Soil Regeneration Grammars (Waitaha Canterbury, Aotearoa New Zealand)

Soil Regeneration Grammars begins with a simple truth: every community has organic material to care for. 

Food scraps, garden waste, crop residues, animal bedding, and other organic materials are produced every day by households, schools, farms, marae, villages, and cities. When these materials are treated as waste, they often become a problem: landfill pressure, emissions, contamination risks, biosecurity concerns, and lost fertility. When they are cared for well, they become a source of renewal: compost, living soil, food, ecological repair, learning, and stronger relationships between people and place. 

[Fungal hyphae from a 12-month old bioreactor compost]

This project brings together Dr. Bailey Peryman and the Neighbourhoods Foundation to develop Soil Regeneration Grammars: reusable coordination patterns that help communities safely return organic material to land and regenerative systems.

Bailey brings a rare combination of scholarly depth, practical field experience, and community-rooted leadership. His work is not simply about studying composting or soil regeneration from a distance. It is about standing in the pile, working with communities, building systems, training people, navigating institutional constraints, and helping groups develop the confidence and competence to care for organic material safely and regeneratively.

[Bailey pictured with a 20:20 Compost trial in Ōtautahi Christchurch (NZ)]

Based in Waitaha Canterbury and Ōtautahi Christchurch, Bailey has spent years working at the intersection of composting, food systems, ecological repair, community education, and regenerative systems design. Since 2020, he has been based at Te Pā o Rākaihautū, an indigenous Māori learning village whose sustainability work has received major international recognition. Te Pā recently won the Zayed Sustainability Prize 2025 in the Global High Schools category, with judges recognising its integration of Māori cultural practices, composting, land restoration, and modern sustainability solutions.

Bailey’s contribution to this field is both intellectual and practical. He has completed a PhD in Architecture focused on regenerative systems design, building on earlier training in professional planning and environmental management. His doctorate reflects a deep inquiry into composting as more than a waste-management technique: as a methodology for ecological, cultural, and social repair. At the same time, Bailey’s work is grounded in everyday practice: developing composting systems, supporting land-based education, coordinating external contributions, helping plan and design new sites, managing funding and compliance requirements, and leading people through the physical and social work of regeneration.

At Te Pā o Rākaihautū, Bailey has taken on multiple roles supporting the wider kaupapa of the community. He has been part of building Te Pā’s food systems and land-based sustainability work. He is contracted to Te Pā Foundation to support its mission to grow Kura-a-Iwi (tribally specific education) in partnership with Mana Whenua, the Ministry of Education, and local agencies. His role includes technical guidance on planning and design, land acquisition processes, coordination of external support, and the practical implementation of systems that connect learning, food, composting, and whenua.

Prior to this, Bailey co-founded Cultivate Christchurch with Fiona Hargreaves, with support from multi-year funding awarded by the Vodafone New Zealand Foundation. His work also has national reach through collaborations such as the Aotearoa Composters Network, connecting him with practitioners and communities working to divert organics from landfill, build local composting capability, restore soil, and strengthen regenerative land stewardship across Aotearoa.

This makes Bailey’s role in Soil Regeneration Grammars essential. The grammar cannot be designed abstractly. It needs to be drawn from someone who understands composting as a living process: the materials, microbes, risks, timing, temperature, labour, training, cultural context, documentation, safety, and trust required to make soil regeneration work in real communities. Bailey brings that depth. Neighbourhoods then helps translate it into a reusable coordination grammar that other communities can adapt.

The larger opportunity is to turn Bailey’s long-standing practice into a shared infrastructure layer for soil regeneration. A grammar developed from his work can help communities understand what steps matter, who is responsible, what evidence is needed, when material is safe to return to land, and how people’s contributions can be recognised. In doing so, Soil Regeneration Grammars can support not only the communities Bailey is already involved with, but countless composting, land restoration, school garden, regenerative farming, and community soil-care projects around the world.

[Bailey spreading biodynamic preparations at Cultivate Christchurch’s urban farm - soil built on rubble using woodchips and food scraps collected using an e-bike and trailer]

Neighbourhoods brings the coordination infrastructure. Neighbourhoods is not simply building an app. It has developed a framework for communities to encode their own ways of coordinating as grammars: structured patterns of roles, actions, permissions, evidence, states, and transitions. A grammar makes it possible for complex local practice to become coherent, teachable, verifiable, and adaptable without being reduced to a one-size-fits-all system.

This is even more important in a world increasingly shaped by AI. Communities can now use AI to generate websites, dashboards, forms, workflows, and digital spaces with unprecedented speed. But without a deeper coordination layer, these spaces can remain fragile: attractive on the surface, but unclear about what is valid, who has authority, what evidence matters, or how one community’s work can be recognised by another. Grammars provide the missing guardrails. They are pluggable, coherent patterns that AI-generated interfaces can render and adapt, while still preserving the underlying logic of coordination. In this sense, AI can help communities dynamically generate the spaces they need, while grammars ensure those spaces remain trustworthy, interoperable, and aligned with real-world practice — both within one community and across many communities working in related ways.

[Trametes Versicolor, photographed on a regenerating site in Waitaha Canterbury (NZ)]

For soil regeneration, this matters deeply. Composting and soil care are not just technical tasks. They involve materials, microbes, timing, people, safety, indigenous and cross-cultural knowledge systems, site conditions, land relationships, and trust. Many communities already have passion, knowledge, and local practice. What they often lack is a shared coordination layer that makes the work legible and transferable: what materials were received, who handled them, what process they entered, how certain values were upheld, what checks were completed, when the compost was ready, how was it applied, what evidence was captured, who signed off, and where the material returned to land. 

A Soil Regeneration Grammar gives this work a repeatable structure.

It can define:

• what kinds of organic material are accepted;
• how a compost batch is created and monitored;
• who is responsible for each step;
• what evidence is required;
• what safety or readiness thresholds must be met;
• when material can return to soil;
• how contributors and stewards are recognised;
• how local learning can be shared with other communities.

The first version of this grammar will be developed from Bailey’s active composting and soil regeneration practice in Aotearoa New Zealand. It will support everyday regenerative contexts such as school gardens, on-farm and community composting, food-growing projects, organics diversion, and land restoration. It can also be stress-tested in more demanding, agricultural and biosecurity preparedness contexts where safe organic-material management and verification are critical.

[Compost microscopy, image credit: Beth Goodwin]

The aim is not to create a generic composting app. Soil regeneration is ‘always-in-process’, local and living. It depends on climate, culture, materials, whenua (land), people, and community relationships. The aim is to create a reusable grammar: a pattern that communities can adapt to their own place while still sharing enough structure to learn from each other, verify their work, and build trust around them.

This is the larger value of grammars. Within a group, they create coherence: people know what to do, when to do it, what evidence matters, and who is responsible. Across groups, they create shared understanding: one soil regeneration project can recognise another’s work because both are using the same or compatible grammar. This helps local practice to travel without stripping away local autonomy.

Ma Earth’s funding round is an ideal context for this work because it combines community-backed support, regenerative practice, and trust-building. Soil Regeneration Grammars will help turn local composting and land-stewardship knowledge into a practical tool that other communities can use, adapt, and build upon. 

[Soil and Vegetation Maps of the project location - image credits: Smaps, Manaaki Whenua; Lucas Associates]

The project starts in Waitaha Canterbury and connects to multiple bioregions, locally and nationally, through relational ties held by Bailey. But the need is global. Any one of the land stewardship initiatives connected to Ma Earth could benefit from the Soil Regeneration Grammar. Countless communities are trying to turn waste into soil, restore land, grow food, and build resilience. Soil Regeneration Grammars can help them do this with greater coherence, safety, visibility, and shared learning.

[Bailey’s idea of a garage project: deconstruct the double garage and use the earthquake-damaged concrete pad as a home compost research station featuring my wife and children plus some allies from the neighbourhood].