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.
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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. Secondly, in computational advancements we may finally have the tools to match the scale of planetary challenges and build bold, ambitious models of care to repair and sustain our planet which can provide new insights and ways of thinking, being, learning and self-learning.1
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GrowGood's Greenprint - Our Technical Journey with Valueflows and REA Accounting
From Jupyter sketches to Flutter dreams: Navigating the complexities of building a regenerative AgTech platform
G’day! Ever wonder what it takes to build software that truly understands a farm? Not just the profits and losses, but the health of the soil, the value of shared work, and the intricate dance of a regenerative ecosystem? That’s the challenge we’re tackling at GrowGood. Our journey to build a transparent, open-source AgTech platform has led us down a fascinating technical path, guided by the robust principles of Valueflows and Resource-Event-Agent (REA) accounting.
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