Some of the state’s most famous coffee-growing regions on Hawaiʻi Island were also among the hardest-hit areas during Hurricane Lala.
Miranda’s Farms in Kaʻū is a family-run cafe that also grows coffee on 80 acres of nearby agricultural land, where Lala toppled eucalyptus and coffee trees, and destroyed greenhouses, sheds and other structures.
“ We've sustained major damages, we have lost infrastructure. Luckily, our cafe stood ground. It's a miracle because all the eucalyptus trees were falling left and right, and they somehow missed our cafe,” said co-owner Maria Miranda.
She said the farm looked "somewhat unrecognizable” after Lala. The debris left after the storm made their land barely accessible even by vehicle.
Earlier this week, Miranda said her family still didn't have full access to their fragmented farm, namely two lots in nearby Pahala, so the damages from the storm could be worse.
“We've got four farms, and we still haven't done a head count and gone through each acre,” she said. “So far we've got hundreds of trees that we've lost, and some of the trees have sustained major damage … they've been uprooted. Others have been completely crushed. They're losing limbs. We’ve lost the cherries.”
Damages in Kaʻū
Coffee farming is a significant part of the Miranda family’s story.
Miranda’s mother, Berta Miranda, was originally from El Salvador. She met her husband, Jose, while working in fruit fields in California. The couple moved to Kaʻū in 1996, where they picked coffee for a dozen years before buying their own land — to grow their own coffee.
Maria Miranda and her three siblings were also raised to be in farming.
“If you were born in this family, you're going to farm,” she said.
That’s what made the damage from Lala so difficult.
Just last month, the Mirandas' Geisha coffee variety earned the highest overall score in the Hawaiʻi Coffee Association’s 17th Annual “Best of Hawai'i” competition. The scoring takes into account taste, smell, physical attributes and even processing information.
The trees that produced that award-winning coffee were hit.
“For 20 years, we've been working on the consistency and quality of our coffee. This is our livelihood,” Miranda said, adding that winning the award is “bittersweet because a lot of the winning coffee, a lot of the trees that were damaged were of that lot … It’s so painful to even utter and say. My mother called me crying.”
The Mirandas aren’t alone. Many farmers grow coffee and specialty crops like macadamia nuts and cacao in the Kaʻū area.
The HCA said coffee farmers there and other parts of Hawaiʻi Island’s southern region, like Miloliʻi and Wood Valley, were some of the hardest hit by Lala.
Impacts to Kona side
However, coffee farmers even up north, in the Kona area, were impacted.
“In the Hōlualoa area, particularly on the mauka side, some farmers are reporting the loss of 20% or more of their coffee trees, mostly caused by larger downed trees,” said Abigail Munoz, HCA’s executive director, in an email.
Bruce Corker is a longtime coffee farmer in Hōlualoa who owns Rancho Aloha coffee farm on the slopes of the Hualālai volcano. Early this week he said he’s got about a week of debris cleanup ahead of him.
“We're a week in, and we're about halfway done cutting up and hauling debris that was blown down,” Corker said.
He and other farmers there produce the coffee for which Kona is famous.
“There are a lot of coffee farms in Hōlualoa, and most of the properties like mine have trees along the border, some of which are tall and a lot of which were blown over,” Corker said.
He estimated wind speeds to be 75 mph or higher, and said gusts were able to knock over large trees.
Losing coffee trees can be a “significant” and yearslong setback, he said, because a replacement tree takes “three or four years before you can get any coffee at all … and probably five years before you get a good harvest off that tree.”
Corker said about a dozen of his trees were uprooted. He’s trying to replant some of them, but doesn’t know if they’ll survive.
What's next for coffee farmers
Coffee is one of Hawaiʻi’s major crops, and the only U.S. state that grows it commercially. Its production value was more than $46 million in 2025, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and it is one of the state's top three most valuable crops.
Fall is supposed to be the start of the coffee harvesting season in Hawaiʻi.
The HCA said it’s still assessing the extent of the hurricane’s damage to coffee growers as a whole, but its main concern at the moment is the well-being of farmers and their families who are facing the other impacts from Lala to their communities.
This year’s hurricane season is supposed to be particularly busy, but Miranda said the weather has changed over the last few years.
“It has been very difficult to farm the last couple years,” she said. “My father's been saying for three years now that it's not what it used to be. I don't know what's going on. It certainly hasn't made things easy, the Hawaiʻi weather.”
