Funding Freedom: An Operating System for the People Growing

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?

Open source is not a synonym for “free to create”. As anyone who has maintained a project knows, relying on developer burnout is not a strategy; it’s a tragedy that ends in abandoned repositories and broken promises. We cannot, and should not, build the critical infrastructure for our food system on a foundation of unrewarded goodwill.

So, how do we fund freedom?

The answer, I believe, lies in building an economic model that is as regenerative as the farming practices we want to support. It means looking beyond the centralised mindset of the big telcos and tech giants, and learning from the resilient, community-owned systems that are already thriving in the real world.

The Physics of Freedom

The problem with the traditional VC model is one of misaligned incentives. VC funding is brilliant at what it’s designed to do: build companies that can scale rapidly, capture markets, and generate returns for investors. But that’s precisely the problem. Those incentives—the ones that work so well for social media platforms and software-as-a-service businesses—are fundamentally incompatible with building resilient, community-owned infrastructure for our food system.

VC funding demands exponential growth and a clear “exit”—a sale or IPO. This pressure inevitably pushes projects toward creating proprietary lock-ins, monetising user data, and prioritising shareholder returns over the community’s needs. It is fundamentally extractive. It is the physics of confinement—the gravitational pull is always toward centralisation, toward exit, toward someone else owning the infrastructure you depend on.

A community-owned platform operates under a different set of laws: the physics of freedom. Its goal is not explosive growth, but sustainable resilience. Its value is measured not by its exit potential, but by the sovereignty and success of the people who use it.

Funding this requires a mosaic of approaches, a diverse palette of regenerative funding mechanisms that ensure the project is accountable to its users, not to outside investors.

A Regenerative Funding Model

Now, I can hear the objection: “That’s all well and good, but can it generate the capital needed to compete with well-funded startups?” The answer is: we’re not trying to compete with them—we’re building something different entirely. We don’t need to fund a sales team, a marketing blitz, or investor returns. We need to fund good developers, solid infrastructure, and responsive support. That requires far less capital, and generates far more genuine value per dollar.

Here’s what this looks like in practice for a project like GrowGood:

1. Direct Community Support: This is the foundation. If you are a grower, a business, or an individual who believes in this vision and gets value from the software, supporting the project directly is the most powerful vote you can cast. Recurring contributions, whether large or small, build a predictable revenue base that allows developers to focus on building, not fundraising.

2. Professional Services & Enterprise Contracts: For larger operations, cooperatives, or businesses that rely on GrowGood, professional support makes sense. This isn’t a SaaS subscription in disguise—we’re not renting you access to your own data. It’s a classic open-source model: the software remains free and fully functional for everyone, but dedicated support, training, customisation, and integration services are paid for by those who need them. This allows businesses to get the mission-critical assurance they need while directly funding the core project.

3. A Non-Profit Foundation: Establishing a legally separate, non-profit foundation creates a steward for the open-source code. This entity can manage community funds with full transparency, apply for grants, protect the project’s intellectual property, and ensure that development is always aligned with the community’s long-term interests. It provides a stable, mission-driven core that can’t be bought or sold.

4. Cooperative Feature Development: Do you and a group of other market gardeners need a specialised crop planning module? Pool your resources. This cooperative model allows groups of users to co-fund the specific features they need. It’s a decentralised, demand-driven approach that ensures the platform evolves according to real-world needs, creating a direct link between utility and funding.

This is a slower, more deliberate, more agricultural path. It’s about cultivating a healthy economic ecosystem around the project, not clear-felling it for a quick profit. It builds something far more valuable than a “unicorn” startup: a platform that is deeply and permanently accountable to its community.

An Invitation to Build

GrowGood is more than just a piece of software. It’s a statement about the kind of food system we want to build. It’s a working model of a system that is collaborative, open, and sovereign by design.

This is not a theoretical exercise. It’s a real project, and it needs real people.

If you are a farmer who wants to take back control of your data and your tools, come and use the platform. Your feedback is our most valuable resource.

If you are a developer who is tired of building walled gardens and wants to work on something meaningful, come and contribute to the code.

If you are a hardware maker who believes in the right to repair and open standards, come and integrate your devices.

If you are a researcher dedicated to regenerative systems, come and use our platform for your work.

And if you are someone who believes in this vision but doesn’t fit neatly into one of those categories? Spread the word. Share this article. Start a conversation at your local farmers’ market or your next industry conference about what it means to own our agricultural future.

The Agricultural Operating System for the future will not be handed down to us from on high. It will be built, field by field, line by line, by us.

Let’s get to work.

What About the Things Money Can’t Buy?

There’s one dimension of this economic model that fiat funding alone can’t capture: the contributions that don’t come with an invoice.

The farmer who spends a weekend stress-testing a new feature and files six detailed bug reports. The agronomist who writes the documentation that onboards a hundred users. The community organiser who bridges two regional grower networks. These contributions are real, they are valuable, and a cash-only model simply cannot express them.

In rural communities, this kind of reciprocal exchange has always existed—working bees, skill swaps, the quiet economy of mutual aid that holds agricultural communities together. Can we build something analogous into the architecture of GrowGood itself? A parallel layer of contribution accounting that sits alongside the fiat model, recognises what money can’t see, and keeps the community genuinely alive?

We think we can. In Part 3, we explore a token-based contribution economy for GrowGood—drawing on the deep traditions of mutual credit and community currencies, and asking honestly what modern tools might help us build it without repeating the mistakes of the speculative crypto world.

Part 3 — Beyond Money: A Contribution Economy for GrowGood — is coming soon.