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Part II: Food for Profit

Part II: Food for Profit – How Corporations Engineered Hunger in a World of Plenty In a world of unprecedented agricultural abundance, I am sure that I am not the only one who is struck by the cruel paradox that billions still go hungry, while others are dying from diseases of overconsumption. This situation—scarcity amid plenty, malnutrition amid surplus—is no accident. I believe it is the calculated outcome of a food system built not to feed people, but to feed profits.

Part I: The Legal Lie

Part I: The Legal Lie How Corporate Personhood Slowly Broke the World I’ve always held a firm belief that in a democracy, we, the people, are supposed to be in charge. Yet, over the last 150 years, we’ve mostly missed a silent coup unfold—one that has steadily replaced the citizen with the shareholder, the voter with the lobbyist, and the human being with a legal fiction: the corporation as a person.

Investing in Outcomes

We have journeyed from the personal story behind GrowGood to the way its Blueprints learn to speak the language of your farm. Now, we arrive at the most crucial part of our conversation: the future we can grow together. This is a vision that extends beyond the farm gate, connecting our individual efforts into a powerful, collective force for regeneration. This isn’t just about building a better tool. It’s about building the infrastructure for a new kind of economy—an economy that invests in outcomes, not just outputs.

Speaking the Language of the Land

In our first conversation, we talked about the need to re-value farming—to move beyond tools of extraction and build something that honours the complexity of living systems. Now, let’s explore how we begin to do that. It starts by learning to speak the language of the land, one farm at a time. For too long, technology has demanded that farmers adapt to its rigid logic. The world of regenerative agriculture is diverse and dynamic—a market gardener thinks in beds and successions, a flower farmer in stems and bloom cycles, and a grazier in paddocks and pasture recovery times. Forcing them into a single, generic mould is not just inefficient; it’s an act of erasure. It silences the unique story of their farm.

Re-Valuing Our Roots

For most of my life, I’ve had one foot in the soil and the other in the digital world. It has been a journey of homecoming, a return to the values I learned growing up on a farm, looking after the land that sustained us. This journey has been guided by a single, persistent question: how can we build tools that honour nature’s complexity, instead of trying to conquer it?

The Intelligence in the Jar

If you’ve ever stood over a jar of fermenting vegetables — watching bubbles rise, catching that sharp, tangy scent — you’re witnessing something extraordinary: an invisible ecosystem, busy at work. It’s easy to think of fermentation as chemistry, but really, it’s ecology — a dance of bacteria, yeasts, enzymes, and time. And when we ferment, we’re not the masters of this process. We’re the collaborators. The Microbial Majority For all our human cleverness, we’re a minority species. Microbes were here first, and they quietly run the planet — decomposing, recycling, fermenting, digesting, transforming.

The Fifty Shades of Regenerative

This morning, while doing my daily scroll through the RSS feeds (a ritual that still feels oddly rebellious in 2025), I noticed a theme popping up: “regenerative agriculture.” It’s everywhere. But what became starkly clear is that not all “regenerative” is created equal. First, I came across this piece from Daily Coffee News. It outlines a new certification scheme from the Rainforest Alliance focused on regenerative coffee farming. It feels grassroots, farmer-first, and run by a not-for-profit with a track record of actual field work. In short: it seems like the real deal. You can sense the soil under the fingernails.

Microbial Lessons for a Living Planet

When we begin to see fermentation not as a human trick but as a conversation between species, something shifts. The jar on the counter becomes a small model of the world — alive, adaptive, and full of intelligence that isn’t our own. These microbial communities show us, in miniature, how life sustains itself through cooperation, balance, and exchange. And if we pay attention, the lessons in that bubbling jar start to sound much larger — lessons not just about food, but about how to live well on a living planet.

From Varieties to Commodities

Have you noticed how “choice” in the supermarket doesn’t really feel like choice anymore? A whole aisle of bread, yet most of it made from the same kind of wheat. Apples that all look perfect, but taste mostly of cold storage. Tomatoes that travel halfway around the world but somehow forgot what flavour is. Somewhere along the way, our food system got… simplified. Not for our benefit, but for the benefit of the system itself — the trucks, the supply chains, the supermarkets, the spreadsheets.

From Healthier Soil To A Fairer Fork

Let’s be honest. The way we produce and consume food is broken. It’s a system that looks great on the surface, with supermarket shelves overflowing with produce from every corner of the globe, available any time of year. But when you dig a little deeper, you find a system built on a house of cards, and it’s costing us more than we think. Our industrial food system is a master of illusion. It presents abundance while creating scarcity—scarcity of nutrients in our food, of biodiversity in our fields, of topsoil on our farms, and of fairness for the people who grow it. It’s a system built on an extractive model, where value is pulled from the land, from communities, and from our own bodies, with little thought for the long-term consequences.