Great idea about lending the machines for redundancy. I had not thought about that yet. I think to facilitate this, we should design the machine so that it can be easily disconnected from inlet and outlets, which would stay in place. You’d just exchange the machine like a cartridge.
And yes, having a small machine at home or moving the machine around is indeed better than moving the beans. We experienced the same issue among the coffee farmers from Hansapur, Nepal that we work with. There is a coffee pulper in the next village but due to the steep terrain (3 km by air, 2 hours on foot …) it is not accessible to them. So they do even the pulping by hand so far … fortunately a pulper is only 250 USD, so this can be solved relatively easily …