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Getting fresh food to people and teaching people to grow it are two different problems. Almost all of the money went to the first. plant is built for the second.
A few years ago we got pulled into the research on food deserts and could not let it go. Communities all over the country where fresh food simply is not there. The standard answer has been to build a grocery store, and after hundreds of millions of dollars, study after study found it barely moved the needle. A store a mile away does not help if you have no car. A new chain drives out the corner market that fed the block for forty years. And none of it matters if no one ever showed you what to do with a head of cabbage.
Access to food and knowledge of food are two completely different problems. We kept solving the wrong one.
During World War II, twenty million home gardens grew more than 40% of the produce eaten in America. Not as a weekend hobby. As a way of life. Then the supermarket arrived, the knowledge stopped being passed down, and the number quietly fell. Today home gardens grow under 4% of what we eat.
The knowledge did not disappear. It just stopped being handed from one generation to the next.
We did 40% once. We want to get back there, and then past it. Picture a country where most of its produce comes from the ground people live on, not a field a thousand miles away. That is the line we are walking toward.
We started with an app. But we never thought of it as just an app. The goal, and we mean this literally, is for plant to behave like a plant. To take root quietly. To grow into something bigger than where it started. To eventually help feed people in a real way, at real scale, in the places the old solutions keep failing. Not a one-time donation. Not a store that closes in five years. Something that grows back every season, and gets stronger for it.
Zone-aware planting calendars, weather alerts, and a traffic light that tells you exactly where every plant stands. Free, with Plant Pro for growers who want more.
Hundreds of free, zone-specific growing guides, sourced from university extensions, so the right information reaches you at the right time of year.
A nationwide community of growers: neighbors in your zone, growers a season ahead, passing what they learn from one yard to the next. We want this to become the largest community of home growers in the country.
One day, a growing curriculum for schools, kindergarten through eighth grade, so the next generation grows up already knowing how.
The fastest way to quit is to fail by yourself in season one. So plant is built around the people growing alongside you: neighbors in your zone, growers a season ahead, the small wins and the honest failures shared in the open. The knowledge that stopped being passed down gets passed down again, grower to grower. That is how it comes back.
plant did not come from an expert. It came from a dad of three in Exeter, California, in the agricultural heart of the state, who was not, by any natural measure, a gardener. First season, the pumpkins died. The one carrot that came up looked like it had been in a fight with itself. Every answer was out there somewhere, scattered across videos and forums and the heads of master gardeners, and almost none of it was easy to reach. That gap is the whole reason plant exists.
Last summer there was finally enough to share with the neighbors. That felt like the beginning of something.
plant launches on Kickstarter in October 2027. Join the list and follow along as it grows.