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.