrow than there are today.

That is what Pūʻiwa Farms Hawaii is building now.

We are a working farm producing ʻawa for today while growing and preserving the plants that will become part of Hawaiʻi's ʻawa story tomorrow.

The plants remember. Our job is to carry them forward.