Apparently, It Is All a System

I have been on a deep and very determined dive into the world of technology lately, and it has been tedious, arduous, frustrating and, at times, completely depleting. It is also necessary. I never imagined I would spend so much time working on websites, tablets, coding, order systems, inventory flow, data and all the tiny connections that have to happen behind the scenes to make Living Ground function properly. I would much rather be outside, working with the gardens, the plants, food, microbes, people and the physical parts of the Project, but lately a great deal of the work has been happening behind a computer screen.

I started Living Ground in 2021 fully aware of the amount of work it would require. I did not enter into this thinking it would be easy, or that there would always be people beside me carrying equal parts of the load. I knew the commitment I was making, and I knew that many of the people around me, even those who supported the idea, would probably not be present for the long haul. It takes a certain kind of person to stay committed to something like this, especially when the rewards are not immediate, the work never really stops, and much of what needs to be done is repetitive, uncomfortable, unglamorous or far outside what you originally imagined yourself doing.

I knew there would be gardens to develop, food to grow, products to make, structures to build, workshops to create, people to teach and a thousand practical problems to solve. What I did not anticipate was just how much of that work would eventually pull me into technology. I did not expect to be sitting at a computer trying to understand why a line of code is breaking something, why a tablet is not making a sound, why an order is not moving to the right place, why a website suddenly looks wrong on a phone, or why changing one small thing affects three other things somewhere else. I am not a programmer, and I am sure there are people who could build many of these systems faster and more elegantly than I can, but I am learning because the Project needs these systems to function.

There has been a huge amount of work going on behind the scenes recently. I have been rebuilding parts of the website, working with code, setting up tablets, creating the café ordering flow, setting up the kitchen system, troubleshooting notifications, improving how orders are entered and completed, and training the girls to use all of it. Each individual piece sounds fairly simple when I describe it, but there is almost always another layer underneath it. One system has to talk to another system, one device has to recognize what happened on another device, and one small break in the pathway can stop the whole flow.

A customer can now come into Living Ground, scan a QR code or go directly to the website on their phone and place an order. That order enters the system and moves into the kitchen workflow without relying entirely on someone writing it down, carrying a piece of paper, remembering what was said, or relaying it verbally from one person to another. The girls still see the order, verify it, prepare it and close it properly, but the information now has a pathway and there is a much clearer flow from the customer to the kitchen.

That flow matters because the tablet is not simply a tablet, and the ordering system is not only a convenience for the customer. It is part of a larger structure that is beginning to allow Living Ground to function as one connected system. The café, the kitchen, the products, the gardens, our stock, our pricing, the customer experience, the girls’ work and the information coming back from sales all begin to connect. I can see what is moving, what is not, what is selling, what is sitting, where mistakes are happening and where something in the operation is creating unnecessary friction.

This is becoming a kind of data centre for the Project, and that is something I have come to appreciate more than I expected.

When you are in the middle of doing everything, it is very difficult to know what is actually happening. I was getting lost in certain areas of operation and losing the ability to understand the “data” gifts that could help the project.

You can have an impression that something sells well because people talk about it, but the numbers may show something different. Some things were out of stock and I had no clue.  The girls are generally very good, but we miss things.  I share all financial data with the whole team (inside and outside crews). That is part of the data overload I have been experiencing.   I need a system that could give me the data of the birds eye view.

Some of this is difficult for me because there are so many moving parts. Tracking all details was becoming overwhelming. Sitting down and working through numbers and inventory is not where I naturally want to spend my time. Honestly, I would rather be teaching, growing, creating, working with food, developing products or being in the gardens, but if something is not working I want to know why.  If something is working, I want to move forward with it.   If we are losing money somewhere, I need to see it, and if we can improve and be a success because of this work, I am totally in.

The data does not replace observation. It gives me another way to observe, and that is where I have started to see a strange connection between all this technology and the work I already understand. In soil work, you cannot simply decide what is happening based on what you hope is happening. You observe the plants, the roots, the soil structure, moisture, organisms, microbial communities and relationships between them. You look for patterns, and those patterns give you information about how the system is functioning.

The soil food web is a network built on relationships and exchange. A root releases compounds into the rhizosphere, microbes respond, nutrients move, organisms feed other organisms, conditions change and the whole community adjusts. The human microbiome is also a network of organisms, signals, exchanges, adaptation and feedback. The health of either system is never only about one isolated component. It depends on the communication and relationships between many parts.

The deeper I get into technology, the more I recognize some of the same patterns there. There are inputs, signals, pathways, checks, responses and feedback loops. One thing triggers another, and a small break somewhere in the system can affect everything further down the line. Quite often the thing that appears to be the problem is not where the actual problem is located, and solving it means tracing the pathway backwards until you find where the communication stopped.

I think that is one reason I have kept persevering with it even when I have been completely fed up with it. I can see how these systems can help Living Ground become less dependent on me personally carrying every piece of information from one place to another. I can see how technology can connect the moving parts without taking away the living, human side of the Project, and that distinction matters enormously to me.

Technology is not replacing the girls or taking the thinking out of their work. I want it to give them a clearer view of what is happening and help them understand how the parts fit together. The girls are learning these systems at the same time I am building them, and there are moments when I begin explaining something new or showing them the order of things and I can literally watch their eyes glaze over. I get a blank stare and they literally stop looking at me.   I know that I have entered territory that is completely foreign to them.  But, I continue to boost their confidence and tell them they can do it.

I understand the difficulties and I have a lot of patience with it because much of this is genuinely new in their world. They may never have had reason to think about inventory systems, digital ordering, sales data, order status, workflow or how information moves through a business. From their side, the tablet is simply a device with buttons that I am asking them to learn, while I am looking at the much larger structure behind it and trying to show them why each small step matters.     When I arrived in Ecuador hardly anyone had dumb phones, never mind smart phones.   This world of technology has entered fast and furious in a short span of time.

An order arrives and it has to be seen, prepared, completed and closed. That one action affects the record of the sale, it tells us something about what the customer wanted, and it eventually connects back to stock, preparation, pricing and what needs to happen next. If an order is left open or something is entered incorrectly, it may seem like a small thing, but it distorts what the system is telling us. I am trying to teach them to understand the connection between their actions and the larger picture, not simply memorize which button they are supposed to press.

They do not fully see everything I am doing behind the scenes.  They see me showing them a new system….changing something, testing another order, fixing a screen, asking them to refresh the tablet, clear an order….asking whether a notification came through, telling them again to close the orders and give all the data required so this system works.  I repeat myself over and over.   They do not necessarily see the architecture I am trying to build underneath all of those small tasks, but I know what I am trying to create and I know why it matters.

Once the girls understand the basic flow, I am willing to train them into the next levels of the operation. That will give them other skills.  I want them to eventually have more power and control inside the system so they can make changes themselves, understand inventory, correct errors, update information, see what is selling and recognize when something is not right. I do not expect that to happen overnight, and I know it will take time, but I see this as part of their growth within Living Ground.   Eventually, this can be their success.

For me, that is about teaching. Teaching is not limited to standing in front of a group explaining soil biology, blood, plants, food or the microbiome. It also mean helping someone understand a system they have never encountered before and giving them enough knowledge to eventually operate inside that system with more confidence and independence. If they can understand how the Project functions and begin making informed decisions without waiting for me to solve every little thing, they gain more capacity and Living Ground becomes stronger.

I am building this same kind of structure in other areas of the Project too. The workshops are a good example because there are students, observations, intake information, blood patterns, images, recommendations, understanding of herbs, medicines, food as medicine.   And there is data that all need to be organized in a way that helps the student see relationships and have tools to help them see what it all means. I have been developing tools that help bring that information together so a student is not simply looking at a collection of disconnected findings.    Data is important.

That work has made me think a lot about the purpose of a good tool. A tool should not make the person using it less capable or less observant. It should help them see more clearly, recognize patterns, organize information and gradually become more capable of working independently. That is what I want in the teaching tools, and it is also what I want in the systems we are building for the café.

The website is becoming another major part of this infrastructure. I used to think of a website primarily as a place where people could learn who we are and what we do, but I now see how much more it can become. People can discover the Project, explore the food and products, read the articles, learn about workshops, register, place an order and connect with what is happening here before they ever physically arrive at Living Ground.

That changes the role of the website because it is no longer simply a brochure sitting online. It is beginning to participate directly in the operation. Information comes into it from the customer, moves through the systems we have built, reaches the girls and the kitchen, and eventually comes back to me as information about what is actually happening.

The more I work on all of this, the more I realize that Living Ground has always been about systems whether I called them that or not. The soil is a system, the microbiome is a system, the garden is a system, the kitchen is a system, and a group of people trying to work together becomes a system too. When the relationships between the parts are weak, things become chaotic, and when nobody can see what is happening, the same problems repeat because there is no useful feedback.

There has been very little glamour in building any of this. There have been hours of frustration, broken screens, settings that refuse to work, code that changes something I did not intend to change, tablets that behave differently from one day to the next and moments when I want to close the computer and be done with it. I struggle with certain parts of it and sometimes I am working well outside anything I would consider my natural skill set, but I keep persevering because slowly I can see the structure beginning to work.

I do want to get back into the gardens more and spend less time sitting at a computer. I want more time with the plants, soil, food, microbes and the physical work that Living Ground was built around. The strange part is that all this computer work may be one of the things that eventually allows me to do that, because a Project cannot depend indefinitely on one person holding every thread in her own head.

I knew from the beginning that Living Ground would require a tremendous amount of commitment, and I knew much of that commitment would be mine to carry. What I am building now is a way for that knowledge, responsibility and information to begin moving outward so other people can understand the system and take ownership of parts of it. That, to me, is what will actually bring Living Ground to its next level.

It is not about making the Project bigger just for the sake of growth. It is about making it more connected, more visible, more teachable and more capable of functioning as a whole. I never imagined that such a large part of getting there would involve learning technology, but apparently that is part of the path too, and like everything else at Living Ground, I am learning it by doing it.