Coffee farm startup
The tale of a tech girl trying to rethink the century old family business
Just to get started and to give you some context: I intend to do this series of posts to give you, the reader, hopefully a coffee lover, a better sense of how a coffee farm works, its challenges, and how quality is made, from the ground up. Join me in my learning process, as I just joined my dad in this quest. I consider my spoken english alright, but my written english has a lot of improvement to be made, I hope you don't mind too much! Please hop on in my adventure of getting a running traditional brazilian farm, inherited from generation to generation, and trying to rethink the way it works!!!
Ok, first episode, some of me and my background: Laura, 29, brazilian, economist, the youngest of Beto and Letícia's 3 daughters. I've spent the past 6 years working with startups in Brazil, Germany and Mexico. Some of it was spent working for Rocket Internet (german huge pseudo-incubator, well known for its cloning-pasting internet businesses), I also co-founded an internet company called Agrid, for service price comparison.

Having worked for a long time with internet, but only having scratched the surface concerning real technology, when Agrid failed I've decided to learn how to code. I took a 3 months online bootcamp, started freelancing, and then worked as a junior programmer for 6 months. Even though the experience was great, I didn't find myself in it. I then decided to quit the job and maybe find a project which could be more multidisciplinary. Maybe combining programming and entrepreneurship?

Well, this was 4 months ago, exactly when Beto, (short of Roberto, short of “my dad”), asked me to code something for our coffee farm.
That could be interesting, I’ve left from my home town, Santa Rita do Sapucaí, when I was 17. Gone to the big city, pursuing a good university and as I thought: never to be back again.
So you can understand:
Santa Rita has roughly 40 thousand inhabitants, it is 200 km (136 miles) away from São Paulo and 366km (227 miles) from Rio de Janeiro. It’s main economic product is coffee, the second? Technology…

That is true, for some interesting historical facts Santa Rita is considered one island of prosperity in Brazil, having the biggest patent production per capita in the country and one of the highest HDI in the state. Nowadays it has many incubators, some tech fairs and innovation contests every year. Facebook has it's dev beer once a month and Google is from time to time supporting local tech fairs.

Most of the coffee farms are not so much part of that innovation movement though, well, not yet.
But at that time, there weren't many things going on in SR, and I wanted to check out the world. Now, at 29ish, doing a project for my dad sounded like a great idea (I’ve spent almost 4 years living abroad and it would be cool to be reunited with my family).
So there I went with my startupy-oriented-mind, to try to understand which was the problem my dad wanted me to solve.

And then mister Beto asked for a very specific task: create an app that sums and registers the amount of coffee cherries each picker picked per day, so he can pays them in the end of the month.
Ok, sounds fair, but how big is this problem? How do others solve it? Is it affecting somehow production? How do we solve it nowadays? Would anybody else buy this app? Would the other farmers in the cooperative buy it?would other crops be interested in something like it?
Hummm sounds like time to interview people, not only my dad, and have a better look at the issue.

I will continue in a next article, but that’s how I got started in getting closer to the farm. Was this going to be a thing? Was this big enough for a startup? I will let you know, very soon!
