SWAAN Webinar:

Managing Mesquite for Yield: What a Century of Kiawe in Hawaiʻi Can Teach the Southwest

By: Neil Logan

Thursday, December 3, 2026 at 10:00am - 11:15 am MST / Arizona time

FREE

Presentation Description:

In 1828 a French priest planted a single mesquite tree in Honolulu. Within a century its descendants covered roughly 150,000 acres of Hawaiian lowland, and Hawaiʻi spent the next hundred years doing something almost nowhere else has done at landscape scale: managing Prosopis as a crop rather than fighting it as a weed. Honey, stock feed, firewood, charcoal, flour and shade all came off the same tree the mainland spends millions removing.

Neil Logan has spent twenty years documenting that experiment, including retracing the 1827 voyage that brought the tree from Peru. This session covers what Hawaiʻi learned: which management regimes produced yield and which produced thickets, how pod and flour production works in practice, why managed stands behave very differently from unmanaged ones, and where the Hawaiian experience does and does not transfer to Southwestern rangelands.

It also takes the harder question head on. The same genus is celebrated in Peru, eradicated in Australia and argued over in Hawaiʻi and the Southwest. Twenty years in, Neil still has not heard a version of that contradiction that fully satisfies him, and the Q&A is the part he is looking forward to most.

Bio sketch:

Neil Logan is an ethnobotanist and agroforestry consultant based in Kapaʻau, Hawaiʻi, where he runs the FARM Center. He has spent more than twenty years on the ecology, management and food use of Prosopis, and is the author of Legacy Legumes: Trees of Renewal and Abundance, published 1 December 2026 with a foreword by MacArthur Fellow Gary Paul Nabhan. His current fieldwork covers mesquite pod harvesting and milling systems and living fuel breaks as fire infrastructure in drylands.

Up to 1.25 ISA CEUs