Where the next machine goes

The fund can afford one machine at a time. Picking by gut means picking whoever asked loudest, so this ranks stations by value created per dollar landed, using real weather.

Machine fundedListed, not yet fundedThe coffee belt, 23.5°N to 23.5°S

Buf Café · Remera

Covered solar drying tunnel · $6,785 landed

890.4

score

Forecast volume292,000 kg cherry from 146,000 trees

Payback0.1 years from processing uplift alone

Weather volatility1% swing in forecast across 5 seasons

Drying risk20/100 from 583 mm of harvest rain

Kopakama · Ejo Heza

40 raised drying beds · $7,500 landed

521.2

score

Forecast volume231,693 kg cherry from 187,000 trees

Payback0.1 years from processing uplift alone

Weather volatility2% swing in forecast across 5 seasons

Drying risk87/100 from 1187 mm of harvest rain

Kelagur Estates

Pulper and washing line · $12,438 landed

178.7

score

Forecast volume105,230 kg cherry from 85,000 trees

Payback0.5 years from processing uplift alone

Weather volatility4% swing in forecast across 5 seasons

Drying risk0/100 from 21 mm of harvest rain

The weather it's reading

Real daily observations from Open-Meteo's archive at each station's coordinates. Arabica flowers when rain breaks a dry spell, and ripe cherry follows roughly eight months later, so the crop a station delivers in March was decided last September.

Station	Flowering rain	Dry spell	Filling rain	Harvest rain	Forecast
Buf Café · Remera2026	320 mm	20 d	385 mm	583 mm	2.00 ±0.36 kg
Kochere · Yirgacheffe2026	455 mm	15 d	756 mm	503 mm	1.62 ±0.64 kg
Dukunde Kawa · Nkara2026	392 mm	24 d	582 mm	694 mm	1.83 ±0.53 kg
Kayanza Hills2026	336 mm	19 d	550 mm	582 mm	1.86 ±0.51 kg
Kelagur Estates2026	89 mm	45 d	902 mm	21 mm	1.24 ±0.53 kg
Kopakama · Ejo Heza2026	1029 mm	14 d	1623 mm	1187 mm	1.24 ±0.53 kg
Pitalito · Huila2026	630 mm	2 d	482 mm	665 mm	1.37 ±0.55 kg

The model

Flowering rainfall Rain after a dry spell sets the flowers that become next season’s cherry.	250–450 mm weight 0.34
Dry spell before flowering Without a dry period arabica flowers out of sync and the harvest straggles.	14+ consecutive days weight 0.22
Bean-filling rainfall Water stress while the bean fills shrinks the cherry and the screen size.	200–400 mm weight 0.26
Heat-stress days above 30 °C Arabica photosynthesis falls off above about 28 °C; sustained heat aborts cherry.	0–5 days weight 0.18
Baseline, mature tree	2.00 kg cherry

Be precise about what this is

This is a transparent model with published coefficients calibrated from arabica literature, not a trained model, because ground truth for these stations doesn't exist yet. The weather is real; the weights are a prior.

What makes that honest rather than hand-waving: the platform is already collecting the training set. Every kilo logged through the station phone is one labelled example against a forecast that was made months earlier. After three seasons this page shows a fitted regression and a backtest error instead of a table of priors.