About Field Notes From the Accidental Farmer
Stories from a coffee farm where the trees have long memories, the neighbors know more about the place than I do, and almost everything worth learning begins with a mistake.
My name is Thomas McOsker. I spent fourteen years on Wall Street building markets for things that were hard to price.
Then I bought Copper Hill, a coffee farm in the mountains of Puerto Rico. I arrived with a collection of ideas about what might be possible, and a rather incomplete understanding of what was already there.
The neighbors helped with that. So did the trees, the old coffee roads, the machinery, and a succession of decisions that seemed perfectly sensible at the time.
Maine has been part of my life much longer. I grew up there and have returned every summer of my adult life, and its farms and woods raised the same questions the mountain did. Who grows our food? What does it cost them? How much of what they produce do we actually value?
Those questions have followed me between Puerto Rico and Maine, and lately into the work of bringing a second harvest from the coffee tree to the people who might enjoy it.
So I began keeping notes.
They were meant to help me run the farm. Slowly they turned into stories about the people who knew the mountain before I did, the history still standing under its canopy, and an industry that has spent centuries putting a price on one part of the coffee tree.
Somewhere along the way, I found I enjoyed the writing as much as the questions.
Most Thursdays, I’ll send you one of those stories. Each appears here first, and once a year they’re gathered into The Accidental Farmer’s Almanac.
I hope you’ll find something worth thinking about, something worth laughing at, and, with any luck, something you didn’t know when you started reading.
Thomas
The Accidental Farmer
About the author
Thomas McOsker, the Accidental Farmer, spent fourteen years on Wall Street learning how markets assign value. Then he bought a coffee farm in the mountains of Puerto Rico. The farm has been correcting him ever since.
His work explores the distance between what we measure, what we value, and what matters. Through stories of people, animals, machines, plants, money, science, and the occasional catastrophe, he connects the daily work of a farm to the larger systems that set its prices.
He writes for farmers, scientists, investors, and anyone who eats, in stories that make complex ideas clear, consequential, and sometimes funny.
