An Ecosystem Approach to Growing Food, Part I

We depend on ecosystems — for fresh air, for clean water, for healthy food. At Grove, we are inspired by ecosystems and their potential to improve our lives. Our first product (appropriately named the Grove Ecosystem) combines technology and ecology to teach kids and adults about the ecosystems that sustain us.

An ecosystem is a self-organizing network of organisms that interact with each other and their environment. Ecosystems are incredible because they are inherently self-sustaining — they recycle waste into resources, they are resilient in the face of disturbances, and they increase in stability and productivity over time. We often think of ourselves as separate from ecosystems, but our well-being and the well-being of the ecosystems around us are inextricably linked. Without ecosystems to support us, we would eventually go extinct.

Frighteningly, ecosystems are being destroyed at an alarming rate across much of the earth, often for the purpose of growing food using industrial agricultural practices.

There is an alternative to these exhaustive, degenerative methods for growing food and we can reverse the trends of global ecosystem destruction while feeding the world. I call this exciting alternative Ecological Agriculture —

harnessing ecosystems to grow our food. There is no single recipe for growing food ecologically, but this philosophy of farming can be boiled down to a simple concept: build an ecosystem around a set of food crops that can thrive in the local environment, support the ecosystem which will in turn support the crops, and then harvest the surplus.

The Grove Ecosystem, our flagship product, captures the essence of the ecological approach to growing food and brings it down to a scale where people can practice it in the home and the classroom. The Grove Ecosystem is truly an ecosystem — a set of plants, animals, and microbes that work in symbiosis to grow food for us humans, the keystone species of the Ecosystem. At the highest level, here’s how the Ecosystem works: we feed the fish, who feed the microbes with their waste, which feed the plants with organic nutrients, which feed us greens, herbs, and fruit. This method for growing food is called aquaponics and it is a great example of an ecological approach to growing food.

There was a point at which our ancestors were all ecologists, living on the land, observing and shaping the ecology around them, and harvesting the fruits of this labor. As the tide of civilization swept across the world, their descendents became disconnected with that ecological heritage, moving off of the land and shifting the burden of agriculture to industry leaving stewardship behind in the process.

Now, in this modern technological era, we’ve collectively lost touch with our ecological roots. We’re starting to feel the consequences of that disconnection in our societies. But the pendulum is swinging back to the roots. People are realizing the value in ecosystems for the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. We’re starting to reintegrate nature back into our lives. The Ecosystem is Grove’s first contribution to this ecological revolution.