Dole Food Co. has decided to cease coffee farming on Oahu and lay off nine employees on Nov. 30 amid an effort to sell the 154-acre Waialua Estate farm.
The decision follows the company’s July sale of a nearby 151-acre cacao orchard, and a commitment to continue growing pineapple on roughly 2,700 acres above Oahu’s North Shore.
“We’re not going to continue to run the coffee business,” Dan Nellis, Dole’s general manager for Hawaii, said Monday. “We’re just going to focus on our core business of farming pineapple.”
The $9 billion food company based in Ireland has Hawaii roots dating back more than a century to when James Dole established
Hawaiian Pineapple Co. in Wahiawa in 1901 and expanded pineapple farming to other parts of the island chain including Lanai. For part of its history, Dole also was owned by local sugarcane industry giant Castle &Cooke Hawaii Inc.
Dole established coffee and cacao in 1996 as part of an exploration into diversified agriculture after closing Waialua Sugar Co. that year.
The cacao farm containing more than 60 acres of mature, producing trees that yield the main ingredient used to make chocolate, was sold to a smaller local cacao farm and chocolate maker, Lonohana Estate Chocolate, for about $8 million.
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Dole’s coffee orchard has been listed for sale without an asking price for more than a year.
According to the listing from commercial real estate brokerage firm CBRE, about 167,000 trees occupy most of 208 acres of farmland for sale above Haleiwa and Waialua that also includes about 10 acres of lychee trees, five acres of other fruit crops including dragon fruit, and about 20 fallow acres that could be planted with more coffee.
Nellis said Dole last harvested coffee from the farm during the most recent season, which runs from September to February, and that a major pruning on much of the orchard was done afterward to reinvigorate coffee fruit yields in the next few years.
CBRE’s listing said the orchard’s past annual yield has been around 2,500 pounds of coffee cherry per acre, and that a “reported potential yield” is closer to 4,000 pounds per acre a year. The listing also said the yield of green beans from cherry fruit is about 20% for the orchard where varieties of Kona typica are watered via a drip irrigation system.
Water for the farm was long supplied by Dole until earlier this year when the company gave the main agricultural water source and delivery system for the North Shore — the Wahiawa reservoir and dam along with 30 miles of ditches and tunnels — to the state to avoid being forced to meet new higher dam safety standards.
The state agreed to the deal after Dole, whose one-time subsidiary Waialua Sugar built the system, threatened to dismantle it instead of making dam upgrades. State officials expect the dam improvement work, which began in May, to cost $65 million. The ownership transfer made Dole and about 50 other area farms a water customer of the state under the Agribusiness Development Corp.
For over a decade, Dole also has been selling much of its vast acreage on Oahu that the company once used to grow pineapple and sugarcane following the demise of both industries in Hawaii. Del Monte and Maui Land &Pineapple Co. ceased pineapple farm operations about 20 years ago, and Hawaiian Commercial &Sugar Co. closed the last sugarcane plantation in the state in 2016.
In 2013, Dole listed roughly 20,000 acres of mostly fallow farmland from Wahiawa to the North Shore for sale at $200 million.
From late 2013 to early 2017, the company reported selling about 5,000 acres for $56.8 million. Many parcels at that time and subsequently have been sold to farm operators, the state, housing developers and others.
CBRE has five other Dole parcels amounting to about 285 acres listed for sale at prices totaling about $22 million, and said in a few of the listings that only 4,000 acres remain unsold from an original inventory of 23,000 on Oahu intended for sale.
Dining and Cooking