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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Stick to what you know, or get burned.
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.