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Hawaii’s small farms are reeling after back-to-back storms in March produced the state’s worst flooding in two decades, washing away crops, destroying equipment, and leaving an estimated $50 million in damage across nearly 2,000 farms, according to the Hawaii Farm Bureau. The floods hit Oahu’s North Shore — an area better known for big-wave surfing than for agriculture — with a force that submerged fields, killed livestock, and left layers of reddish-brown mud that have since hardened under the tropical sun.
“In some cases entire farms have been wiped out,” said Brian Miyamoto, the farm bureau’s executive director. “These are farmers who were just days or weeks away from harvesting and now they have to start over.”
Data collected by farming advocates puts the reported damage at nearly $40 million across more than 600 farms, but Miyamoto said the bureau’s estimate is much broader — closer to $50 million at almost 2,000 of Hawaii’s 6,500 farms.
The flooding has struck a particular kind of agriculture. For most of the late 19th and 20th centuries, Hawaii’s farm sector was dominated by large plantations — Dole and conglomerates founded by missionary descendants grew immense fields of sugarcane and pineapple for export. But as that model faded by the 1990s under international competition, state officials began promoting smaller, diversified farms that could supply local grocery stores, farmers markets, and shops in Honolulu’s Chinatown.
The COVID-19 pandemic, with its worldwide shipping disruptions, reinforced the importance of local food production for the isolated archipelago, and the state has since offered additional support including infrastructure funding, a farm-to-school program, and loans for farmers denied credit by banks. But the small scale that defines Hawaii’s farm sector also leaves it exposed: unlike many mainland operations, Hawaii’s farms are often too small and diversified to afford or qualify for crop insurance.
Many of the farmers are immigrants who were barely making a living before the storms, Miyamoto noted. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that most of Hawaii’s farms have less than $10,000 in annual sales. The flooding, combined with high winds and power outages, killed or stressed livestock and wrecked equipment, vehicles, and infrastructure.
Bok Kongphan, an immigrant from Thailand who leases a five-acre plot, watched floodwaters rise to his thigh inside the shipping-container home he built on the property. In an interview interpreted by his niece, Jeni Balanay, he called the floods “very devastating” but said he intends to keep farming — growing lemongrass, cucumber, okra, and other vegetables he sells at farmers markets, a swap meet, and stalls in Honolulu’s Chinatown.
Without insurance, Kongphan has been seeking government aid and figuring out how to level earth displaced by the water. Balanay has been helping him and other Thai farmers navigate the available relief: federal disaster assistance, one-time $1,500 emergency grants and long-term loans from the state, and a charitable fund that raised about $850,000 in the weeks after the floods. Many farmers have also started online fundraising pages.
Balanay, who learned farming from her mother after the family immigrated to Hawaii, lost her own crops — choy sum, bitter melon, tomato — and watched recently planted banana, coconut, and mango trees yellow in the aftermath. She recalled the torrent rising to her waist in seconds and wiping out her fields in the middle of the night.
“Will it happen again?” she said. “When you look at the land and it’s all destroyed, you want to give up.”
The flooding is only the latest crisis for Hawaii’s growers, who have faced wildfires, pests, and volcanic tephra — ash and debris ejected by an erupting Big Island volcano — in recent years, said Sharon Hurd, the state’s top agriculture official.
“These are the farms that we really need to get started again,” Hurd said. “We cannot have them give up.”
State officials have been testing soil to assure farmers their land is safe and have been providing seeds and plant starts, she said.
The damage is already visible at farmers markets, a key income source for many growers. Farmer Kula Uliʻi said her family has been bringing roughly one-quarter of their usual output — about 60 pounds of tomatoes on a weekend instead of the 200 pounds they normally sell. They lost starts that were due to be planted this month and face months of limited harvest. Uliʻi said she is unsure about the status of her farm’s contracts with grocery stores, given that it cannot meet demand.
Even taro, a crop that thrives in water, was lost after contaminants carried by the floodwaters submerged the plants.
“It’s all gone,” Uliʻi said. “We can’t use any of it.”