Origen — EUDR copilot

Inspiration

We come from Peru's coffee and cocoa world — working alongside exporters of native Peruvian products, where one idea is common sense: if we don't honor the land, sooner or later it takes these privileges away from us. So when the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) arrived, it hit a nerve. From December 30, 2026, anyone selling coffee or cocoa into Europe must prove, plot by plot, that it wasn't grown on land cleared after 2020. Europe takes roughly half of Peru's cocoa and a large share of its coffee. Miss the proof and a cooperative doesn't get a fine — it gets locked out of its main market. And today the tools are built for big European importers, cost a fortune, and the compliance cost lands on the smallholder, who is often already below the poverty line. The farmer who didn't deforest pays to prove it, with software he can't afford. We built the opposite of that.

What it does

Origen is an AI co-pilot for cooperatives that turns a phone capture into a buyer-ready, verifiable EUDR data package — in minutes.

• Capture in the field (PWA, offline): a technician drops a GPS point, or walks the perimeter for a real boundary polygon when a plot is over 4 hectares (the format Europe requires), plus a photo and the legality checklist. Cooperatives that already have their members' geolocation can bulk-import Excel/CSV/GeoJSON — same verification, same seal, no repeated field work.
• Verification: every plot is cross-checked against four open satellite sources — Hansen tree-cover loss, GFW near-real-time alerts, WDPA protected areas, and the EU's own JRC 2020 reference map. Verdict: clean / review / flagged.
• Gemini co-pilot: explains why a plot is flagged in plain Spanish, recommends whether to exclude or substantiate it, drafts the legal justification, and answers EUDR questions — grounded in the regulation.
• Segregation what-if + confidence score: simulate excluding flagged plots and watch the compliant volume and status update live (the EUDR allows no mixing of compliant and non-compliant material). Each lot gets an explainable 0–100 confidence score.
• Shipment dossier + TRACES GeoJSON: one consolidated EUDR dossier (ES/EN) for a whole container of plots from many producers and regions.
• Trust & neutrality: every dossier is hashed and anchored in Bitcoin via OpenTimestamps (independently verifiable), the cooperative owns and can export all its data in open formats, it shares a clean link with its buyer, checks status by WhatsApp, and gets alerted if a plot ever turns non-compliant.

It's live: capture a plot and generate a real dossier today, share it with a buyer, and verify its authenticity without the file ever leaving your computer.

How we built it

FastAPI on Google Cloud Run, Gemini (gemini-2.5-flash) via Vertex AI, Firestore for durable storage, Secret Manager for keys, Google Sign-In for cooperatives, and a PWA front end. The deforestation engine runs entirely on open, commercially-usable data — no black box, nothing to re-license. The EU's reference map ships as a single ~38 GB satellite file, so instead of downloading it we read just the pixels we need over HTTP range requests with rasterio. We're honest about the AI: Gemini writes and reasons over the assessment, but the verdict comes from deterministic satellite math, not the model — for trust and auditability. The notarization is small and real: SHA-256 + a public OpenTimestamps proof anyone can check.

Challenges we ran into

False positives almost broke our confidence — free satellite maps are coarser than commercial ones, so we only escalate when several sources agree and lean on the EU's own reference map, with a human always in the loop. Infrastructure bit us too: a missing system library (libexpat1) made the satellite reader fail silently, and Cloud Run's per-instance disk made generated PDFs vanish until we made them durable. Europe's system rejects self-intersecting polygons, so we added geometry validation before anything is signed. The biggest challenge wasn't code: Peru's government is starting to give farmers free geolocation, so "we map your farm" would compete with free. We changed the pitch — we don't sell the map, we sell the verified, accepted proof and the market access that comes with it.

What we learned

The hard part isn't satellites or AI — it's trust and adoption. "Open and verifiable by anyone" beats "trust us, it's on a blockchain." And the only validation that counts is a cooperative paying for the proof because its buyer accepts it.

What's next for Origen

Convert pilot cooperatives into the first paying customers; the two-sided buyer↔cooperative loop (the importer requests the data, the co-op fulfills in one click); continuous monitoring at scale; Peru-specific legality layers; and "Origen Capital" — turning the verified compliance + yield history into access to credit and premiums for farmers.

Built With

• fastapi
• firestore
• gdal
• gemini
• google-cloud-run
• google-sign-in
• javascript
• opentimestamps
• pwa
• python
• rasterio
• reportlab
• secret-manager
• shapely
• vertex-ai
• whatsapp-cloud-api