After a presentation I gave yesterday I got to thinking .... How many people only garden certain times if the year? Then post why below

Partha Dasgupta basically walks into the room, looks at humanity’s accounting books, and goes: “Erm… you know you’re running an ecological deficit, right?” And not like a cute little “we’ll tighten the belt next quarter” deficit. We’re talking about 70% overshoot. As in: we’re demanding roughly 70% more from nature than Earth can regenerate. Seventy percent. That’s not “slightly inefficient”. That’s overdrawn, mate. If this were a business, auditors wouldn’t be asking polite questions. They’d be unplugging the printer and escorting us out. And the wild part? We keep “measuring” nature with spreadsheets and good intentions… then act surprised when the maths doesn’t change. Dasgupta’s whole point is: if nature is the asset base, we’ve been treating it like it’s free, infinite, and somebody else’s problem. What we’ve been missing is a Nature Ledger: something immutable, verifiable, and live. A system that can prove real stewardship, reward the people doing the work, and diversify balance sheets with utility, not greenwashing. That’s why GROW exists. Because if we’re serious about fixing the overshoot, we need to stop debating nature like it’s a vibe and start accounting for it like it’s our future. Three questions I’d love to hear from you all on: 1. If we’re truly 70% overdrawn, what are you doing today that you’d never allow in your own bank account? 2. If nature had a ledger that showed your footprint in real time, would you still be living the same way, or would you finally change the budget? 3. If your stewardship could be packaged as a tokenised RWA that buyers and lenders can verify instantly, would you use it to unlock cheaper capital, new markets, or a second income stream — and which one matters most right now?

Imagine if “doing the groceries” didn’t mean wandering under fluorescent lights like you’re on a sad little food safari. Imagine it meant stepping outside, meeting the person who actually raised your eggs, grew your spinach, and knows the name of the field your beef came from. Because somewhere along the way, we got hustled into thinking food has to be mass-produced, shrink-wrapped, and shipped around the planet for weeks or months before it lands in your trolley. And yes, it’s cheaper… but it’s cheaper for a reason. You’re not just paying with money. You’re paying with freshness, flavour, and the disconnect that makes food feel like it comes from “the system” instead of the soil. Now listen, I’m not pretending I’m some perfect farm-to-table saint. I still hit the regular shop for odds and ends, broccoli, lemons, the random stuff you realise you need five minutes before dinner. But over the past decade I challenged myself: meats, dairy, eggs, produce, the staples, sourced straight from local farms as much as possible. And here’s what surprised me: it’s not “only for rich people” if you’re smart about it. You manage cost by: choosing more affordable cuts and stretching meals eating more eggs (nature’s budget protein) spending less on packaged snacks that cost a fortune and taste like regret And honestly, we all benefit from slowing down and making food a weekly ritual again: get outside talk to farmers buy what’s fresh, not what’s been travelling since last season That’s exactly why Grow built The NourishMart. It’s not trying to “replace” grocery stores. It’s trying to fix the bit that’s broken: the distance between people and the producers who feed them. The NourishMart makes it simple to buy direct, build relationships, and keep more value in local communities, while giving you actual transparency into where your food came from. So no, I’m not saying abandon supermarkets. I’m saying: try shifting as much as you can to local through NourishMart, and watch what happens.

This week on Pasture Prime Time, we head to Australia to meet first-generation farmer Anika Wulff, a woman who left city life to build an organic farm from scratch, weather floods, hail, market pressures, and still keeps growing soil, community, and trust. We talk resilience, real farm life, organic markets, and why no farmers = no food = no you. 👉 https://youtu.be/qdSgeZFHYBk #PasturePrimeTime #Farming #Organic #GrowCommunity

There’s nothing quite like pulling a legume out of the ground and seeing it absolutely covered in nodules. 🌱 It’s like nature’s little audit trail. Quiet, unflashy, but doing the real work. Those small bumps on the roots are where rhizobia bacteria move in and set up shop. Here’s the clever part. Inside each nodule, the bacteria take nitrogen out of thin air, literally atmospheric nitrogen, and convert it into ammonia, a form the plant can actually use. In return, the legume feeds them energy from photosynthesis. No invoices, no middlemen, just a clean trade. So the legume is not draining your soil’s nitrogen like, “Cheers mate, I’ll be taking that.” It’s more like, “Relax, I brought my own nitrogen crew.” That’s why legumes are such a weapon in a cover crop mix. They can grow without pulling down your nitrogen bank account. When the cover crop breaks down, that fixed nitrogen becomes available for whatever you plant next. Now let’s talk nodules like we’re talking blockchain. A healthy nodule is like a verified block. You crack it open and it’s pink or reddish inside. That is proof the system is live, the transaction is real, nitrogen fixation is happening. If it’s white or green, it looks fine on the outside, but the process is not actually running. And our Grow Smart Nodes do not lie either. Nodules are like Grow Smart Nodes. They sit quietly in the system, doing the work, validating the flow, creating value without extracting it from somewhere else. You do not have to trust the story. You can check the roots. So if you want to know whether the system is working, don’t guess. Pull a plant. Check the roots. Slice a few nodules. Because nodules, and Grow Smart Nodes, do not lie.