Drive south on Māmalahoa Highway past mile marker 110 and you will pass an ʻulu tree tall enough to clear the telephone lines, standing across the road from a small farm plot that most visitors mistake for an overgrown lot. It is not overgrown. It is being rebuilt, tree by tree, on purpose. A hundred yards further, mauka of the highway, sits the gate to Amy Greenwell Ethnobotanical Garden, next door to the Manago Hotel and its long-running plate of pork chops.
This Saturday, September 19, that gate opens for the ʻUlu Festival, a free public event running 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. It is the kickoff event for the 2026 ʻUlu Hoʻolauleʻa, a week-long breadfruit celebration that continues through September 24. For anyone who already lives in this stretch of South Kona, the festival itself is worth a Saturday morning. But the reason it is happening here, on this particular hillside, is the part most calendars leave out: this ground was breadfruit country for centuries before it ever grew a coffee cherry.
What Kona Grew Before It Grew Coffee
The slopes above Kealakekua and Captain Cook are known today for coffee, and for good reason. But long before Kona coffee existed as an industry, this same elevation band was part of the Kaluʻulu, a breadfruit agroforestry belt that Native Hawaiians developed as part of the larger Kona Field System, a network of walled agricultural zones that climbed the mountain from coast to forest. The Kaluʻulu sat roughly at the 600 to 800 foot elevation, one band in a sequence that included a dryland taro and sweet potato zone above it and a banana zone higher still. It was not backyard farming. It was infrastructure, built to feed a resident population without shipping anything in.
Amy Greenwell understood what that system represented before most people were paying attention. She returned to Captain Cook in the mid-1950s after working alongside a New York Botanical Garden collaborator on Hawaiian plant records, and spent the following two decades planting native and Polynesian-introduced species into her own property's historic agricultural fields. When she died in 1974, she left that land to Bishop Museum specifically to preserve a working example of the Kona Field System. The museum ran the garden for more than thirty years before the property transitioned to full community ownership in 2019, when the nonprofit Friends of Amy B.H. Greenwell Ethnobotanical Garden purchased it outright. Today the garden protects a five-acre archaeological section of that original field system, along with more than 200 species of plants that grew in Kona's farms and forests before Captain Cook's 1778 arrival, arranged across the same four biogeographical zones, coastal, dry forest, agricultural, and upland forest, that defined a traditional Kona ahupuaʻa.
The Numbers Nobody Puts Next to Each Other
Coffee and breadfruit occupy the same mountain, but at wildly different scales, and almost nobody lines the two up side by side.
| Precontact Kaluʻulu breadfruit belt | Present-day Kona coffee belt | |
|---|---|---|
| Approximate footprint | About 10 square miles across the mauka slopes | About 3,500 acres, roughly 5.5 square miles, in active cultivation |
| Estimated annual yield | About 33 million pounds of breadfruit a year, based on doctoral research reconstructing the historic system | About 3.8 million pounds of green coffee a year |
| Farm structure | One continuous agroforestry belt feeding a large population with no imported inputs | Roughly 650 to 800 small farms, most under five acres each |
The comparison is not a claim that one crop beats the other. Coffee built a name-brand export economy that supports hundreds of family farms today, some in their fourth or fifth generation. But the scale gap is real: a belt about twice the footprint of today's coffee-producing acreage once produced something like eight times the tonnage, as pure calories, without a single imported bag of fertilizer. That is not nostalgia. It is a working number that tells you the land itself never stopped being capable of feeding people at scale. What changed was what got asked of it.
The Quiet Restoration Already Underway
The festival is not the first sign that this history is coming back. Across the highway from the garden, a researcher named Lincoln built his doctoral work around measuring exactly what the Kaluʻulu once produced, then turned the research into a working farm. In 2015, the cooperative he helped found, Māla Kaluʻulu, won Kamehameha Schools' Mahiʻai Match-Up competition and was awarded a four-acre parcel inside the historic belt to start rebuilding it. What began as roughly 3.8 acres cleared of invasive trees by student volunteers now hosts more than a hundred breadfruit trees interplanted with other traditional food species, deliberately grown in the loose, layered canopy of an agroforest rather than in rows.
That farm is one node in a larger network. The Hawaiʻi ʻUlu Cooperative, which grew out of the same research and organizing effort, now represents small diversified farms across Hawaiʻi Island and Maui working to bring breadfruit back into regular production and distribution. The ʻUlu Festival exists because that network, along with the Friends of Amy B.H. Greenwell Ethnobotanical Garden, The Breadfruit Institute at the National Tropical Botanical Garden, and several other partner organizations, decided the public needed a way in.
What Actually Happens on Saturday
The festival is free and open to the public, held on the garden grounds at 82-6160 Māmalahoa Highway in Captain Cook, on the mauka side of the road near mile marker 110. Plan for a few hours, not a quick stop. Confirmed elements include:
- Cooking demonstrations from visiting chefs, showing breadfruit prepared in ways most home cooks have never tried
- Grower and agroforestry education sessions aimed at anyone curious about growing ʻulu on their own property
- Cultural and ethnobotanical exhibitors covering the plant's role in Hawaiian foodways
- Keiki programming built for families, not just adults
- An ʻUlu Mākeke marketplace featuring value-added producers, artisans, and makers selling breadfruit-based products
- A one-day breadfruit tree sale offering new cultivars that organizers say have not previously been available in Hawaiʻi
This is not the first time Amy Greenwell Garden has hosted this kind of event. The garden ran two breadfruit festivals in 2011 and 2012 that together drew roughly 10,000 attendees and are widely credited with helping launch the modern breadfruit revival in Hawaiʻi. This year's festival picks up that same thread at a moment when the surrounding restoration work has had over a decade to mature.
If You Want More Than One Saturday
The ʻUlu Festival is the public-facing opening of a longer week. On September 20 and 21, an invitation-oriented gathering called ʻAha ʻUlu convenes cultural practitioners and Indigenous knowledge holders at Kahaluʻu Ma Kai for protocol and storytelling exchange, a session built for practitioners rather than general attendees. From September 22 through 24, the Global Breadfruit Summit takes over the Outrigger Kona Resort & Spa in Kailua-Kona, drawing farmers, researchers, and food-system professionals from across the Pacific for panels and workshops on agroforestry, propagation science, and breadfruit-based product development. Organizers describe it as the largest gathering of breadfruit specialists anywhere in the world. For most residents, Saturday's festival is the one to put on the calendar. The rest of the week is there if the topic grabs you harder than expected.
A Working Landscape, Still Working
What makes this festival worth a Saturday morning, beyond the food and the crafts and the keiki activities, is what it quietly proves about the ground under South Kona's coffee reputation. The mountain never stopped being capable of feeding people directly. It just spent a century and a half being asked to do something else. A four-acre restoration plot, a cooperative of small farms, and a garden that refused to let the old field system disappear are now putting that capability back in front of the people who live here.
Hōkūlia's own agricultural easements, set aside for small-scale farming within the community, sit inside this same regional pattern of land that keeps proving it has more than one identity. That is not a reason to buy anything. It is simply a fact worth knowing if you already call this stretch of the Kona Coast home, and you are looking for a good reason to drive up the highway this Saturday morning.
For more on the community and the land it sits on, visit Hōkūlia.
