Community Syntropic Agriculture Coordination in Costa Rica

Project Story

All over the globe, humanity’s food supply is racing towards a crisis. Farmers are increasingly trapped in an economic net that drives towards extractive monoculture, soil destruction, and dependence on both distant artificial and toxic material inputs and the volatile global commodity market. However there is a growing awareness of this trap and a desire to escape through regenerating the agricultural landscape with closed-cycle, nature-based practices such as permaculture and syntropic agroforestry. In Costa Rica this awareness has been visible for decades in national policy; biodiversity has become a cultural touchstone and since the 1980s over a million hectares – some 20% of the country’s land area – has been reclaimed from pasturing and other degradations to healthy tropical forest.

On the ground, agriculturalists need not only the awareness and intent to farm regeneratively, but also they need knowledge and practical methods to farm in harmony with nature and to be economically sustainable. In the last century, government agricultural extension services have effectively trained people in the now-unsustainable production methods that are so widespread. GrowGood brings a decentralized, parallel path to spreading knowledge and successful practices. GrowGood is not a silo: it is an open-source interoperable platform designed to help farmers without extracting “rent” to investors. In the long run, successful advancement of the GrowGood technology (in concert with the many other projects it interoperates with) provides foundational infrastructure for a new food economy, featuring resilience, transparent provenance, data sovereignty, and shared knowledge. We need tools like this to recover from the extractive, monoculture, market-bound food supply chains now strangling us.

This proposal brings two existing Costa Rican regenerative agriculture communities – La Huerta Farm School and Alegria Village – together in a pilot intended primarily to accelerate and guide the development of the GrowGood software, and also to help the communities to gain concrete insight into their own practices, their impacts, and interrelations with natural and commercial resources.

This proposal funds not only the development of software and codification of syntropic practices, but also the documentation, publication and dispersal of this through open source repositories and aligned organizations such as GOAT, Open Food Network, and Bionutrient Institute.

Background

La Huerta and Alegria Village share a lineage going back to the permaculture ecovillage founded by Stephen Brooks at Punta Mona in 1997.

Over the years the Punta Mona community has cultivated and propagated hundreds of varieties of fruits, vegetables, and support plants, introduced hundreds of students and visitors to permaculture practices, and has been a hub of regenerative culture for Costa Rica.

La Huerta Farm School sits on five hectares of hillside at 450 m elevation in La Libertad de San Mateo, Alajuela — in the headwaters of the Rio Machuca watershed. It is a living demonstration site for syntropic agriculture, watershed restoration, and regenerative food production. The property hosts over 600 fruit trees across 70+ species and runs immersive courses teaching syntropic farming practice. La Huerta leads the knowledge capture task: it shepherds co-development, testing, and documentation of syntropic recipes and Blueprints.

Alegría Village is a 70-hectare intentional eco-community on reforested pasture land, also in the upper Rio Machuca watershed. Founded in 2018, it currently has over 100 residents and 40 households receiving weekly farm baskets from its organic permaculture farm (~5 hectares) and food forest. Alegria continues to expand and evolve its food ecosystem; it is currently planting a new syntropic agroforestry area with 3000 new food trees and 2000 support plants.The community is featured on Zac Efron’s Netflix series Down to Earth. Alegría contributes syntropic knowledge, and also is the community scale deployment partner: the CSA farm basket operation is the immediate real-world use case for Digital Product Passports (DPPs) and community food coordination.

Both La Huerta and Alegría Village, located a few km apart in the upper Rio Machuca valley in Costa Rica, carry the imprint of Steve Brooks in their origins and their culture of stewardship, land regeneration, social integrity, and respect for the indigenous. Together, they represent the full arc from syntropic knowledge creation to community-scale food provisioning — precisely the cosmo-local model GrowGood is designed to enable.

What does GrowGood do?

GrowGood has been brewing in the mind of the lead developer (Leo Gaggl) for many years, but burst into a surge of development with the incorporation of the Valueflows ontology in mid-2025. GrowGood is committed to open source principles and ensuring that farmers retain sovereign rights to the data they generate, while enabling fruitful consensual data sharing. After hundreds of volunteer development hours building the core infrastructure, GrowGood is now prepared to engage with specific project sites in an “alpha” mode to validate its framework, obtain feedback and to continue on its development roadmap concentrating on the features most valuable to these initial sites.

GrowGood is built on the Valueflows ontology, which is organized in a Knowledge Layer, a Planning Layer, and an Observation Layer. For specific applications, the ontology is populated with vocabulary that expresses the appropriate resources, agents, processes, and events. This funding will allow us to put elements of a regenerative agricultural vocabulary into practice at all three layers.

The Valueflows model is powerful but can be overly abstract to a farmworker or even a farm manager. GrowGood makes the abstractions into a working data engine (“back-end”) and exposes an intuitive, user-friendly face (“front-end”) for farm managers, workers, and community members.

At the Knowledge layer, we will build recipes which track resource types (e.g. compost, seeds, harvested fruits) as inputs and outputs of explicit processes within farm operations. A key feature of the ontology is that we can explicitly recognize, as resources, less tangible inputs and outputs (e.g. rainfall, soil restoration) which traditional accounting systems ignore as externalities. Operationally, a collection of recipes, linking the outputs of one process to the inputs of others, constitutes a blueprint for farm operations. These recipes and blueprints are a “digital farmbook” and facilitate effective understanding, planning, and monitoring within each organization. Additionally, and importantly, they can be shared into a knowledge commons where other organizations can study, compare, and remix them. Developing a rich vocabulary supports transferability of recipes between organizations.

The GrowGood Planning layer helps the farmer to translate goals (e.g. “harvest 100kg of cucumbers this April”) into quantities and scheduling for seeds, garden space, soil amendments, labor, etc.

Permaculture practices are founded on a cycle of observation and response. The GrowGood Observation layer captures operational data and serves two principal purposes: (a) in farm operational management, determining “what worked well and what didn’t”, and (b) in “track and trace” capabilities outside the farm such as proof of organic provenance. Observation is multifaceted and the GrowGood roadmap includes (1) building a mobile data capture app, (2) input/output tracing logic on resources and externalities, (3) integrating data capture from cameras, GPS mapping, and electronic sensors (e.g. IoT – “internet of things” sensors for temperature, water, etc) with the process and event framework.

GrowGood’s Prior Investment — Context for Funders

GrowGood is not a startup seeking seed funding. The core platform — Valueflows engine, sensor pipeline, Blueprint system, spatial layer, API — has already absorbed 500+ volunteer development hours from a team of four people contributing without any external funding, because they believe this infrastructure is urgently needed.

The Ma Earth grant will fund four specific extensions that this Costa Rica pilot requires but that do not yet exist in the platform:

• A Syntropic Agriculture Blueprint vocabulary — recipes and process definitions for syntropic farming at both sites, publishable to the global knowledge commons.
• A mobile data capture application (Flutter, iOS + Android) — field-ready data entry for harvest events, chop-and-drop cycles, succession management, and ecological observations, with offline capability.
• Digital Product Passport (DPP) trace functionality — linking Alegría’s weekly farm basket to specific farm processes, inputs, and ecological outcomes.
• Community observation dashboard – a public-facing spatial and time-series view of farm activity, ecological events, and sensor readings for residents and external audiences

These features will be merged back into the open-source GrowGood codebase and made freely available to any syntropic farm, Landcare group, or regenerative community worldwide.

Project Timeline

Timeline Summary

Phase 1 — Co-Design & Setup

August–October 2026 (Months 1–3)

This phase is community-led. The GrowGood team does not arrive with a finished tool and ask the community to use it. It arrives with a framework and asks the community to fill it.

Phase 1 total volunteer hours: ~90 (excludes funded dev hours)

Phase 2 — Development & Deployment

November 2026–March 2027 (Months 4–8)

The intensive development window. Hardware goes in the ground; software is built against real community workflows.

Phase 2 total volunteer hours: ~64 (plus 120 funded development hours)

Phase 3 — Active Use & Refinement

April–October 2027 (Months 9–15)

Both sites run GrowGood in regular operations. The focus shifts from building to learning from use.

Phase 3 total volunteer hours: ~322

Phase 4 — Documentation & Open Publishing

November 2027–January 2028 (Months 16–18)

Everything learned becomes a gift to the global regenerative farming community.

Key milestones:

• July 2026 — Ma Earth community donation campaign closes
• August 2026 — Co-design workshops begin at both sites
• November 2026 — Development phase starts (mobile app, Blueprint, DPP)
• January 2027 — Sensors live at both sites; first farm basket DPP
• March 2027 — Mobile app released; La Huerta training courses using GrowGood
• April 2027 — Full operational use at both sites
• April 2027 — Mid-project report to Ma Earth donors
• October 2027 — Joint community workshop: “What are we learning?”
• January 2028 — Syntropic Ag Blueprint library published; final report; field guide released

Budget (all figures USD)

Cash Budget

Cash Budget Summary

This sits comfortably within Ma Earth’s project ceiling of USD $15,000. If matching falls short of the full amount, the priority order for deferral is: GrowGood travel → weather station → time-lapse cameras. The mobile app and Syntropic Ag Blueprint are the non-negotiable core — they are what makes this project distinct from just putting sensors in the ground.

Software Development (project-specific)

GrowGood’s core platform exists. This budget funds the four new features this pilot requires. All code produced is open-source and benefits every future community that uses GrowGood.

$60/hr is a volunteer stipend rate. Market rate for Flutter/Python development is $120–$180/hr. The remaining ~80 hours of platform integration, testing, deployment, and maintenance are contributed as volunteer in-kind by the GrowGood team.

Hardware (two sites)

Community & Education

Coordination