No Breathing Room: Back-to-Back Storms Are Dismantling Hawaii's Coffee Industry in Real Time
On the flanks of Mauna Loa and across the rolling highlands of Ka'u, coffee trees that took years to grow and longer to perfect are now lying on the ground. The 2026 hurricane season has turned into a relentless siege on one of America's most storied agricultural traditions, and what was once considered a resilient, premium-crafted industry is now staring at multi-year losses with no clear end in sight. Hawaii coffee farmers are struggling with the toll of repeated storms hitting the islands right in the middle of their peak harvest season. The back-to-back nature of these events — no gap wide enough for recovery, no dry window long enough to salvage what's left — is what makes 2026 different from anything the industry has faced before.
A Season Built Over Years, Destroyed Over Days
To understand why these storms hit so hard, you need to understand how coffee actually works. This isn't a crop you replant from seed in the spring and cut in the fall. According to the Hawaii Coffee Association, the repeated rounds of severe weather stripped ripening coffee cherries off branches and uprooted entire trees — trees that take three to five years to grow and produce fruit, meaning the damage extends well beyond just one season. When a corn farmer loses a crop to a late frost, he can plant again next spring. When a coffee farmer loses a tree to a hurricane, he's looking at half a decade before that ground returns to full production.
The timing this year was particularly brutal. The storm hit about a month before peak harvest time in Ka'u, farmers said. Coffee cherries were ripening on the branch — weeks away from the labor-intensive hand-picking that separates Hawaiian coffee from mass-market commodity beans — when the winds came. What fell to the ground was not just this year's income. It was years of cultivation, pruning, fertilizing, and careful water management, all wiped out in a matter of hours.
Hurricane Lala Fires the First Shot in Ka'u
The most immediate devastation hit the Ka'u district on the southern tip of the Big Island, an area that has quietly grown into one of Hawaii's premier coffee regions over the past two decades. Hurricane Lala tore across Hawaii Island farms and ranches, washing away coffee crops on the eve of harvest season and knocking out drinking water sources for thousands of head of cattle and horses, leaving a preliminary damage estimate of $761,150. But as is so often the case with agricultural disasters, the preliminary number was just the opening line of a much longer, grimmer story. Two weeks after the storm passed, the actual cost to Big Island farmers and ranches was expected to be much higher as damage assessments continued, especially in the badly hit Ka'u region.
The human reality behind those numbers is vivid and wrenching. Alla Kostenkos, the owner of A Coffee Farm in Pahala and a board member of the Hawaii Coffee Association, couldn't even reach all of her property immediately after Lala passed. Road damage from Lala's flooding delayed her survey of damage to her property, which she described as "pretty extensive, and it's pretty bad." When she and her team finally made it out on foot, what they found was catastrophic. Kostenkos described the situation plainly: "The road to Cloud Rest was damaged so badly, we're not able to drive there. We could only go there by foot. The culvert to our farm was washed out. The structures were OK, but the trees were badly damaged. Some of the trees were almost on the ground."
And for the trees still technically standing, survival is far from guaranteed. Tilted trees will likely not survive because of root damage from which it is almost impossible to recover. Kostenkos noted that her farms had already taken hits earlier in the year from Kona lows, and that even those events — catastrophic by any prior standard — were beginning to look like warm-up acts for what came next.
Gloria Camba, president of the Ka'u Coffee Growers Cooperative, highlighted Moa'ula in the Pahala foothills — with widespread damage to farms in Wood Valley, Pear Tree, and Cloud Rest, prime Ka'u coffee-growing areas. Camba put it plainly: "It's going to be a big loss for everyone in these areas, because the trees are lying on the ground."
At Miranda's Farm, located on acreage near the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park Kahuku Unit outside Naalehu, Hurricane Lala uprooted both coffee trees and the windbreak protecting them. Windbreaks — rows of taller trees planted specifically to shield delicate coffee plants from exactly this kind of weather — took years to establish. Losing them leaves the remaining coffee trees exposed to the next storm. And in 2026, the next storm was never far off.
Then Came Nolo
Before farmers had cleared the debris from Lala, the calendar flipped into late September and another threat materialized in the Pacific. The National Hurricane Center reported that Nolo's maximum sustained winds were holding at 105 miles per hour, making it a Category 2 hurricane. The American Red Cross opened eight shelters across the Big Island, while airlines canceled at least 21 flights at Hilo Airport as carriers adjusted schedules and monitored conditions.
For coffee farmers still in the middle of surveying Lala's wreckage, the arrival of Nolo was the gut punch that pushes a man past the point of processing. Coffee growers also dealt with power outages and high operating expenses sapping revenue, and as Hawaii Coffee Association Executive Director Abigaile Munoz put it: "When farmers don't have the opportunity to recover, take a breath for a minute, they don't have the chance to fully recover between events."
An Industry Already Stretched Thin Before the Storms Hit
What the storms exposed — and accelerated — is a structural fragility that has been building in Hawaii's coffee sector for years. Coffee farms throughout Hawaii entered this period facing an already challenging marketplace: a heavy previous crop, cautious purchasing by green coffee buyers, and high costs for fuel, fertilizer, labor, shipping, equipment, and other agricultural inputs all placed significant pressure on producers. The storms didn't hit a robust, well-capitalized industry flush with reserves. They hit producers who were already stretched.
As Hawaii Coffee Association Executive Director Abby Munoz stated: "This has been an extraordinarily difficult year for many of Hawaii's farmers. Our producers are still recovering from earlier storms while preparing again. Farming is already a vulnerable livelihood. When you add the realities of operating on an island, remote agricultural communities, high production and transportation costs and repeated severe weather, the impacts compound very quickly."
Severe weather can further affect farms through lost coffee cherry, damaged or uprooted trees, soil erosion, damaged roads and farm infrastructure, interrupted power and transportation, delayed harvesting, and additional labor and cleanup costs. That's not one problem — that's seven simultaneous crises, each requiring money and labor that most small farms simply don't have sitting in reserve.
The insurance picture is especially bleak. Hunter Heavilin, advocacy director for the Hawaii Farmers Union, noted that the vast majority of farmers do not have insurance to cover crop loss: only 4% of farmers on O'ahu are insured, and while 15% of farmers on Hawaii Island carry insurance, most of those cases are large-scale coffee and macadamia nut operations, while smaller-scale farmers lack coverage entirely.
Kona Coffee's Earlier Wounds: The Kona Low Storms of March 2026
To fully grasp how dire the situation has become, the story has to go back to March 2026, when a series of Kona low storms — a weather phenomenon specific to the Hawaiian Islands, bringing extreme rainfall from persistent low-pressure systems — delivered what was then considered a once-in-a-generation blow to the Big Island's agricultural community.
A series of relentless Kona low storms left Hawaii's agricultural community reeling, with record-breaking rainfall causing what officials described as the worst flooding the islands had seen in decades. Between March 11 and March 15, some areas received more than 30 inches of rain, and a second system followed less than a week later, with the University of Hawaii recording staggering localized totals of up to 61 inches. In total, an estimated 2 trillion gallons of water were dumped on the state's countryside, leading Hawaii's governor to label the event the most severe flooding since 2004.
The numbers that followed were staggering. The damage to Hawaii farmers caused by March's Kona low storms could be nearly $70 million and counting. U.S. Rep. Jill Tokuda reported that "at least 1 in 3 farmers, ranchers, and producers were negatively impacted."
Greenwell Farms: A 176-Year Legacy on the Brink
No single story from the March storms crystallized the stakes more clearly than what happened to Greenwell Farms in Kealakekua, one of Kona's most recognizable and historically significant coffee operations. On March 14, a historic Kona storm tore through Hawaii, bringing heavy rain, flooding, and strong winds, leaving one of the island's oldest coffee farms shattered in its wake. At Greenwell Farms, a 176-year-old coffee operation, owner Tom Greenwell said the damage was unlike anything the farm had ever experienced.
Heavy rain, flooding, and winds from the Kona low storm system transformed the land, carving three deep trenches through one of the farm's South Kona locations. Floodwaters carved deep trenches through the land, destroying decades-old coffee trees and wiping out roughly 24,000 young plants in the nursery. "That's our future planting that is gone and trees that I grow and give to farmers to grow," Greenwell said.
The farm estimated total losses at $10 million, combining damage to crops, infrastructure, and the owner's residence, where Greenwell estimated personal damages of roughly $1 million. For context, that's a single farm. State officials estimated at least $9.4 million in agricultural losses across all sectors, with coffee and other high-value crops heavily affected — a figure that Greenwell's farm alone nearly matched, and a figure that experts confirmed was a severe undercount as surveys continued.
Rep. Tokuda visited a coffee farm in Kona that was preparing to plant as the storms struck. "They were just about to plant 20,000 saplings in their fields — completely wiped out and gone," Tokuda explained. "They had legacy trees that were originally planted over a hundred years ago by their founders — gone and lost."
The Hidden Threat: Root Damage, Fungal Infection, and Slow Death
Among the most insidious aspects of the storm damage is what farmers can't see yet. Wind-stressed and flood-damaged trees don't always die immediately. The shaking back and forth causes cracks in the roots — wounds that allow fusarium fungus into the tree and frequently kill it over the long term. "Right now, you look at your trees and you're like, 'Wow, they survived.' But they're starting to turn a little yellow." A tree that looks upright today may be gone by next spring, leaving a farmer with nothing to show for another full year of work.
In West Hawaii, coffee and cacao crops suffered extensive defoliation and flower destruction, and experts expect significant yield declines in the coming year. Defoliation — the stripping of leaves — is particularly damaging for coffee because the leaves are critical to photosynthesis and the plant's ability to set fruit. A heavily defoliated tree produces far fewer cherries the following season, compounding losses well beyond the year of the storm itself.
Flooding has also washed away fertile topsoil, leached nutrients from the ground, and helped spread invasive pests — a triple threat that undermines the foundational soil quality that Hawaii's volcanic-terrain coffee is famous for. That rich, well-draining volcanic earth is the backbone of Kona coffee's flavor profile and international reputation. When it washes downhill, the recovery calculus becomes exponentially more difficult.
The Climate Pattern Driving It All
None of this is happening in isolation. The force of Lala came amid one of the most intense El Niño climate patterns on record, as abnormal warming of sea surface temperatures in the region contributes to the ferocity of storms during hurricane season. Experts say Hawaii could be facing as many as 13 cyclones in the area through November. That number alone reframes the entire conversation. Farmers aren't trying to recover from a bad year — they may be trying to survive an extended period of intensifying storms with no meaningful off-season in between.
As Rep. Tokuda noted, residents in the southern part of Hawaii Island — Ka'u, Pahala, Naalehu, Ocean View — had "never seen water like this," with Tokuda adding: "It feels like every part of my district is being hit differently, but increasingly harder with every storm."
The Human Calculus: Who Keeps Farming?
Behind every dollar figure and storm track is a person — usually a family — who chose coffee farming not because it was safe or lucrative but because it was their land, their identity, and their community. As some longtime ranchers and farmers figure out how to recover from both the Kona lows and Lala, some are thinking about whether or not they can continue, whether they can pass it on, or whether this is the straw that breaks their back.
The numbers on farm survival in Hawaii were already grim before 2026. Between 2017 and 2022, the state lost more than 700 farms, while the suicide rate for farmers and fishers is three times higher than that of the general population. These aren't abstract statistics. They map directly onto a farming culture under extraordinary pressure, where the decision to quit isn't just financial — it's a kind of grief.
The Big Island alone is home to 3,638 farms and another 760 ranches, according to the state Department of Agriculture and Biosecurity. Each of those operations represents a family, an investment, and often a generational commitment to land. The coffee industry, as the premium face of Hawaii agriculture, carries particular symbolic weight — but the storms don't discriminate.
A $46 Million Industry Under Existential Pressure
The economic stakes for the broader state — and for coffee drinkers across America — are real. The statewide Hawaii coffee crop for the 2024-2025 season was valued at approximately $46.4 million. That's the baseline against which this season's losses must be measured. If even a significant portion of the 2025-2026 harvest is lost — and the evidence strongly suggests it will be — the financial shock will reverberate through the entire supply chain, from farm to roaster to retailer.
Hawaii produces the only commercially grown coffee in the United States. Kona coffee in particular commands prices among the highest of any origin coffee in the world, driven by the combination of volcanic soil, high altitude, and meticulous hand-harvesting. Ka'u coffee, the newer prestige origin on the Big Island's southern slope, has won international competitions and carved out its own premium niche. Both growing regions took direct hits from Lala, and both now face the compounded threat of Nolo and whatever systems follow it through November.
For farmers who were just days or weeks away from harvesting and now have to start over, the financial math is particularly punishing: farms typically front the cost of land, water, seeds, inputs, fuel, and labor with the expectation of recouping those expenses after harvest. When the harvest is stripped from the trees by wind and flood, those costs don't disappear — they just go unrecovered, piling onto the next season's balance sheet.
What Comes Next: Recovery, Relief, and the Long Road Back
Relief efforts have mobilized, though the scale of need has consistently outpaced the response. The Hawaii Agricultural Foundation and the Hawaii Farm Bureau Federation launched a coordinated relief effort to support farmers and ranchers affected by severe weather, flooding, and prolonged heavy rains. But coordinated relief and emergency funding, while necessary, don't replant trees or rebuild topsoil on any timeline that helps a farmer get through the next harvest cycle.
The coverage gap is a structural problem that relief funds can't fully bridge. State insurance officials urge Hawaii residents to check their policies ahead of future storms, warning that standard plans don't cover hurricane or flood damage. For the farmers who have been hit hardest — many of them operating small, family-run plots without the margins to carry comprehensive agricultural insurance — that warning arrives too late to be anything more than a painful reminder.
The path forward requires more than emergency checks. Coffee trees don't recover on a fiscal year. The growers who survive this season and replant will not see full production from those trees for three to five years. In the meantime, fixed costs continue, mortgage payments don't pause, and the market for premium Hawaiian coffee — already under pressure from lower-cost competitors and cautious buyers — remains unforgiving.
What Hawaii's coffee farmers are confronting in 2026 is less a single crisis than a cascade — Kona lows in March, Hurricane Lala in August, Hurricane Nolo in September, and an El Niño-charged season that still has months to run. Each storm hits ground that hasn't fully recovered from the last. Each tree that falls represents years of work and years of future production. And each farmer who decides he can't go on represents a piece of a uniquely American agricultural heritage that, once gone, is extraordinarily difficult to rebuild.
For those of us who reach for a bag of Kona or Ka'u at the specialty coffee shop, or who've made the pilgrimage to the Big Island to tour a working farm and understand what single-origin really means, the events of 2026 are a stark reminder of how fragile that cup actually is — and how much of it depends on the willingness of a shrinking number of families to keep planting, keep tending, and keep going back to the fields after the storms move through.
