GrowGood

Paying for What Lasts

Thirty years of European ecosystem funding versus Australia's Big-Ag wager

Stand in an alpine meadow above Salzburg in July and you are surrounded by 50 or 60 plant species in a single hectare. Orchids, arnica, eyebright, wild thyme. The farmer who manages that meadow cuts it once a year — late, after the wildflowers set seed — hauls the hay down by hand because the slope is too steep for machinery, and receives a payment from the Austrian government for doing exactly that. Not as charity. As compensation for a service the rest of society benefits from but rarely pays for directly: a functioning, species-rich landscape that holds water in the soil, holds carbon in the vegetation, holds tourists in the valley, and holds genetic diversity in the bank for everything that comes after us.

Rewilding the Field

GrowGood as a Digital Commons

There are paddocks in Western Australia’s wheatbelt — tens of thousands of hectares — where the soil crusts white in summer. Salt. The farmers who cleared the mallee scrub for “improved” pasture in the mid-20th century didn’t intend disaster. The short-term arithmetic made sense: clear the deep-rooted native vegetation, plant shallow-rooted annual crops, harvest, repeat. For a generation, it worked. Then the watertable rose. Without the native root systems drawing it down, the groundwater — laden with salt from ancient seabeds — climbed toward the surface. It poisoned paddocks. It killed trees. It sterilised soils that had grown native plants for millennia. Roughly two million hectares of Australian farmland carry this legacy. Not from malice. From simplification.

Logos & GrowGood: Community Owned Economies

Guest Podcast with Host Sterlin Lujan

Introduction What does a post-capitalist economy look like, and where does value actually live? In this deep-dive session from the Logos Thursday X Space, heterodox economist and monetary theorist Leanne Ussher joins host Sterlin Lujan to explore the frontier of community-owned economies. The conversation traces a fascinating lineage of economic experimentation—from the Wörgl “miracle” during the Great Depression and the Sardex network in Sardinia to modern-day implementations like Will Ruddick’s Sarafu currency in Nairobi’s Kibera slum. Moving beyond theoretical frameworks, this discussion focuses on practical applications: mapping material, ecological, and human flows to reclaim value that mainstream economics is built to ignore.

GrowGood Mycelium

Part 1: Economics of the Digital Commons

GrowGood is an ambitious open-source digital platform built to empower farmers to reorient their practice towards regenerative agriculture. We are part of a movement and a broader shift toward planetary civics grounded in what Zehra Zaidi & Indy Johar (2024) describe as two defining realities: Firstly, there is an awakening of planetary consciousness regarding the scale of planetary challenges. Groups of stakeholders have recognised that there is finite time to correct destructive pathways and have begun to experiment and generate new propositions.

Funding Freedom: An Operating System for the People Growing

Building a Regenerative Economic Model for Open Source AgTech

Part 2: Building a Regenerative Economic Model for Open Source AgTech In Part 1, we painted a picture of a different kind of Agricultural Operating System—one built on trust, transparency, and technological sovereignty. A system where growers own their data, connect their own hardware, and use “glass-box” AI to gain insights, not receive orders. It’s a compelling vision. But it prompts the elephant in the paddock: if we reject the growth-at-all-costs venture capital model, how do we keep the lights on?

Doughnut Economics and GrowGood

Aligning Farm Management with a Thriving Planet

Introduction Kate Raworth’s “Doughnut Economics” presents a compelling model for 21st-century prosperity, one that rejects the endless pursuit of GDP growth in favour of a more balanced goal. The “Doughnut” itself is a visual framework representing a safe and just space for humanity. It consists of two concentric rings: The Social Foundation (Inner Ring): This outlines the basic standards of living—such as food, water, housing, and political voice—that no one should fall below. The Ecological Ceiling (Outer Ring): This represents the nine planetary boundaries, such as climate change and biodiversity loss, that humanity must not overshoot to protect Earth’s life-support systems. The goal is to operate within the Doughnut’s green ring: the space where we can meet the needs of all people within the means of the living planet.