My dad left me a coffee plantation and I have no experience in this at all, nor did he. It is freshly planted so it won't reach peak production until around 2026. But I want to learn how I could go about taking care of it and eventually start selling beans. Do you have any resource I can take a look at to learn more about coffee and its production process?
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The YOLO "hollywood movie"/NYT best seller answer, however, is to drop everything you're doing, go to Madagascar, spend some time trying and failing (with hijinx!) to grow the crop yourself. Your neighbors at first are distant and doubtful, but slowly you gain their respect. 15 years from today, tsingy brand coffee is a household name.
1) Do I enjoy the coffee business? Would I have bought that plantation if the opportunity had arisen? If the answer is no, selling is most likely the right answer.
2) That being said, it's not like the plantation is a hot potato that needs to be sold right away. OP has some time to check it out, learn about the business and decide if this is something worth trying for a few years. How long to try for? What's the opportunity cost? They would decide to invest a limited amount of time (e.g. one year of work) and then reevaluate at the end. I would timebox this decision process too. Perhaps learn all you can in a month and decide if you want to give it a shot? Part of this process should involve getting in touch with people in the industry and seeing if you like interacting with them. In the end, most of your job will be about interacting with the different types of players in your industry.
I'll try at least until the first harvest is sold or whatever happens. It cost me around 3000 euros a year to run for now. So YOLO
the money made from letting a Netflix crew follow you around would probably help through bad seasons
[1] https://coffeelands.crs.org/2021/04/agroforestry-and-coffee-...
I stand to inherit a farm (of a very different sort: dry plains, mostly growing wheat) and I plan to do the same thing my father does now: lease it to a local.
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If you want to get into farming get Wintgen's Coffee - Growing, Processing, Sustainable Production: A Guidebook for Growers, Processors, Traders and Researchers, 2nd, Revised Edition https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Coffee+Growing%2C+Processing%2C+... (You will get a way cheaper from other sources).
Depending on the country you have different options. You can think about leasing it to other farmers or a cooperative. Talk to a local Specialty Coffee Roastery for a different perspective.
If you are interested in more information I could make a follow up post
Just dump any information you can, I know nothing about this so any bit of info is good. Leasing is not really an option because finding someone who will lease would be hard, we don't do that here.
Meta-advice, find people who actually understand the business and get their opinions. This forum is great for CS startups, but it’s full of people who think their success in one field means they are experts in everything they’ve read an article about. Be skeptical.
For your specific situation, my grandfather had a different saying: "Find yourself a teacher". He claimed this philosophy came from the Talmud, but I can't say. In any event, my grandfather had already gone from being a door-to-door cloth salesman to a cutter to a tailor, and he always found an expert teacher to attach himself to and learn from, and this usually meant someone humbly but seriously devoted to the work at hand. In the case of the ranch, it was a Cahuilla Indian man who had lived nearby, and who taught him how to take care of the trees. My grandfather employed him as a full-time caretaker and kept up his house on the land for the rest of his life.
My advice with anything where you don't have the knowledge to do it yourself would be to find yourself a teacher by searching in the humblest of places for someone with that knowledge, and make them your mentor.
If he would have invested that $10,000 in the S&P 500 and reinvested the dividends, it would have been worth more than $2 million by the 90s.
https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/
"Warren Buffett: $10,000 invested in an index fund when I bought my first stock in 1942 would be worth $51 million today"
Looks like he could have done 51 times better for no work
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/07/warren-buffett-10000-investe...
I once sold 1000 BTC for about $10k, for reasons largely similar to the ones that kept my grandfather from entering the stock market. I think putting $10k into an index fund probably seemed just as insane to most people in 1942 as keeping $10k in Bitcoin seemed to me in 2012.
In addition to having run a casino, I'm a reformed gambling addict (as long as you don't leave me alone in Vegas for too long). Part of overcoming gambling addiction and its manifestations in everyday behaviour is that I don't second-guess decisions I make out of being too conservative or, in other words, feel regret for pocketing my gains and walking away. That way lies ruin. And also, as a gambler, I'm an optimist, so I don't think I missed my one-and-only chance to make 50x my money. There's always another spin right around the corner.
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Recap the facts:
You could lease it out, but do you HONESTLY (a) want the headache of managing tenants, legal contracts, collecting rent and all that jazz (b) have enough experience to make sure you are not getting screwed and your tenants treating the land well ?I'm not being discouraging, I am being realistic.
I am looking at the situation from someone who has no ties to the situation. Taking the completely objective view with no bias.
I am looking at the situation who has been involved in small businesses, I know how tough running a small business is .... running a small farming business with zero experience will be sheer hell, frankly.
If they had a couple of decades to learn, that might be one thing... but they have stated they have three years (2023 – 2026). The hard reality is that you are not going to become a farming wizard in three years. You are taking on a lot of stress and a lot of financial risk. 21st century farming is a tough business with tight margins and near-zero tolerance for mistakes.
Learning to program is low risk, high reward. The absolute worst thing that can come from failing is the hard drive space used by VSCode and the lost evenings you were going to waste on Minecraft anyway. Meanwhile, the reward is a lucrative software engineering job or at least the ability to make neat stuff. No reason not to give it a try; if you like it, you gained a new skill. If you dislike it, you find some other hobby. A maximum of $0 will be spent. Maybe $20 if you buy a book or something.
The same is not true of an industrial coffee farm. Property tax bills will come due. Employees have to be hired and then fired when you fail. Specialized machinery needs to be purchased and will be useless when you give up.
If you've got a few million dollars in your bank account that's burning a hole in your pocket, then I suppose "learn the coffee trade by buying a full-scale manor" is something you could do. If you don't, then cash out now and use the money to build a business you'll actually succeed in. If you just want to learn how to grow and roast coffee, plant a coffee tree in your backyard. When you get bored and it dies, pay someone $200 to remove it.
I definitely get these ideas in my head all the time. I was watching some video about a box factory and was like I should own a box factory. You get a cool industrial loft, and there are machines in there, and guys with trucks come to pick up your boxes. Easy money easy life!! The I realize the video is a safety investigation video and the box factory blew up and killed everyone in the neighborhood because water coming into the plant had too much oxygen in it and am like; wait I don't know anything about any of this stuff. I will stick to programming for the time being.