At 95, Casey Shim still works a Kula coffee farm that began with 100 plants and almost no soil.
Casey Shim picks coffee one step at a time. The rows climb and drop through lava rock, and when the cherries redden, he steps through them, setting his feet before he reaches, holding branches before he picks. Kula, he says, is “either going uphill or downhill.”
Shim, 95, grows 1,500 coffee trees on five acres of family land in Kula’s old Chinatown. Many volunteered from seeds beneath older trees. He prunes them shoulder high now; for 10 years, the trees grew tall enough that he used a hooked bamboo pole to bend branches down and pick one-handed.
The farm began with 100 plants from Al Franco at Grandma’s Coffee House. Nearing retirement, Shim had heard someone mention coffee over lunch. Al’s cousin drilled the holes with a backhoe. Shim saw almost no soil.
“The holes were mostly lava rocks,” he says. “I said, ‘How are these trees going to grow?’ ”
Franco told him to plant them with the dirt around their roots, cover them with rocks and see. Thirty-five years later, almost all those first trees are alive.
“That’s an amazing plant, that coffee plant,” he says.
As a boy in Haʻikū, Shim cut weeds around Dwight Baldwin’s farm, where his father worked as a farm manager. He picked avocados and grapefruit, helped prepare Honolulu shipments and earned 50 cents a day. During World War II, he remembers working pineapple fields for about 14 cents an hour.
After Army service, a University of Hawaiʻi psychology degree and 33 years in Long Beach schools, he and his late wife Margaret built their Kula house in 1990, choosing a flat spot with what Shim calls a “million-dollar view.”
The Kula land was in his family for generations. His grandparents had come from China with little money and no English. Shim says he feels lucky to have inherited the place. Shim Bao – Popo to him – raised eight children in the old house still on the property. Once, when Shim struggled to lift a bag of corn, she picked it up, threw it on her back and headed downhill.
“I’ll never forget that,” he says.
Margaret planted hydrangeas, amaryllis and ginkgo biloba across the farm, choosing places for them herself. Now Shim recognizes her hand as he walks.
“I see her all the time,” he says. “She’s all over the farm.”
In Kula, coffee cherries may redden from January to March, and picking can last six months. In an average year, Shim harvests 1,000 to 2,500 pounds of red cherries. In 2024, he picked 4,400 pounds; in 2025, 1,400. Nature decides the crop.
After picking, cherries go through the pulper, separating beans from fruit. Shim sells the coffee in 4-ounce bags under the Shim Pure Kula Coffee label, designed by his granddaughters Loryn, Marissa and Alexandra Kanemaru as children.
He says he has never really fertilized the trees. One section has drip irrigation; the rest gets water from hoses and sprinklers. Mostly, the trees keep doing what they have done since Franco’s first 100 plants went into rock.
“I’m not a scientist,” he says, “but I believe the soil in Kula is magical.”
Shim was a founding member of the Maui Coffee Association in 2004 and remains one of the elder figures in Maui’s coffee community, which hosts the annual Seed to Cup Coffee Festival.
Shim drinks one cup a day, drip-brewed, with cream and two scoops of sugar. It has been, he says, a “learn by doing” farm.
Shim spends winters in California with his children and grandchildren. On Maui, a cousin watches the trees. When the next crop reddens, the cousin lets him know. Then Shim returns to Kula to pick what the rocks have grown.
Seed to Cup Coffee Festival
The Maui Coffee Association organizes the annual Seed to Cup Coffee Festival, bringing together coffee workshops, farmers, roasters, food, music and local coffee vendors. Learn more at mauicoffeeassociation.org.
