From Fields to Forecasts: How Coffee Co-ops in East Africa Are Using AI to Outsmart Climate Risk

Coffee farming in Rwanda and Uganda has always run on generational knowledge — when to plant, when to harvest, when to hold back. Climate change broke that knowledge. Rainfall patterns shifted. Dry spells land mid-season. The signals farmers trusted for decades no longer map to what's actually in the ground.

In this fireside chat, Helios AI, COSA, and Ethos Agriculture share results from a Gates Foundation-funded pilot that gave coffee cooperatives in East Africa a new signal: daily, crop-specific climate risk intelligence, built on satellite data and a decade of historical patterns. Hear from the people running the program on the ground — and from the farmers and cooperative managers who used it to make real decisions in real time.

This session is for sustainability and sourcing leaders at food and coffee companies, NGO and development leaders, and anyone working on farmer resilience in climate-exposed supply chains.