Speaking
Talks & Conversations
I speak to farmers, scientists, investors, and anyone who eats.
The stories come from my working farm, and the aim is to make complicated things clear.
Wall Street taught me to read a balance sheet in fourteen years. The hillside is taking longer.
Signature Talk · For anyone who eats
The Second Harvest
Every coffee tree grows two harvests. The world pays for one.
Thomas McOsker learned this on a mountain in western Puerto Rico. He signed for a coffee farm there in 2017, and Hurricane Maria arrived before the deal closed. The farm has been revising his plan ever since.
Drawing on his master's thesis and a Specialty Coffee Leaf supply chain now being built, he follows the money from the tree to the cup. He shows who has been paying for the harvest the ledger leaves out. Then he asks what becomes of the farm, the forest and the coffee in your hand once the rest of the tree is paid for.
You'll leave with a new way to see that cup, and three questions to put to any second harvest. Who bears the cost? Who earns the margin? What can the farm afford to change?
Send a speaking inquiryPlease include the date, host, audience, and format.
Additional Talks
For farmersCan You Make a Living Growing Coffee?Farmers have heard this promise before. A new crop, a new certification, a new premium. The picking bill comes first.Show less
Thomas farms coffee in Las Marías too. Using a Nicaraguan farm that sells coffee leaf, he works through the questions he'd ask on his own farm. What's left after picking and processing? How does the tree respond? Will the buyer come back next season?
He says what the evidence supports, what he's still testing, and what would make him leave the leaves on the tree.
Takeaway A way to work out what a buyer would have to pay for leaf to be worth picking on your farm.
For scientistsHow to Bring a Forest Into a BoardroomYou've counted the birds, measured the carbon, and tracked the water. Who funds the next season?Show less
Thomas once helped remap the property records of an entire island. At Copper Hill Farms, the question was what a conservation funder needed to see before it could back regenerative work. He uses AgroforestryX to show how the farm made that case, and what happens when scientists and funders agree on what the work will cost, what it will accomplish, and how they'll know it worked.
Takeaway A way to turn your biodiversity, carbon, or watershed research into a plan someone can fund.
For investorsHow a Market Learns to SeeA coffee leaf can have value in the cup long before it has a price at the farm gate. What has to happen in between?Show less
Thomas spent a decade building an institutional marketplace for tax liens. He's now building a market for Specialty Coffee Leaf. Buyers need a shared way to judge quality, growers need terms they can plan around, and the price has to cover the work of getting the leaf from farm to café.
Takeaway How to spot overlooked value, see where capital can make repeat trade possible, and identify who earns the margin.
Speaker Bio
Thomas McOsker writes as The Accidental Farmer. He spent fourteen years on Wall Street building financial systems before turning to farming and research in western Puerto Rico. His master's thesis introduced the Whole Tree Economic Model. He is the founder and CEO of The Whole Tree Company, PBC. He is helping establish the Specialty Coffee Leaf Association.
Download portrait · Media inquiries · Research methods and thesis citationFull Professional Bio
Thomas McOsker builds markets for what the old ledger leaves out.
He spent fourteen years on Wall Street building financial systems and learning how markets assign value. Then he bought a coffee farm in the mountains of western Puerto Rico and began discovering what those markets leave out.
The Accidental Farmer is the writer who emerged from that collision: a financier turned farmer and researcher, and still a student of the land.
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.
Field Notes From the Accidental Farmer is his public notebook: essays most Thursdays, grounded in lived experience and written to leave readers seeing something differently.
The Accidental Farmer's Almanac gathers those essays each year into a literary record of observation, discovery, mistakes, and changing understanding.
The Second Harvest tells the history of coffee's leaf harvest and makes the full economic and agricultural case behind the work.
He writes for farmers, scientists, investors, and anyone who eats, in stories that make complex ideas clear, consequential, and sometimes funny.
Beyond his writing, McOsker is developing the Copper Hill Research Station in Puerto Rico, researching new economic models for regenerative agriculture, and helping establish the Specialty Coffee Leaf Association. His commercial work runs through The Whole Tree Company, which is introducing its first product, Wize, to create a market for coffee's second harvest. Together, these efforts explore a common question: what becomes possible when agriculture earns revenue from more of what it already produces?
The farm is the classroom.
Press & Media
Interview angles
- Why a coffee mill sits idle between harvests
- What a second harvest would have to earn to pay for itself
- What a hurricane taught a Wall Street systems builder about risk
- How a farm made the case for public conservation funding
Organizers may copy the speaker bio above for event programs and introductions. For an interview, a longer introduction, or an approved photograph, send a media inquiry.