ABOUT
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The mission of Be Agriculture is to heal the Earth by reframing the food, farming, and health systems. To do this we must adopt a bioregional lens, embrace regenerative agricultural methods, fix the food system, and flip the sick care system into a force for healing. Big work.
The vision is to spark reverence for life, for all people to take their rightful and responsible seat at the table of agriculture, and to collectively recognize that solutions are found in growing living soil, not just plants.
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Be Agriculture operates through the equation --> agriculture = food + farming + health. Our reckoning is that we are all agricultural beings. When we recognize that agriculture is about more than growing crops, and that eating is an agricultural act, we can mitigate the artificial impact that we are having on the world.
Healthy soil is alive - it can regenerate - and as the soil food web does its humble work, the results get better and better with time, reducing costs for water, fertilization, and the expense of chasing symptoms that only make the problem worse with toxic rescue chemistry. Ultimately, the logic is that we grow healthy soil, that grows healthy crops, and this grows healthy people.
In many ways agriculture is the problem, and, at the same time, it serves as the most potent solution we have for the wicked problems of the world. ​It is from this place that Be Agriculture was born.
We are being called to reconnect with ourselves, with one another, and with Mother Nature. The most potent way to do this is through agriculture - with our hands in the soil, breaking bread at the dinner table, or through nourishing our bodies with living foods.
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Be Agriculture exists to manifest accountability for life, and to promote living agricultural methods. We do this through direct agricultural consulting and the Living Land Program, writing stories that weave with life force, and working with and through resonant organizations.
Is this you? It all starts with an idea.
What we think, we grow.
Evan Folds Background
Evan's experience is rooted in following a passion for the living world, a desire to witness the living whole, and a fascination with start-up organizations grounded in living ideas.
He started 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 what is now called agroecology, or "regenerative agriculture".
For 20+ years Evan has pursued bioeconomics, and trained in the art of teaching and connecting with people on the subjects of food, farming, and health. In 2005 he founded and operated a commercial wheatgrass and microgreen growing business for over a decade that served the local health food and restaurant community. It was through this experience that he would come to intimately understand the value of life force in food, and the powerful influence living soil and living foods can have on people, plants, and planet.
One of the original inspirations for Evan's work is the legacy of Dr. Rudolf Steiner. In the preface to The Agriculture Course lectures given by Steiner in 1924, he was asked why people’s inner guidance and spiritual impulses were so weak, his thought provoking and surprising answer from over 100 years ago 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.”
Through his experimentation with compost tea Evan pioneered the development of vortex-style compost tea brewing systems. He founded and operated a wholesale/distribution company in 2007 called Progressive Farms that manufactured the Microbe Maker compost tea system, including a Dealer network of hundreds of garden centers around the United States creating the “perpetual compost tea brewing” developed in Progressive Gardens.
A serial entrepreneur, in 2008 Evan founded and operated an organic lawn care company called A Natural Approach that specialized in growing and regenerating soil using compost tea and base saturation soil testing that has become the Living Land Program.
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.
With the creation of Be Agriculture in January 2018, Evan brought all of his business and agricultural experience into a focus through the lens of bioregionalism and bioeconomics. He works with clients to integrate disruptive technology with living systems thinking at the intersection of food, farming, and health in order to generate dynamic solutions that solve wicked challenges.
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Over the last seven years, Evan has worked with many pioneering organizations, including Project Biome, Farmers Footprint, Northside Food Coop, Kiss the Ground, Working Landscapes, and many more.
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Evan serves as an elected Supervisor of New Hanover Soil & Water Conservation District, and serves as President of the Board of Directors if the Eagles Island Nature Park project. He 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.
Evan is a thought leader, an ecological entrepreneur, a published writer, and a proud father. He works as a consultant for regenerative projects around the world, and he looks forward to working with you towards a future of human thriving.
Let's be in touch!
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Email: evan@beagriculture.com
