01What you would actually do
The short version: tell us what you already do, using what is already in your hand. No new app to install, no form with forty fields.
Send it however suits you
Photograph the drying beds in the afternoon. Record a voice note saying how long the ferment ran. Take a short clip while turning the pile. Or type one sentence. It goes through the messaging app you already use every day.
The system does the filing
What you send gets turned into something the vault can use. When it isn't sure, it asks one short question back rather than guessing quietly — and your own words are always kept first.
No schedule to keep
Send something when there is something to say. Skip the weeks when the harvest is on. At the cooperative's collection point the meters already report their own readings, with nothing extra asked of you.
Nobody should have to become a data-entry clerk to get their own knowledge on the record.
02What you get back
A comparison with plots like yours
Plots at a similar altitude, on similar soil, growing the same variety: how long they fermented, how long they dried, and what the cup scored. Today you have to know someone personally to ask. This is the one thing smallholders cannot get anywhere at present.
A record of your plot, with the evidence attached
What you did each season is written down with its source. When you talk price with a buyer, you have something to show rather than only something to say — and improvement across seasons becomes something you can demonstrate.
The person at the other end can trace it back to you
With your permission, whoever buys that bag can follow it back to the plot and to your name, instead of stopping at a province printed on the label.
And the more growers take part, the more your own contribution is worth, because every comparison gets sharper as the number of plots in the vault grows.
03Questions worth asking first
What does it cost
Nothing for the farmer. The project earns from others along the chain who put this knowledge to work — not from the people growing the coffee.
Who owns my plot data
You do. You choose who sees it, you grant access to the buyers you choose, and you withdraw it from the ones you don't. Nobody opens your data to anyone else without your say-so.
What about a bad year
Whatever you send, you decide who can see it. That rule was written at the start, not added later.
I'm not comfortable typing
Then don't. Photograph it, or speak it in the language you use every day, dialect included. The translating is the system's job, not yours.
What happens after I leave my email
We get in touch, and invite you into the first group testing the system. While we're at it we want to hear what we have got wrong about how coffee actually works where you are.
04Why it has to be public
This vault is a public good — like a road or an irrigation system. Everyone can use it and no single party owns it.
The structure is published in full: anyone can build their own system on it or argue with it. Your data stays yours, portable and withdrawable. And every fact in the vault carries its own provenance — who said it, and what evidence stands behind it.
Neo Gens funds and stewards the work but does not own the knowledge inside it. A vault owned by one company is just a database with better marketing, and nobody should put their own data into one.
If you want the full reasoning — why the coffee sector needs a shared knowledge vault, and what each party along the chain gets back — read the long version.