Ka‘u Coffee Farmers Grab Land — And Control Of Their Futures … Many are former sugarcane plantation workers who, when their employer went bust, started one of the most renowned coffee regions of the world.
After years of uncertainty, dozens of Ka‘u coffee farmers are now buying the land they’ve worked for more than two decades.
About 300 acres near Pahala on the Big Island have been utilized by coffee farmers since sugarcane plantation C. Brewer & Co. left the area in the late 1990s.
But the land in the Pear Tree-Moa‘ula Cloud Rest Area has changed hands several times over the farmers’ tenure through a series of purchases, sales and a foreclosure, having been caught up in the global financial crisis. Now the coffee farmers themselves have an opportunity to buy the land from Ka‘u Mahi, a subsidiary of Colorado equity firm Resource Land Holdings, which bought it as part of a $10 million, 6,000-acre purchase in 2016.
RLH bought the land from Lehman Brothers, which had loaned $105 million to WWK Holdings to invest in the area, before the former became embroiled in 2008’s financial crisis and was forced to sell.
