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Comment by traceroute66 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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