The projection
Huku is to project or stand out, and Kahuku is the point — the blunt northern tip of the island where the coast turns.
The word also describes a rise in the land, and there is a Kahuku on Hawaiʻi Island in the southern Kaʻū district that takes the name the same way.
After sugar
The Kahuku sugar mill ran from 1890 until 1971. The land has since gone to aquaculture — the shrimp farms and their roadside trucks are the town's best-known feature now — and to one of the state's larger wind farms.