HĀNA — For two nights as a Kona low storm whipped through East Maui in mid-March, all Gina Lind could do was pray. 

“I still have nightmares about the wind,” said Lind, who owns G&G Land Farm and Fishing with her husband Greggie Lind near the Hāna Airport. “I wake up thinking that the wind is back, because it was something else. My husband and I are both from Maui. … We’ve never experienced that, not in Hurricane Iwa or Iniki.”

In the days after the storm, the Linds and other farmers woke up to another kind of nightmare — dozens of trees and plants uprooted and destroyed, undercutting their livelihood and leaving them with a long-term recovery.

“A lot of our stuff was mature and fruit-bearing,” Lind said. “Gotta replant and start all over again. It’ll take another four or five years before it’s producing as much.”

On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that technical and financial assistance is available to help Hawai‘i farmers and livestock producers recover from the back-to-back Kona storms in March. 

Arthur Keyes, acting state executive director for the USDA Farm Service in Hawai‘i and the Pacific Islands, urged impacted producers to report all crop, livestock and farm infrastructure damages and losses to their local office “as soon as possible,” although the deadline is March 1, 2027.

Maui County Mayor Richard Bissen said because the county can get boots on the ground faster than state or federal agencies, it plans to do assessments and help farmers figure out what kind of funding they’re eligible for. That could include federal public or individual assistance now that the president has approved a federal disaster declaration for the storms.

“We have different programs, different forms of funding that we can try to bring to bear,” Bissen said Friday. 

In addition to helping farmers report damage to the state or federal government, the county could also offer grants of its own. The Maui County Council is currently reviewing Bissen’s version of the budget, and while the mayor said there wasn’t specific aid for Hāna farmers because the proposal had to be submitted right after the storms, he said: “We’ll be able to find the emergency funds for that.”

In East Maui, farmers just outside of Hāna town in the Ka‘elekū area sustained some of the hardest hits. But even they acknowledge they’re the least likely to ask for help, especially after seeing the damage to other parts of the state. 

“I always try not to be a squeaky wheel,” said Mikala Minn, project manager for Mahele Farm that was also impacted by the storm. “But the farmers are the ones that never say anything, because naturally they carry that humility, just being land people.”

For farmers, recovery is not as straightforward as fixing a pole or patching a roof. They’ll have to wait years to see a return of the crops they lost in the storm. Minn said people may start to think differently about what and how they plant. 

At Mahele Farm, a teaching farm collaboration between Ma Ka Hana Ka ‘Ike and Kahanu Gardens, 31 of the 35 macadamia nut trees were lost. The banana plants got hammered, and even the ones that did survive may no longer bear fruit and will have to be cut down. A couple of the farm’s biggest lychee trees, which take five to eight years to fruit, completely snapped. Mountain apple trees, by contrast, “did really well,” tucked away in a protected zone.

“People are going to be replanting, but also, the psyche of the farmer is like, OK, do I replant that same tree? Or am I going to learn from this and maybe move to a crop that I noticed did better on the property?” Minn said. “Maybe it’s not worth as much … but it’s more resilient.”

Hāna is “built for rain,” Minn said. The young volcanic soil typically drains very well compared to the old clay soil in places like South Maui. But they weren’t ready for the wind that the first Kona storm brought hurtling down the slopes of Haleakalā. On his road, Minn watched utility poles “snap like a toothpick.” He didn’t leave the house for two days and was without power for 10.

Aldon Frost, owner of family-run cacao grower and chocolate producer Hāna Gold, said the farm suffered an estimated $100,000 in terms of crops and value-added products lost, “which is pretty painful for a small family farm.” Frost is one of the farmers hoping to get federal aid and met with USDA officials on Friday.

His family has owned the 10-acre property since the 1970s, when they were growing papaya and distributing it to IHOPs across the state. But as larger farms got into papaya cultivation, prices went down, a good thing for customers but a challenge for the farm. His parents shifted back to their careers — his mom as a teacher and his dad as a pilot. 

But in 2005, Frost and his mom wanted to jump back into the business and started thinking about niche crops. 

When they found out they could grow cacao in the islands, they got some pods from Hawai‘i island and planted 200 trees in 2005. By 2010, they’d gotten to a point where they had enough of a harvest to make chocolate. Frost learned the ropes under chocolatier Virginia Douglas of Sweet Paradise Maui. Now, they have 2,000 cacao trees and sell chocolate from their little farm stand in Hāna as well as online. 

Around this time, Hāna Gold would be collecting the tail-end of its harvest. But the Kona low storms destroyed the farm’s late spring and summer harvests, toppling about 20 trees, knocking down baby cacao pods and blowing flowers off branches. 

“Cacao trees can be pretty resilient, but it’s hard to say which ones are going to survive at this point and which ones are going to go down,” Frost said. 

Until November, which is typically the peak harvest time, Frost said they won’t truly know whether the damage was just “a bump in the road” or devastating enough that they’ll have to pivot to keep the operation going. Fortunately, they try to buy cacao from other local farmers to keep a “buffer” of beans so operations can keep going. 

With no summer harvest, Frost hopes to use the lull to rebuild the large greenhouse custom built for drying cacao beans. The wind blew away half of the structure, a critical piece of the business that has to be restored as soon as possible. Frost estimated that reroofing could cost more than $10,000.

Aside from repairing the damaged structure, Frost said their next move will be to plant again. Cacao trees take about three to five years to start producing. 

“I’m not trying to make this a big pity party for us,” Frost said. “There’s people that have it way worse. We’re really blessed.”

Matt Ponichtera and his wife Leah, owners of Hāna Macadamia, lost 45 to 50 trees, about 50 percent of their total farm. Growing macadamia nuts is a long, labor-intensive process, with trees taking nine to 10 years to mature and fruit. 

The couple inherited the macadamia nut trees, which were planted in the ‘90s, when they bought the 6.7-acre property in 2018. For years they juggled full-time jobs, with Matt commuting nearly three hours to Kīhei to work at Maui Brewing Co. and Leah waking up at 4 a.m. to work remotely with a public relations firm on the Mainland. On weekends they picked nuts and cracked shells while watching Netflix. 

They hustled, showing up consistently to the Hāna Farmers Market, and diversifying their products with flavored nuts, mac nut butter and mac nut milk. Finally, after about five years, he was able to go full time, and she followed last year, achieving their “ultimate goal.” They had their biggest harvest last fall and winter of about 14,000 nuts in husk.

The Ponichteras thought they had survived the winter weather until the Kona storms hit last month. On the morning of March 13, during a brief lull in the winds and rain, the couple threw on their bee suits and rushed out to right the bee boxes that had tipped over in the howling gusts.

“Those are the last things we were just trying to save because those are the things we could save at that point,” Matt said.

Now, with a potential decadelong wait for newly planted macadamia nut trees, they’re looking into diversification, with the potential for coconuts and breadfruit.

“I’m called a young farmer, but I don’t feel like one, and 10 years away seems like a long time to have 50 percent of my crop gone,” he said. 

When asked if they’d still be able to stay full time on the farm after the storm damage, he said “that’s the big question.” Right now, they’re sitting on a big harvest that will help them through the coming days, but it all depends how the surviving trees fare. 

“That’s the goal, that’s the dream, that’s why we worked so hard over the eight years to do it,” he said of running the farm full time. “We had a taste of it. It’s hard to give it up right away. So we’re going to keep doing what we’re doing for the next few months, probably evaluate, see what kind of green nuts look like that come back on the trees.”

Gina and Greggie Lind also will be reevaluating what they plant moving forward after seeing the storm’s impacts. Gina Lind said she hates the fact that areca palms create so much rubbish and attract rats, but “not a single one of them fell.” 

Meanwhile, the storm destroyed several of their ‘ulu, avocado, starfruit, papaya and mountain apple trees, things they planted when they’d first moved to the property and started their farm 10 years ago. In addition to growing “every kind of tree imaginable,” the couple also raise egg-laying and meat chickens, sheep and rabbits on a combined 7 acres near the Hāna Airport.

Greggie Lind, a commercial fisherman who used to supply Mama’s Fish House and the Wynn Resort in Las Vegas before shifting to doorstep cooler deliveries in Hāna during the pandemic, sells his fresh catch at the Hāna Farmers Market at below-market prices every week.

During the storm, the Linds went without power for eight days. They lost “quite a bit of food,” and now their ice machines and one large freezer no longer work. So many trees toppled on their farm and surrounding properties, including an old banyan that Gina Lind remembers being told to look out for when she was first learning to drive as a teenager. It looked like “some monster toddler went through the neighborhood ripping trees out,” she said. 

Still, Gina Lind said the losses on O‘ahu’s North Shore, where her sister works as a first responder, have put the impacts into perspective: “I kind of look at our losses as being manini, compared to what people have gone through there.”