About

From finance to farming

The Accidental Farmer

I spent fourteen years on Wall Street building financial systems and learning how markets assign value. Then I bought a coffee farm in the mountains of western Puerto Rico and began discovering what those markets leave out.

I write as The Accidental Farmer: a financier turned farmer and researcher, and still a student of the land.

My 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, I connect the daily work of a farm to the larger systems that set its prices.

Field Notes From the Accidental Farmer is my public notebook: essays most Thursdays, grounded in lived experience and written to leave readers seeing something differently.

In The Accidental Farmer's Almanac, I gather those essays each year into a literary record of observation, discovery, mistakes, and changing understanding.

In The Second Harvest, I trace the history of coffee's leaf harvest and make the full economic and agricultural case behind the work.

I write for farmers, scientists, investors, and anyone who eats. I try to make complex ideas clear, consequential, and sometimes funny.

The farm is the classroom.

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From Wall Street to Copper Hill

Before Copper Hill, I built markets for assets that were difficult to value, including at GFI Group and BCMG. In Las Marías, I brought that same question to the coffee tree: what would it take for the leaf to become a harvest a farm could sell?

Farming became central to my work in 2019. Most of the roughly 500-acre property is forest, conservation, or agroforestry.

I grew up in South Portland, Maine, and earned my BA at Tulane University. I earned a master’s in sustainability from Harvard Extension School.

Research

My master’s thesis examined the economics of coffee leaves and fruit. That work continues in the field and lab at the Copper Hill Research Station.

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Life at Copper Hill

I write about the education I got from weather, soil, trees, and people who knew more about all three. In Puerto Rico I keep bees, walk the farm roads, and paint with beeswax. Maine, where I grew up and still spend summers, is the other landscape in my writing.

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coffee.works consulting

Through coffee.works, my consulting company, I advise on market design, agricultural economics, and bringing research to market.

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Industry leadership

I’m the founder and CEO of The Whole Tree Company, PBC, which is introducing its first product, Wize. I’m helping establish the Specialty Coffee Leaf Association so growers and buyers have a shared way to describe coffee leaf and evaluate its quality.

View my LinkedIn profile · Specialty Coffee Leaf and my roles

Career timeline

2005–2019Financial markets: I designed financial systems for alternative debt and asset-backed lending. I built an institutional tax-lien marketplace at GFI Group and continued that work at BCMG in San Juan.
2019Copper Hill: Farming became central to my work in western Puerto Rico.
2026Graduate research: I earned a Master of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies in the field of Sustainability and Environmental Management. My thesis introduced the Whole Tree Economic Model.