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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 world doesn’t need another farm management system. It’s a crowded field, filled with tools that are often complex, expensive, and prescriptive. With few exceptions, they are designed to fit the farm into a box, to reduce the living, breathing art of agriculture to a series of industrial inputs and outputs. They ask farmers to speak the language of efficiency, a language that often feels alien to the principles of diversified, regenerative farming.
This approach forces us to leave the most important stories untold. The quiet, vital work of building soil, enhancing biodiversity, and stewarding water becomes invisible in the economic ledger. We are asking farmers to be ecologists, accountants, and data scientists, but giving them tools that only add to the chaos. The burden of proof falls squarely on the shoulders of those doing the most important work, without offering them a language to express its value.
This frustration, this sense of a story half-told, was the seed from which GrowGood sprouted. It’s not about reinventing farming; it’s about re-valuing it.
From Burden of Proof to a Story of Value
The core problem isn’t just clunky software or high subscription fees; it’s a fundamental mismatch in philosophy. Most farm software is built on a paradigm of extraction, not regeneration. It measures success in tonnes per hectare, not in nutritional density, soil carbon, or the return of native pollinators. This leads to critical issues for the farmers who are building a different future:
- Data is Siloed and Fragmented: Your soil health data doesn’t talk to your harvest records. Your water usage isn’t linked to your yield quality. This fragmentation makes it impossible to see the whole picture, to connect the health of your land to the true value of your produce.
- Ecological Work is Invisible: The system can’t account for the value of a cover crop, the benefit of a restored pollinator habitat, or the long-term investment in no-till practices. This essential work, the very foundation of regeneration, is treated as a cost, not an asset.
- Farmers are Locked In: Proprietary systems hold your data hostage in closed formats, creating dependency and preventing the free flow of knowledge that is the lifeblood of a resilient community. Your data should be yours, portable and powerful.
- Collaboration is Stifled: These tools are designed for individual optimisation, not collective intelligence. They isolate us at a time when we most need to be connected, sharing insights and building regional strength.
Cultivating a Digital Commons
GrowGood is our answer to this challenge. It is not a product we are selling, but a digital commons resource we are stewarding with and for the community. It’s an open-source platform built on a few core beliefs:
Software must adapt to the farm, not the other way around. We recognise that the work of a farmer in the field is vastly different from the work of a farm administrator at a desk. That’s why GrowGood has two distinct interfaces: a mobile-first Operational UI for quick, offline-capable data entry in the paddock, and a powerful Administrator UI for designing the deep, interconnected workflows of your farm. It’s about providing the right tool for the right job.
Record-keeping can be story-building. By using ValueFlows as a common, open-standard language, we can begin to capture the natural ‘flow’ of the farm. Each action—from planting a seed to harvesting a crop, from moving livestock to applying compost—becomes part of a verifiable story. This creates a high-integrity, auditable log of not just what was produced, but how it was produced, making the invisible visible.
Technology should be a bridge, not an island. Data sovereignty is non-negotiable. GrowGood is designed to connect farmers to a larger, interoperable network. Because your data is structured with ValueFlows, it is portable and future-proof. It ensures your farm is not a data island, but a node in a thriving, interconnected, and transparent bioregional economy.
We must cultivate a perennial public good. This platform is, and always will be, free and open-source. It is a tool for collaboration, not competition, built to serve the regenerative movement for generations to come. We are building infrastructure, not just an application.
This project is about creating technology that mirrors nature’s complexity and respects the farmer’s wisdom. It’s about building a tool that helps you not only manage your farm, but tell its true story—a story of regeneration, connection, and hope.
In the next post, I’ll explore how the Blueprint system works to tell that story, creating a tool that speaks your farm’s unique language.
Join me. Let’s grow this together.
Attribution: Image by Juliek1967, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Visit here
