GrowGood

Beyond Money: A Contribution Economy for GrowGood

Part 3: Tokens, Mutual Credit, and the Art of Building Something Together In Part 2, we laid out how GrowGood plans to stay financially viable without selling out to venture capital: direct community support, professional services, a non-profit foundation, and cooperative feature development. It’s a solid, well-tested model—slow finance for a project that is deliberately refusing to chase explosive growth. But money is not the only way to build something worth building.

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?

Doughnut Economics and GrowGood

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.