The Coffee in Numbers panel offers an integrated view of Brazilian coffee

Embrapa has just launched the Coffee in Numbers Panel, an online and interactive tool that gathers official information about Brazilian coffee farming. The platform allows users to track where coffee is produced, how the activity has evolved over time, and what social, territorial, and productive characteristics are associated with each region.

Developed by Embrapa Café (DF) and Embrapa Territorial (SP), the panel integrates data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), the Agricultural Census, the Agricultural Zoning of Climatic Risk (Zarc), and Embrapa itself.

“There was a lack of a single, integrated point of reference,” says Daniela Maciel, an analyst at Embrapa Territorial responsible for developing the tool.

The dashboard gathers information on Arabica and Robusta coffee, with national, regional, state, and municipal breakdowns. The historical production series runs from 2014 to 2024, while data on agricultural establishments and producers are from the 2017 Agricultural Census. The tool will be updated as new official data is published.

Seven modules

The panel is organized into seven thematic modules. They cover indicators such as production, planted and harvested area, productivity and value generated; territorial distribution and rankings of producing states; and the number and profile of establishments, with information on family farming, gender, age range and aging of coffee growers.

The tool also presents maps and periods of lower climate risk for cultivation and brings together the scientific and technological output of Embrapa.

“The Coffee in Numbers Panel strengthens the sector's ability to plan, anticipate risks, guide investments, and support evidence-based decisions and public policies,” says Renata Silva, Head of Innovation and Business at Embrapa Café.

First step towards a national platform

The dashboard is the first step towards creating the National Coffee Territorial Intelligence Platform. Still in the structuring phase, the initiative aims to aggregate georeferenced data, strategic indicators, interactive maps, and various analyses of the sector using AI tools, remote sensing, and satellite imagery.

According to Embrapa, the proposal aims to offer the global market an evidence-based picture of Brazilian coffee farming, as well as to guide public policies, investments, and increase competitiveness in the sector. National-scale implementation still depends on forming partnerships and securing funding.

Test of the report

The volume, diversity, and detail of the data, compiled in a historical series from 2014 to 2024, allow us to draw local overviews and track the recent evolution of coffee farming.

To test this possibility, the report investigated canephora production in Cacoal (RO), a central municipality in the production of Amazonian robusta coffees. A hybrid of conilon and robusta that gained identity in Rondônia, this coffee constitutes a unique phenomenon whose development coincides with the period covered by the panel.

Five indicators were compared from 2015, the period of emergence of Amazonian robusta coffee plants, and from 2024, the most recent year covered by the tool.

The data illustrate (at the municipal level) the growing economic importance of Amazonian robusta coffee: in a decade, average productivity increased by 72.8% – while the harvested area in the period decreased by 28% – and the nominal value of production jumped from R$ 40.6 million to R$ 339.8 million. Furthermore, the weight of coffee in Cacoal's agricultural production increased by 7.37 percentage points.

Navigation still requires adjustments.

In the test, the panel offers maps with clear data. The platform also includes various filter options and indicators, as well as diverse geographic scopes, allowing users to start with a national overview and arrive at municipal-level information.

In some modules, the interface seems to merely transpose the spreadsheet structure to the online environment, without exploring web-specific navigation and visualization features. Navigation is not always intuitive, especially given the amount of information and filtering possibilities—two qualities that reveal the vast amount of official data Brazil possesses, particularly from Embrapa—on its coffee production. The dashboard is also not yet adapted for mobile phone access, and the English translation tool did not work during testing.

On the other hand, behind this interface, there was extensive work in selecting, standardizing, and processing databases produced with different methodologies. According to Daniela, the tables provided by institutions such as IBGE needed to be reorganized and converted into formats compatible with database processing before being incorporated into the panel.

This resulted in searches that do not direct the user to the original databases, but provide data that has already been processed and structured by the Embrapa team.

The breadth and integration of information are the tool's main strengths. Future adjustments to responsiveness, visual organization, and navigation flows could simplify consultation and expand the potential of this collection to produce knowledge about Brazilian coffee farming.