Fun on the Farm
This year marks the 15th anniversary of Kahuku Farms, the family-run farm on the North Shore known for its tractor-pulled tours and fresh-from-the-harvest cafe.
It’s a milestone for managing director Kylie Matsuda-Lum who, along with her husband, Judah Lum, and her sister, Kalyn Matsuda, keeps the operation running.
They are the fourth generation of a family whose agricultural roots stretch back more than a century, to when Matsuda-Lum’s great-grandparents emigrated from Japan. Her great-grandfather found work as an independent contractor growing watermelons and pineapples. Her grandfather was an irrigation supervisor on a pineapple plantation before branching out on his own.
Then, in the 1980s, Matsuda-Lum’s father, Melvin Matsuda, teamed up with friend and fellow farmer Clyde Fukuyama to create Matsuda-Fukuyama Farms — Kahuku Farms’ parent company.
“My uncle, Clyde Fukuyama, my dad, Melvin Matsuda, and my mom, Momi Matsuda, are all still involved in that business,” Matsuda-Lum says.
While Matsuda-Fukuyama Farms continues to grow and wholesale apple bananas, Lāʻie Gold papayas, long eggplants and dryland taro, Kahuku Farms’ focus is on education, agri-tourism, value-added retail products and food service.
“Farm to table is so popular these days, but in our case we brought the tables to the farm,” says Matsuda-Lum.
The concept proved to be so popular that earlier this year, Kahuku Farms won Newsweek’s 2025 Readers’ Choice Award for Best Farm-to-Table Restaurant — beating out farms in California’s wine country and upstate New York for the honor.
Matsuda-Lum credits the local community for supporting them from the very start.
“When we opened our doors 15 years ago, we had no idea if people would like this or not,” she recalls. “We’re on the North Shore where it was all about shrimp, plate lunches, seafood and mac salads. So opening up with our menu, we were like, ‘Oof, I don’t know if this is going to work…’ Fortunately, people responded really well to it.
“It was rewarding to have people from the community be our first guests.”
The acai bowl is the star of Kahuku Farms’ cafe menu. It’s made with farm-grown acai berries and topped with slices of apple banana also grown on the farm. Demand for it was so strong that they sold out in June. Folks had to wait until August — when the next crop was ready to be harvested — to get their fix.
Kahuku Farms advertises itself as the first — and, as far as it knows, the only — business to offer acai bowls made with Hawaiʻi-grown acai.
It took Matsuda-Lum and her team eight years to perfect this sweet treat.
“We planted our first acai plant in 2008, we got our first harvest in 2016 … and we launched the first Hawaiian-grown acai bowl in 2017,” she says. “There was a lot of trial and error for sure. When we harvested those first acai berries, we got pretty nervous because we thought it was going to be like a blueberry where you harvest it, wash it, then throw it into a blender and make a smoothie, as easy as that.
“But with this first harvest we noticed there was this very big pit or seed and very little flesh and pulp that surrounded it. So we kind of panicked and thought, ‘Wow, we just spent eight years on this and it’s not the right varietal.’”
Unlike blueberries, which grow on shrubs, acai come from a palm tree native to Brazil. While blueberries can be refrigerated for a week or so, that’s not the case for acai — something Matsuda-Lum’s team learned when their first harvest went bad. Turns out, you need to freeze acai.
“We were trying to YouTube as much as we could, but YouTube didn’t really have that much information back then,” she recalls.
Fortunately, she and her team eventually figured out how to separate the acai pulp from the pit and were able to refine the recipe that would become beloved by many.
Now, it takes Kahuku Farms’ acaipalms about five years to produce berries, Matsuda-Lum says, and her team has staggered the plantings so that they can get berries throughout the year.
But the saga of that first crop illustrates a truth about farming: It’s risky.
“You can be a really good farmer but you have no control over the weather, you have no control over bugs, diseases, viruses,” Matsuda-Lum says. “There’s so many things that can affect your crops that you have nothing to do with … Bad weather can affect you for years.”
As a daughter of farmers, this is something she grew up understanding — and probably why, when she got to University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa back in the late 1990s, she majored in travel industry management.
She says if you had met her as a child and asked her if she wanted to follow in her parents’ footsteps, she would likely have said, “No way.”
But after graduating and working at other jobs, she found herself hankering to return to the family farm. Only now it was her parents saying, “no way.” They reiterated the risks, reminded her about her college degree and encouraged her to pursue a more stable career.
Perhaps she would have, had her father not enrolled in an Agriculture Leadership Foundation of Hawai‘i program in 2002. He got to network, take a trip to Washington, D.C., learn about agriculture laws and policies, and visit other local farms.
Matsuda-Lum recalls that it was after he visited Ali‘i Kula Lavender Farm on Maui that he told her something like, “‘I think I have this idea for you. I just visited this cool farm on Maui and they’re doing something with lavender, but maybe we could do it with the things we grow.’
“He said, ‘Why don’t you build a smoothie stand on the farm, and you can grow the different products around the cafe and do educational tours to teach people?’
“I guess you can say I took that idea and I ran with it because we’ve become so much more than a smoothie stand,” Matsuda-Lum continues. “It’s kind of exciting to take a step back and really look at what we’ve done here, because although I thought it was a cool idea at that time, never did I imagine it would be what it is today.”
What it is today is a full-scale cafe with covered seating, a large lawn, shady paths for visitors to explore and learn about the different plants, and packaged goods like liliko‘i butter, chocolate fudge and cacao chai tea that are made on-site in Kahuku Farms’ commercial kitchen.
All of the food and drinks incorporate farm-grown produce that didn’t meet the aesthetic standards of wholesalers but were still perfectly edible.
“Kahuku Farms was really created out of a need, because like I said, farming is so risky. We really needed a way to diversify and to be more sustainable,” Matsuda-Lum says.
Attending a tour adds more depth to her words. Guests visit a field of eggplants and see for themselves how many of the fruit — yes, eggplant is a fruit, technically a berry — don’t meet the standards of grocery stores simply because they are too big or too warped. Then, they can order a focaccia bread pizza with eggplants from that very same field. Food waste goes from abstract to visceral. Same for the chocolate fudge in the mocha espresso shake. After exploring a grove of cacao trees, tasting raw cacao and learning about local chocolate production, the work that went into making it feels more real.
Matsuda-Lum says she and her family are always looking for more ways to foster these connections. In addition to the tractor-pulled tour and the farm cafe, Kahuku Farms also hosts baby lūʻau. A walking tour and a pick-your-own-fruit concept are under consideration.
Matsuda-Lum says she’s also excited to re-launch the farm’s field trip program — similar to a tour, but for keiki in preschool to second grade and arranged through schools — and to explore opportunities for corporate and wellness retreats.
“It’s really all those touch points that we have that make it rewarding,” she says. “That is my favorite part (about running Kahuku Farms). Because if we were doing all this and people weren’t coming and weren’t enjoying themselves, of course that would be really junk.”
To learn more about Kahuku Farms or to book a tour, visit kahukufarms.com.
