Ka Lako ʻĀina

About the campaign

Ka Lako ʻĀina — the provisioning of the land — is the work. The network the work builds is Ka Malu o ka ʻAi — the shelter of the food. Formally, the campaign is the Hawaiʻi Island Food Resilience Initiative, a joint program of Hawaii Farmers Union United – Big Island and the Pure KNF Foundation, formed in June 2026 as the Iran war repriced every link in the island's food supply line. Its work is public: eight papers — the threat, the history, the audit, the plan, the strategy, the money — and a data page updated daily. Its premise is plain: no one is coming. That's the good news — it's ours to do.

The campaign runs in Lono's register — agriculture, rain, peace; the season when war was kapu and the harvest circulated the island — and it serves the season; no person wears the mantle. It also holds the island's oldest rule of belonging: kuleana here has always been earned by feeding the place. Everyone who feeds this island holds kuleana for it; the movement restores kuleana — it does not gatekeep it.

The two organizations

Hawaii Farmers Union United – Big Island

The institutional voice of the island's family farmers and ranchers: part of a statewide federation of more than 800 farmers, ranchers, and food producers (2024 — Civil Beat) with chapters across six islands, five of them on Hawaiʻi Island: East Hawaiʻi, Kona, and Kohala active, Puna and Kaʻū open and seeking leaders. The union's adopted 2024 Policy Statement already authorizes this initiative's whole agenda — Natural Farming by name, food hubs, county funding, mobile slaughter, traditional staple crops, and disaster-response planning. The initiative is not a change of direction; it is the policy put to work. hfuuhi.org

Pure KNF Foundation

The island's Korean Natural Farming education and research nonprofit — direct Master Cho lineage, monthly meetings in Hilo (second Tuesday, Komohana Research & Extension Center), teaching farmers to make fertility from local materials instead of buying it off the barge. The record is published: Foundation people hold named co-authorship on the University of Hawaiʻi's Natural Farming extension research (the SA-series fact sheets, including the Fish Amino Acid sheet as lead author), and the published Hawaiʻi Island trials documented purchased-input costs roughly 45% and 33% lower (CTAHR trials). The university's own published words: "Virtually all of the inputs used in KNF… are available locally at a fraction of the cost of imported feeds, composts, and fertilizers" (SA-21). The practice has held its ground here for twenty years for one reason: nature does not lie, and the proof is in the fields. pureknf.org

The allied ecosystem

Leadership

Drake Weinert (president, HFUU Big Island; president, Pure KNF Foundation) convenes the initiative and the five named Move leads, monthly, in public. The proof-of-concept is not a slide deck — it is a working KNF-managed farm in Papaikou on the Hāmākua coast: cassava, banana, laying chickens, and twelve head of cattle (ten meat, two dairy), run on inputs made on the land. The input-making the plan scales island-wide is daily practice there, and the standing invitation to every farmer is the same one the Foundation has always made: come, make a batch, take it home, watch what your soil does.

Contact the initiative via pureknf.org.

Ka Malu o ka ʻAi — the shelter of the food

The land provisions; the food shelters. What the five moves leave standing is a network — farms, hubs, pantries, crews, rails — and its image is the kīpuka.

When lava comes down the mountain it does not take everything. Here and there the flow splits, passes around a stand of forest, and closes again on the far side — and the stand lives: green, intact, seed-bearing, in the middle of the new black rock. Hawaiians call it a kīpuka. It is not a refuge. It is the engine of return. From the kīpuka the birds carry seed back out over the lava, and in time the forest walks back across the ground it lost.

That is the network's whole strategy in one image. We are not building a bunker, and we are not waiting for rescue. We are tending the living stand — the farms, the herds, the skills, the lineages, the organizations that still know how to feed this island — so that what lives in them spreads back over everything that was lost. Every node of Ka Malu o ka ʻAi — every proof farm, every trained crew, every stocked pantry — is a kīpuka. Two hundred years of imports did not kill the knowledge; it stands in the fields at Waipiʻo and the pastures of Kohala, in the union halls and the input kitchens, the way the koa stands in the kīpuka. Tend it, and the forest returns.

The mark

The campaign's home on the web is okina.ai. The ʻokina is the letter that turns ai into ʻai — food, and in the old usage rulership itself: ʻai moku, to hold and care for a district. One small mark, and provision and responsibility arrive together — which is why the work lives there.

And the deepest root is a family line. In the genealogy David Malo recorded, the first kalo plant grew from the firstborn child of Wākea, buried at the end of the house; the second child carried the plant's name — Hāloa — and from him come the people (Malo, Hawaiian Antiquities, 1903). The kalo is the elder brother. To plant is to tend family.

Deep roots. Great heights.