D:FOOD
D:Food Web
The Distributed Past & Future of Agriculture
BY RITHIKHA RAJAMOHAN
In August 2024, a transdisciplinary group of contributors in the public goods funding, technology, farming and food systems spaces gathered in Navarro, California. Our purpose was to develop a vision for the future of agriculture, its supporting technologies, and how we might go about resourcing the first steps towards it. While this vision is still coming into focus, it's one we're committed to grounding in the ethos of the commons, recognizing the need for restoring community-ownership in agricultural systems and its supporting technologies. The following site synthesizes and documents the first of three D:Food collaborations taking place to develop a pilot commons funding mechanism. In addition to tool development, these collaborations explore cooperative structures that can govern their use, the ethics of who owns and controls the data used in these technologies, and how to sustainably fund open source projects in the long term. The following documentation is a nascent vision for the agricultural technology commons and exploration of why this model is not only needed, but likely to become the status quo in coming years.
Agriculture is a multi-generational, shared human endeavor and arguably humankind's first major innovation; one that has catalyzed widespread cultural and economic change by fundamentally altering our relationship to land and with each other. However, it has also gradually been forced into a siloed, monopolized and privatized environment.
Decentralized software systems—where no single server or authority is in charge—are often described as a new technology. But they echo an organizational structure that is quite old: the commons. For much of human history, communities shared and managed resources, like land, water, and knowledge, through collective stewardship and coordination. Today’s peer-to-peer systems revive that tradition in digital form, enabling people to coordinate, exchange, and govern together without relying on centralized authorities. In a world where platforms control speech, access, and value, the return of networked governance and infrastructure is becoming more of a necessity, and increasingly, the more effective choice.
Beginning in the 12th century, and accelerating in the 18th and 19th, the enclosure of the commons reshaped much of Europe. Lands once managed collectively, as was the practice in many other parts of the world, were fenced off, privatized, and transformed into sources of profit and taxation. Soon enclosure become a blueprint for colonial expansion and industrial capitalism, displacing many communities as widely as Indonesia and Brazil. Today, a new kind of enclosure is occurring. Instead of land, it's our digital spaces and tools. The platforms we rely on for banking, communication, navigation, and many other everyday needs are privately owned, opaque, and perhaps as a result, brittle, as they collapse under their own weight. At any a time, a company or country can freeze your account or cut off access to these services and tools. I would argue that open source is not just a nicety for maintaining complex, critical software, but the most effective way. Many hands make light work, but only if they can sufficiently coordinate their tasks. What started as the loss of the physical commons has now entered the digital realm, and in the world of agriculutre, both have had tangible impacts on our systems of food production.
Innovation today currently relies on a handful of well-established funding models: government and academia fuel policy programs and fundamental research, but are often influenced by changing political and institutional priorities. Corporate R&D departments push technological boundaries forward, but are generally restricted to market demand and profitability; venture capital boosts startups on the path to rapid growth along with a promise to meet high return/exit expectations with these high-growth, high-return goals often at odds with customer needs and best interests. And philanthropic grants, which are often a byproducts or excesses from these previous systems, that fund socially valuable work though with limited commercial appeal and financial sustainability and deeply tied to philanthropic program interests.
The commons offers an alternative to the usual binary of public versus private ownership. One that's rooted in collective benefit, competitive collaboration and long-term stewardship. In agriculture—and likely many other fields—the barrier to meaningful change isn’t a lack of technology or good intentions. When Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press it was to democratize knowledge, it was only a matter of time before the same tool was used to spread lies, inflame divisions, or consolidate power. Again and again, we’ve seen that technical advances alone don’t deliver lasting impact. What’s often missing is a deeper reflection on the systems we build within: the protocols of ownership, control, and benefit distribution that shape every innovation. As we develop this funding mechanism for the ag-tech commons, we invite you to not just imagine better tools, but to help design the social and economic contexts that make those tools truly transformative.
We’re only beginning to understand what’s possible when systems operate without a central authority. Open networks introduce new forms of coordination: emergent behaviors shaped by the structure of interactions between peers. In nature, we see versions of this pattern everywhere. Mycorrhizal fungi quietly support 92% of plant families through underground exchange networks. Neurons in the brain communicate without a single command center. Ant colonies make complex decisions without a leader. These are all examples of swarm intelligence, or coordinated patterns that emerge from simple rules and dense peer-to-peer interaction. If we design human networks with similar principles—prioritizing shared scaffolding over centralized control—we may unlock new social, civic, and economic outcomes not possible in hierarchical systems.
What might a modern-day commons look like and how could open networks be governed in ways that promote shared benefit? We have plenty of examples to pull from, quietly shaping the world around us: cooperatives, democratically owned and controlled by worker-members, on average see lifespans over twice that of traditional businesses. Open source software forms the backbone of global digital infrastructure and decentralized technologies and cryptographic protocols are reducing the need for traditional intermediaries or middlemen in many types of transactions and communications. These experiments, new and established, are signals of what’s possible when systems are designed for collective agency rather than centralized control.
A networked, peer-to-peer approach shifts us from simply having good intentions to rigorously examining how power flows: Who owns what? Who controls the system? Who benefits from success? Unlike traditional models that aim to design the perfect solution up front, networked systems ask us to build the right scaffolding—the structures and incentives that allow better outcomes to emerge over time. This means focusing less on dictating specific moves, and more on defining the rules of the game: the affordances, constraints, and feedback loops that shape behavior. In a modern-day commons, success isn’t about picking the right players. It’s about designing the right ruleset to create the right conditions for fairness, adaptability, and positive-sum dynamics, no matter who’s playing.
Our food systems are at a turning point. For centuries, agriculture was rooted in shared knowledge, land, and labor. That commons-based approach gave way to industrial systems that have evolved to become centralized and extractive. Network-based innovations present an opportunity to come full circle in our journey from communal farming to industrial agriculture; a chance to reimagine the agricultural commons for the 21st century.
Rithikha Rajamohan, civic technologist and founder of V6A Labs. D:Food contributor, synthesis and documentation.
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