Hawaii island coffee industry may suffer delays, lack of product after Lala

Severe storm damage from Hurricane Lala has cut off some coffee farms in the rural southern part of the island of Hawaii, washing away crops and destroying roads and bridges just as farmers were about to head into harvest season. Separate from the Kona coffee region, Kau has built a reputation for coffee of its own.

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But the impacts extend beyond the farms. Washed-out roads and bridges had left communities in the area with no access out of town. Some residents are still facing power and water outages, reliant on deliveries for supplies.

For Kau’s coffee industry, the full extent of the losses is still emerging. Some in the industry are reporting uprooted coffee trees, power outages, water disruptions and impassable roads.

“Thousands of trees are down, a lot of it just washed away completely, and the road is completely destroyed,” Alla Kostenko, co-owner of A Coffee Farm, told SFGATE. She lives on her farm above Pahala.

Pahala was initially cut off from the rest of the island by highway closures in both directions after the storm due to severe damage to the highway and bridges, but highway access to Hilo has been restored. The roads into Pahala’s main town were also impassable until the local community came together to create a path for vehicles, Kostenko said.

Once she made it into town, Kostenko saw the “Salvation Army and helicopters flying and bringing in some supplies, because there are communities here that are still completely cut off. There’s no power, no water,” she said.

Access continues to remain difficult in the coffee-growing areas. Kostenko said part of her subdivision, where many coffee farms are located, is still inaccessible by road. Some portions of the road, she said, are “completely gone.”

She and her husband went around the area on foot to survey the damage.

“There’s a water line that you know goes from the mountain that is also completely destroyed. It’s incredibly sad. The local farmers and just the local people are saying that they have never seen such damages at this time,” she said. “It’s, you know, very heartbreaking.”

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Kau has about 500 acres of coffee production, grown primarily on small farms. At one of Kostenko’s  properties, she estimated that about half of the coffee trees were lost, primarily younger trees. Elsewhere, she has seen sections planted about a year ago washed away.

The timing could worsen impacts on farmers. With fruit already on the trees, Kau was about to enter its coffee harvest season.

Hawaii coffee scientist and Coffea Consulting owner Shawn Steiman told SFGATE in an email that his biggest fear is that coffee cherries nearing harvest were blown away or washed from trees. “No cherries means no coffee to sell,” he said. Leaves, which are important for photosynthesis, he added, may also be lost. Prolonged waterlogging can harm or even kill coffee trees, though Steiman said Kau’s volcanic soils generally drain quickly.

Even farms whose crops escaped major damage face another problem: getting coffee to buyers. Damaged buildings, equipment and infrastructure, along with disruptions to electricity and water, can prevent farmers from processing and selling coffee that survived the storm, Steiman said.

He experienced the disruption firsthand after attempting to place an order with a Kau coffee farmer over the weekend. He later found out the farm had no electricity and couldn’t roast coffee. Damaged roads also raise questions about whether coffee can be shipped out.

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“Farmers first need to attend to their basic needs before they can farm or vend. Thus, buyers, whether they want green bean or roasted coffee, aren’t going to get it for a while, even if all the coffee is fine and ready to be prepped and sold,” he said.

At Rusty’s Hawaiian in Pahala, the immediate concern is getting ripe coffee off trees. From her Pahala home, co-owner Joan Obra told SFGATE over the phone that while she has not yet been able to survey the farm herself, coffee pickers had recently reached the property and returned saying, “Everything’s red. Everything’s ripe. It needs to be harvested.”

She added the farm was already dealing with erosion from kona low storms earlier this year, which created a new waterway through its middle field. She expects it to have widened and deepened. With another round of heavy rain forecast in the near future, the farm is focused now on getting as much of the crop harvested as it can. 

The storm is a setback for a coffee-growing region that has spent decades building an identity separate from its much more famous neighbor, Kona.

Coffee has been cultivated in Kau since at least 1894, but it wasn’t until the Kau sugar plantation closed in 1996 that it gained increasing interest as displaced plantation workers turned to coffee. In its early years, much of Kau’s coffee was sold in the Kona market, but the region eventually developed its own brand and began winning its own awards.

Now, visitors frequently stop at some of the Kau farms for tours and tastings, getting a closer look at the small farms and growers behind Kau coffee. The annual Kau Coffee Festival has further increased Kau coffee’s reputation.

Kostenko encouraged the public to support Kau farmers by looking for Kau coffee at cafes and roasters or buying roasted coffee directly from the farms that sell it.

“A lot of the farmers are obviously going to persevere and just continue doing whatever they’ve been doing for, you know, decades,” Kostenko said. “You know, you just roll up your sleeves and you continue going.”

Editor’s note: SFGATE recognizes the importance of diacritical marks in the Hawaiian language. We are unable to use them due to the limitations of our publishing platform.