Be Agriculture

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Evan Folds Background

Evan got his start in agriculture by founding a retail garden center called Progressive Gardens that specialized in hydroponic and beyond organic gardening techniques, including composting, aquaponics, urban farming, compost tea, organic lawn care, and so much more.

For over fourteen years Evan honed his craft and learned the art of teaching and connecting with an audience on the subjects of gardening and health. During this time he founded and operated a commercial wheatgrass and microgreen growing business serving the local health food and restaurant community. It was through this experience that he began to intimately understand the value of life force in food, and the powerful influence living foods can have on people.

One of the original inspirations for Evan's work is from the preface to The Agriculture Course lectures given by Rudolf Steiner in 1924. When Steiner was asked why despite his constant stimulus people’s inner guidance and spiritual impulse was so weak, his thought provoking and surprising answer was as follows:

"This is a problem of nutrition. Nutrition as it is to-day does not supply the strength necessary for manifesting the spirit in physical life. A bridge can no longer be built from thinking to will and action. Food plants no longer contain the forces people need for this.”

A serial entrepreneur, Evan founded and operated an organic lawn care company called A Natural Approach for over three years that specialized in growing and regenerating soil using compost tea and base saturation soil testing.

Out of this project he developed a local project called Food Lawns that focused on developing an economic model for the coordination of neighborhoods to produce food on lawns and vacant residential landscapes.

Through his experimentation with compost tea Evan pioneered the development of vortex-style compost tea brewing to deliver living microbes to the general public. He founded and operated a wholesale/distribution company Progressive Farms that manufactured the Microbe Maker compost tea system, then developed a Dealer network of hundreds of garden centers around the United States that used the “perpetual compost tea brewing” pioneered in Progressive Gardens.

In addition to product development and manufacturing, Progressive Farms operated a fourteen acre market vegetable farm with a community supported agriculture (CSA) program that fed over seventy families in cooperation with a local residential housing development. It was here that Evan learned the challenges and rewards of food farming on a community level.

Evan is a partner in the Farm-A-Yard project and a frequent guest on the Farm-A-Yard Podcast  that encourages homeowner to grow food, not lawns.

Evan is active in performing lectures and workshops for gardening and farming groups all over the world and is a contributing published writer for many reputable international gardening publications including Garden Culture Magazine, the Biodynamic Association, Hobby Farms, Maximum Yield, and more.

Evan received a bachelor of science in Biology and a minor in Religion from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and resides with his family in Wilmington, NC.

The purpose of this website is to invite collaboration with all types of individuals and organizations on regenerative projects.

If you have a project that you think Evan can bring value to, please be in touch! 

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