Comment by traceroute66 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by traceroute66 | Hacker News Reader

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Let's be realistic here, your only option is to sell it.

Recap the facts:

       - You've confirmed you have no experience ("I have no experience in this at all")
       - You've confirmed your dad had no experience ("nor did he") ... so how do you know it's "good" land, or you dad did a good job until now ? Are you sure there are no "skeletons in the cupboard" ?
       - You haven't got long ("around 2026"), we're entering 2023 now, 3 years will fly by.  You have no experience, you have no coffee bean buyers lined up (in what is a very competitive market). 
      - Remember you are also taking on MORE financial risk by continuing because you will doubtless be required to incur CAPEX and OPEX expenses. So not only could it become a mental headache for you, but it could easily become a financial blackhole too.

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 will keep it at least until the first harvest is sold or whatever happens. If you prevent yourself from doing anything because you don't experience in it, you won't ever do anything. It costs me around 3000 euros a year to run.

No need to be so discouraging. Is it likely to be a lucrative business? Probably not. Is it likely to be even profitable? Probably not. But if OP wants to learn, why suggest their only option is to sell it? We don't tell our kids to give up programming because they have no idea how much pain dealing with javascript is.

> No need to be so discouraging

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.

I think the move you're missing is getting in on the ground floor with a solid ownership share to an experienced coffee grower. A 51/49 ownership split or a similar arrangement could be a life-changing opportunity for an experienced farmhand or manager. (Of course OP will not be able to tell the sharks from the real helpers and this would still be a gamble unlikely to pay off--it just could also be an incredible life experience that assists in later success.)

I would say that if OP has a family and isn't already loaded, sell outright, but if they're younger and willing to go through hell they definitely should try to be involved in growing coffee beans.

> I would say that if OP has a family and isn't already loaded, sell outright, but if they're younger and willing to go through hell they definitely should try to be involved in growing coffee beans.

I'm loaded in my poor country, different story than when I was abroad. COL here is low like really low.

If you don't have a spouse I would take a run at it. I would definitely get a really good lawyer, though.

Yes, or you get screwed out of your share in some tricky way. If you do not have experience in the market how do you know if you're getting cleaned out?

You don't. In cases like OP you can choose to make a gamble. If you don't have a family to support there's no real reason to not take big unlikely payoff risks in order to try and make crazy outcomes happen. The only caveat would be if by trying to become a farmer you'd be exposed to organized violence, but I'm not sure what that's like in Madagascar.

OP has zero years, not three, because the choices they make today (and their father already made) will have a huge impact on the quantity and quality of the future crop.

But at this moment they can be fixed when time investment is low

> I'm not being discouraging, I am being realistic

Hardly, you don’t know anything about how difficult it is to do what they’re trying to do. For all you know it’s a crop that essentially grows itself and has a huge market demand so selling is easy. Your experience in unrelated small businesses in another country has very little bearing.

> it’s a crop that essentially grows itself and has a huge market demand so selling is easy.

I'm sorry but you're hilarious.

There is no such thing as "grows itself" and there is no such thing as "easy selling".

Many years of experience can make growing LOOK easy.

Many years of experience and contacts can make selling LOOK easy.

But the reality is it isn't.

I mean, look at programming.

Anybody can learn to program. Anybody can use boilerplate code and WYSIWIG editors to make code that "essentially writes itself".

There is also "huge market demand" for programming.

But the reality is people, especially the good paying people, want experienced programmers, not noobs.

An experienced programmer can make programming LOOK easy. An experienced programmer can have a book of high-paying clients. But that is due to the experience.

Don’t cherry pick words to change the meaning of people’s sentences, it makes you seem disingenuous.

Edit: see also the top-level comment from the former actual coffee farmer who said that there’s not that much to do outside the harvesting season. This goes to my actual point, which is that your experience in a totally different field doesn’t translate. Now that’s hilarious.

You're potentially setting the bar very high, though. Sure, experienced programmers can command very high rates. But even mediocre programmers can make a good living.

The same could very well hold for a coffee plantation. I've seen something like it with an orange/nispero/avocado orchard. Yes, it's easy to make mistakes and it's not easy to get rich. But break-even is quite possibly not that hard to achieve.

As another poster mentioned, these things are very regional. In the orange orchard case, there happens to be a cooperative in almost every larger village in the whole region. You can easily source everything you need there and you can sell your produce wholesale. Both at fair rates, since the neighbors also go there and they pay/get the same. And there's plenty of neighbors who will be willing to help out (although you might also find those who want you to fail to buy your land). And for the day-to-day you can make use of the experience of day labourers that you can pretty much always find in these areas.

Honestly I don't buy your argument. In the US you can take your crop to the nearest grain elevator and sell it by the truckload. If there's a way to unload your coffee in Madagascar the same way, one only needs to learn how to tend the farm.

Without any experience in coffee farming, I can't say if that's as easy as shaking the tree under a barrow or what.

I really don't see how you could know any more than that.

Yes running a business can be hard, but not necessarily.

Friends bought a relatively large olive plantation. They had a ton of savings, moved from NL to Portugal and went 'all in' It took them more than a decade before they really got the hang of it. By then their savings had depleted and they had no other option than to flee forward and really make it a success. It worked, barely. There is no such thing as a 'crop that essentially grows itself'. It may seem like that to people that visit supermarkets rather than farmhouses, toolsheds and plantations. Any kind of cash crop will require money invested upfront (land, plants, this part seems to be covered), money until maturation (irrigation, fencing, possibly pruning depending on the crop), money to harvest. And if you're lucky they pay-off from the harvest covers all those other costs, or hopefully at least a substantial fraction. And if it doesn't there's always chapter 11...

When you're used to the kind of income that software can generate farming anything seems like very hard work, even when it works well.

All that proves is that farming olives in Portugal is hard. Is farming coffee analogous to farming coffee? According to the actual former coffee grower in this thread, no. Is selling green coffee in Madagascar hard? None of us knows.

> When you're used to the kind of income that software can generate farming anything seems like very hard work, even when it works well.

Even if that’s true, so what? They didn’t ask, is this a better path to getting rich than working at a FAANG. They asked if anyone knew how to do it. The only correct answer for the people in this thread would be “nope, no idea”. Thus my point that they’re not being “realistic”, they’re just well-actuallying someone without having any relevant knowledge.

Seek to understand, don’t just be a wet-blanket.

> Seek to understand, don’t just be a wet-blanket.

Stick to what you know, or get burned.

> We don't tell our kids to give up programming because they have no idea how much pain dealing with javascript is.

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.

I assume the people who randomly inherit coffee plantations actually are the people with money to spare to learn the trade. To that end, I'd say that the OP should go to the area, find profitable plantations and try to get sit downs with owners and operators. Learn what you can, try and hire the best operator you can, or someone they recommend. Profit share with the operator and let him run it while you stay out of the way and/or learn the ropes from him - possibly by doing shifts in all of the roles.

One thing you guys don't realize is that it's in Madagascar, it cost me 3000 euros per year to run, not millions.

It's discouraging. It's encouraging. Encouraging to sell, because that decision makes by far the most sense. If I inherited a business that I have no experience in and that I would not have started by myself I wouldn't even bother with an 'Ask HN', I would have been on the phone to someone who brokers coffee plantations. Besides that, I don't drink coffee so I wouldn't even know if my product is any good.

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