In this paper, we study Higgs and co-Higgs bundles on non-Kähler elliptic surfaces. We show, in particular, that non-trivial stable Higgs bundles only exist when the base of the elliptic fibration has genus at least two and use this existence result to give explicit topological conditions ensuring the smoothness of moduli spaces of stable rank-2 sheaves on such surfaces. We also show that non-trivial stable co-Higgs bundles only exist when the base of the elliptic fibration has genus 0, in which case the non-Kähler elliptic surface is a Hopf surface. We then given a complete description of non-trivial co-Higgs bundles in the rank 2 case; these non-trivial rank-2 co-Higgs bundles are examples of non-trivial holomorphic Poisson structures on ℙ1-bundles over Hopf surfaces.