Coffee, with coordinates

03/11/2026

For years, Peter Kibet could account for Toroton Farmers’ Cooperative Society’s coffee by weight. Farmers brought it from small plots scattered across the hills of Nandi County, Kenya, where ripening fruit glows red against dark, glossy leaves. A clerk for the cooperative, Peter weighed each delivery, recorded it and helped calculate what each farmer would be paid.

By May 2025, Peter was preparing for buyers to start asking for a different kind of number: the coordinates of the land itself. New traceability requirements were increasing pressure on coffee producers to show that their crops were sourced from deforestation-free areas.

The Toroton cooperative had no digital map of the hundreds of farms supplying it. What had long been known locally by farmers would soon have to be translated into precise data verifiable from thousands of miles away. “There were many worries within the board that the cooperative might not be able to sell our products,” Peter says.

Across global supply chains, buyers are increasingly asking companies to trace products back to where they were produced. For the small farmers of Nandi County, the new requirement amounts to a test of how quickly they can adapt when the rules of global trade change around them.

In May 2025, the AIM4Forests programme and AIM4Commodities initiative of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) introduced Peter and other cooperative members to Open Foris Ground, a free, open-source map-based application developed by FAO and Google. 

This is part of a wider effort by FAO, with financial support from the Governments of the United Kingdom and Germany, to help countries produce sustainable agricultural commodities.

In Kenya, this included supporting coffee cooperatives to respond to emerging traceability requirements with practical, open-source solutions, including Open Foris Ground and WHISP (short for “What is in that Plot?”). Over 70 percent of coffee production in Kenya is done by smallholder producers organized around farmers’ cooperatives like Toroton. Through hands-on workshops, cooperative members and extension officers learned how to collect farm-level data themselves, review it and use it to support both compliance and local decision-making.

Hiring 13 young people from the area, the cooperative set out with phones to walk the farms, recording plot boundaries alongside yields, coffee varieties, intercropping and pest problems. Six weeks later, they had mapped 1 621 coffee plots.

This information soon proved useful to the cooperative for more than satisfying buyers. Farmers used the survey to identify problems getting fertilizer, ask for advice on managing their coffee and tell the cooperative what services they needed.

Instead of disappearing up the supply chain, the data could be used where it was collected, and crucially, it belonged to the cooperative from the start. In many data collection campaigns, surveyed communities wait months to see results, if they see them at all. In Toroton, the cooperative had direct access to it.

“With the data we obtained from Open Foris, we are able to offer extension services to farmers,” Peter says. “We can know the needs of our farmers.”

Then came the test that had prompted the exercise. Peter ran the mapped farms through Open Foris WHISP, which compares locations against forest and land-use data to identify possible deforestation. None of the cooperative’s 1 621 plots were flagged as having been deforested.

When buyers asked for evidence of compliance, the cooperative had it ready. “We were able to access the data first-hand and give it directly to the buyers,” Peter says. The Toroton cooperative maintained its ability to sell its products.

What Toroton had learned did not stay there. Neighbouring cooperatives began asking Peter for help setting up their own surveys.

By late July, the surveying skills first developed by Toroton were spreading through a farmer-led training model. Guided by experienced peers, 111 smallholders and cooperative representatives mapped coffee plots with Open Foris Ground and reviewed the results in Open Foris WHISP.

Across participating cooperatives in Nandi, nearly 2 000 coffee plots were mapped, and farmers provided feedback on how the applications could be improved.

Their work with Open Foris also supported Kenya’s national efforts of mapping smallholder agriculture and locating its coffee farms using satellite imagery. However, from space, coffee growing beneath shade trees can disappear under the canopy and tiny farms can be difficult to distinguish from the vegetation around them. In 2025, the Kenya Space Agency reported that satellite imagery had identified only about 30 percent of the country’s coffee plots. Filling those blank spaces required people walking the land with phones.

Back in Nandi County, Peter’s job still begins with coffee fruit arriving at the cooperative. Yet the numbers surrounding that coffee have changed. He began by weighing what farmers brought him; within months he was designing surveys, producing evidence for international buyers and showing neighbouring cooperatives how to map their own land.

New traceability demands have required farmers to describe their farms in a new language. Now they are building on their learning, and teaching that language to others to expand this experience.