ABOUT
Welcome!
Evan Folds here, I am grateful that you're here, and look forward to the opportunity to connect with you in the goal of growing healthy people, plants & planet.
My vision and "assignment" is to help generate regional regenerative agriculture systems. Be Agriculture is the result of 18+ years working towards this vision. The purpose of this website is to find people who see the problems and solutions through agriculture.
Agriculture is about more than growing crops. Eating is an agricultural act, and the impact that our farming and eating has on the world is profound. Be Agriculture calls everyone to take a seat at the table of agriculture.
Right now, we are further from agriculture than we have ever been before. The systems that sustain us have become toxic and unconscious, and agriculture is being conducted for the wrong reasons - food is no longer our medicine.
We have lost our way, but we can find it again through the living soil. To do this we cannot merely sustain what we have and call it good enough - regenerative is the new sustainable.
It is my belief and experience that the solutions to the challenges that we face in the world - hunger, climate, poverty, health care - are found in agriculture. Agriculture is the answer. The task before us is to Be a Part of Agriculture again.
We can focus on developing our “Personal Agriculture” by following these simple principles:
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Grow Your Own = Eat, Use & Sell the Things That You Grow
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Eat Real Food = Processed Foods Disrupt the Bodily Process
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Buying Power = Vote With Your Dollars & Eat Your Ideals
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Creative Agency = Know Your Impact & Act Accordingly
If we fix the soil we fix ourselves. Be in touch, and let's get started.
Evan Folds Background
Evan got his start in agriculture by starting a retail garden center called Progressive Gardens in 2002 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.
With the creation of Be Agriculture in January 2018, Evan brought all of his experience into focus with the goal of creating a regional regenerative agriculture system in Southeastern North Carolina, and connecting this effort to the growing awareness of the power of regenerative agriculture.
He now carries this out through a variety of projects on the local and national level, including Project Manager for the Northside Food Co-op, Co-Chair of the Eagles Island Central Park Task Force, Policy Director for the Feast Down East Learning Farm, Advisor to Kiss the Ground, and a consultant for many different regenerative agriculture projects around the world.
Evan is active in performing lectures and workshops for gardening and farming groups, 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.
If you have a project that you think Evan can bring value to, please be in touch!
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Email: evan@beagriculture.com
