Do you dream of an organic garden, but don’t have a yard? A
flock of chicks, perhaps, but don’t have a yard? Home-grown food, and lower grocery
bills (but, alas, no yard!)? Dream no more, because you can have it, and without quitting your job, trading your bus pass for a pickup, or moving to the rural north.
A new wave of farming is happening in a city near you. While true, Old MacDonald had a farm (ee-i-ee-i-o), his offspring have some urban fish to fry. They’re working off loans, and can’t necessarily afford a parcel of land. They’re young parents who want to save money on cherry tomatoes. They’re newlyweds paying off healthcare debt, and growing taters in their trashcan. They’re students avoiding crappy dining plans. They’re urban farmers. Plain and simple.
So without further ado, I give you Ruppenthal’s comprehensive “how-to” info for growing fresh food in the absence of open land; it’s here for the taking. Nom nom. Here’s my discussion with him:
For the past 18 months people have been calling Tasch’s work a “movement.” Indeed it is a movement, but this is a movement about investing, not protesting. Recently when he gave his presentation in Santa Fe, it was attended by legislators, members of some of America’s wealthiest families, and many farmers.
So who is Woody Tasch, and from where on the economic landscape did he arise? He was formerly treasurer of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation, and he’s an experienced venture capital investor and entrepreneur who has served on numerous for-profit and nonprofit boards. He was founding chairman of the Community Development Venture Capital Alliance, which supports venture investing in economically disadvantaged regions. Slow Money is an effort to create a new way of steering capital in support of local food systems. It is in part a reference to Slow Food, and it is also a reference to slow money as opposed to fast money—everyone is beginning to understand what that is.
Rev. John Gibb Millspaugh had big plans for his trip to Utah last month.
He was going to be in Salt Lake City to talk at a Unitarian conference about the importance of slowing down to examine the spiritual implications of food choices. Afterward, Millspaugh figured he and his wife, Sarah, would hit as many tourist sites as possible.
While Millspaugh’s conference talk touched on, among other things, the principles of the “slow food” movement, when he scaled back his vacation, he was joining another fledgling movement: slow travel.
Read the whole article here.
Change.org
Sustainable Food
by Jill Richardson
category: Policy
Published April 29, 2009 @ 11:25PM PT
There are 3 articles out there on the web that rate Obama's first 100 days when it comes to food. One of them is mine, one is from Civil Eats, and one is by Obama Foodorama. We each went about it in different ways. I compared his campaign promises and promises made after taking office with his actions (and the actions of those in his administration). Civil Eats gave the Obamas a B- together but Michelle is the A student between the two of them with her garden. Barack himself got a C-. I didn't give out grades but I think that's about accurate. He's mostly just continuing to follow the same unsustainable path we've been on since the end of World War II, with a few improvements (like the new White House garden and the appointment of Kathleen Merrigan as the new #2 at the USDA).
Obama Foodorama has a different take though:
There's a single word for President Obama and Ag policy in the first 100 days: Unprecedented.
It's now fairly obvious that the President is in firm possession of the deep understanding that food and Ag policy is connected to everything, that it's the critical starting point for every policy discussion. Whether it's green recovery, health care, the economy, the credit markets, homeland security, etc, Ag policy is entangled with and impacts every other area of policy the President is addressing. Obama has surrounded himself with cutting-edge thinkers who are savvy multi-taskers, who also manage to work food and Ag into their platforms, even when their jobs ostensibly have nothing to do with food and Ag policy. A few examples: Steven Chu, the Energy Secretary, has publicly worried that climate change is going to rapidly decimate California Ag and vineyards. Van Jones, the Green Collar advisor for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, has big plans for greenroof food gardens in urban areas, and eventually even the White House (giving new meaning to "small" and "local" farming). Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, who has a long resume in social justice, will be crucial for creating a just food economy, in which we do not rely on migrant or slave labor, and even the poorest among us have access to good, nutritious food. We have Kathleen Sebelius, the newly confirmed Secretary of Health and Human Services, who still happens to be the governor of Kansas (pictured last night after being confirmed). Just days ago, Governor Sebelius, ethical foodist, made a crucial legislative veto regarding hormone labeling on milk, back in her home state. We have Rahm Emanuel, secret foodist, who's walking around the Hill debating farm subsidies (and carbon credits, for that matter); and his brother Zeke, health policy advisor for the President, who moonlights as a restaurant critic.
While I agree with Obama Foodorama that Steven Chu, Van Jones, and Hilda Solis are fan-freaking-tastic, what about less excellent choices like Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner on Obama's economic team? I doubt either of them have read the wonderful new book Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered by Woody Tasch. One of the most profound points I've heard is that nature does not function based on supply and demand. When we deplete the soil, the soil doesn't "get" that it's in high demand and then create more supply.
Furthermore, while I get that Obama has a terrific strategy of surrounding himself with qualified people (plus the occasional Wall Street shill), I don't think that Obama himself really gets food and ag issues. I don't expect him to be all things to all people, and I don't expect him to know everything about every issue. Unfortunately, MANY - far too many - of the very respected "ag experts" from very respectable institutions in this country absolutely SUCK. It's the predictable result of a country that has been practicing "better living through chemistry" for several decades and only just discovering sustainability. We're only now beginning to have university programs that teach sustainable ag. We certainly don't have a large corps of well-known PhDs to compete with those on the other side. Someone like Obama would have to take a pretty big leap of faith to totally ignore the entire ag establishment and head out into unknown sustainable territory. But who knows. He's a smart guy. Maybe he'll get it.
What are your thoughts about Obama's first 100 days? How do you think he's doing on food and ag issues?
Photo credit: Steve Rhodes on Flickr.com
Examiner.com
Mary Vincent
April 7, 4:57 AM
You may have heard that 'water' is being discussed as the new 'gold'. After I finished reading Woody Tasch's new book and talked with him, perhaps 'Soil' should also be the new 'gold'.
Woody Tasch is author of Inquiries Into the Nature of Slow Money:Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered.
Per Tasch, several years of agricultural industrialization and financial policies have contributed to the degradation of our soils. "It takes roughly a millennium to build an inch or two of soil; it takes less than forty years, on average, to strip an inch of soil by farming in ways that are more focused on current yield than on sustaining fertility. A third of America's topsoil has eroded since 1776. About a third of China's 130 million hectares of farmland is seriously eroded, and Chinese crop yields fell by more than 10 percent from 1999 to 2003, despite increasing application of synthetic fertilizers."
His premise (of Slow Money) is: "The problems we face with respect to soil, fertility, biodiversity, food quality, and local economies are not primarily problems with technology. They are problems of finance. In a financial system organized to optimize the efficient use of capital, we should not be surprised to end up with cheapened food, millions of acres of GMO corn, billions of food miles, dying Main Streets, kids who think food comes from supermarkets, and obesity epidemics side by side with persistent hunger."
Tasch is Chairman of Investors' Circle, a U.S group funding socially responsible companies, where $130 million has been placed in 200 businesses, i.e. ZipCar.
He is currently raising money for the Slow Money venture fund dedicated to investing in local, sustainable agriculture ventures. He also wants to help build a marketplace where farmers and financiers can find each other. He says: "Social Investors are starting to invest in entrepreneurs, and people are eager to discuss fundamental alternatives." He is planning to include more attention on a grassroots investment strategy: a structure that will allow smaller investors to be involved, and the details are currently being worked.
I asked how the news of the UN Climate Change report stating that animal agriculture causes more greenhouse gases than transportation and Bon Appetit, a food service provider, cutting meat to cut carbon is impacting the Slow Money investment philosophy? He says the issue is scale and industrial farming is causing the problems. Sustainable farms are important.
Gratitude Gourmet would suggest that investing in plant-based companies be the goal.
Slow Money has already made its first investment in Vermont-based High Mowing Seeds, which supplies seeds to 75 percent of the organic farmers in the country, according to founder and CEO Tom Stearns. Investors will earn 6 percent interest on their money over the next five years, paid in a balloon payment in the fifth year, at which point they can opt to leave their money in and let it grow or term out the debt at ten years, according to Stearns. High Mowing Seeds currently has $1 million in sales, and Stearns projects $3 million in sales over the next two years.
The Slow Money Alliance was also established to run Slow Money Institutes, publish books and white papers, and members include food entrepreneurs, farmers, investors, and philanthropists. It is looking to expand Alliance membership.
Marin Independent Journal
Rob Rogers
Posted: 03/29/2009 07:00:00 PM PDT
Investor and environmental activist Edward "Woody" Tasch sees a lot in common between the mortgage-backed securities that helped bring about the global recession and a typical American hamburger.
"No one is quite sure where the meat in a hamburger comes from," Tasch told his audience last week at a discussion of the "slow food" movement at Fort Baker's Cavallo Point Lodge. "It might come from hundreds of different animals. And no one is sure where the money for each of those securities came from."
Recent food scares like January's discovery of salmonella in peanut products made by a Georgia plant and the 2006 identification of E. coli bacteria in spinach have fueled interest in the movement's mantra of small-scale agriculture and locally grown food, said Elizabeth Ptak, a spokeswoman for the Marin Agricultural Land Trust.
"This is part of a very timely national conversation," Ptak said. "People want to know where their food came from and who grew it. Writers like ("The Omnivore's Dilemma" author) Michael Pollan and ("Fast Food Nation" author) Eric Schlosser have helped people become much more aware of these issues, and (first lady) Michelle Obama planting a garden on the White House lawn is part of that change as well."
As an investor, Tasch - the author of "Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms and Fertility Mattered" - eschews massive mutual funds in favor of small, local businesses where his contribution can make an impact on his community.
As a consumer and an eater, Tasch and others who tout "slow food" believe buying food that is grown and sold locally, using small-scale or organic methods, can have the same positive impact on their health, and the health of the environment.
"The closer food is produced to where it is consumed, the greater the likelihood that it will be fresh, in-season and better tasting, and that getting it to market will use less energy and produce less pollution," declared the American Farmland Trust in a study of the Bay Area's "foodshed" released last week.
Amelia Spilger puts it another way.
"Farmers need customers. Eaters need nutrient-dense foods. And those foods need local farmers," said Spilger, a market manager at Marin Farmers Markets. "It all goes hand in hand."
According to the University of California's Sibella Kraus, the meaning of "slow food" has less to do with whether food is organic, locally grown or sustainably produced. Instead, it's about the relationship between the person who grows food and the person who eats it.
"It's not an ideology that says food grown within 75 miles is good, but within 50 miles is better," said Kraus, director of UC Berkeley's Agriculture in Metropolitan Regions program. "The farms need to have a personal resonance for the consumer. The places where people grow our food are places we should visit. We need a better understanding of who grows our food."
Read the whole article here.
Good Magazine
Posted by: Peter Smith on March 16, 2009 at 4:38 pm
Slow Food’s backlash against fast food turns 20 this year and while the international, gastronomic organization appears to be losing some of its allure, a crowdsourcing investment model based in part on Carlo Petrini’s philosophy appears to be taking off: Slow Money.
The timing seems particularly apt given the recent roller coaster of the fast money and investor wariness after the burst of the housing bubble.
Slow Money takes its name from a book by Woody Tasch published last year: Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered. Tasch isn’t arguing against economic growth; he says money should be lent at a local level by smaller investors who have an interest in their environment. Rates tend to be lower; after all, he writes, “no ear of corn has ever heard of 6 percent interest, much less 12 percent”:
“Organized from ‘markets down’ rather than from ‘the ground up,’ industrial finance is inherently limited in its ability to nurture the long-term health of community and bioregion. These limits are nowhere more apparent than in the food sector…” (via NPR).
The notion expands on community-supported agriculture and other community-supported foods, where large groups of consumers/investors contribute small amounts of funds to renovate barns, repair fishing boats, and build restaurants.
Slow Money is a unifying concept, one that should take a note from Slow Food’s expansion, which continues to walk a fine line between earthiness and elitism, advancing a political agenda and promoting expensive meats.
Guest blogger Peter Smith lives in Portland, Maine, where he produces The Sunday Best and writes for Gastronomica, Gourmet, and the Boston Globe. He profiled Ben Dobson in GOOD 013.
CBC News
Seeds of change
Healthy food
Hippies' revenge as hardscrabble Hardwick goes organic
Last Updated: Thursday, March 12, 2009 | 5:16 PM ET
By David Gutnick
Before the long-haired people from the city moved into these tree-covered hills, Hardwick, Vermont, was known as the "Building Granite Centre of the World."
It boomed in the late 19th and early 20th century as thousands of workers cut deep into the mountains, blasting out sheets of granite that were then cut, ground, polished and loaded on trains for the boardrooms, post offices and city halls of America.
But in 1929 when Wall Street crashed, so did Hardwick. By the time of the post-war building boom, cement and plate glass reigned supreme.
Granite had lost its lustre and Hardwick, nestled in Vermont's Green Mountains a two-hour drive south of Sherbrooke, Que., was just one more industrial town with a product that no one wanted.
At one point, when Hardwick became known as "Little Chicago," you could still go to Benny's bar for cheap beer or a fistfight.
But then even that nickname died.
Land sold for a song around Hardwick and in the 1960s and '70s, the hills attracted the hippies — the back-to-the-landers — who planted the seeds for its eventual rebirth.
Down from the hills
"A lot of the back-to-the-land movement was very much centred on these individuals' ability to take care of themselves," says Monty Fischer. "They didn't produce a lot of extra."
Fischer is the executive director of the Centre for An Agricultural Economy in Hardwick. He coordinates the growing number of food-based businesses in this town of 3,000 or so.
The walls of his office on Main Street are covered in charts that show how everyone from traditional dairy farmers and cheese makers to a soy-milk producer and an organic seed grower, even a lending circle called Slow Money, are part of the local network.
"What's happening is that with the new entrepreneurs there is a mass of production that allows for more produce, more value-added food products to be on the local market.
"Whatever extra there is can be exported elsewhere." And these extras are staring to mount up.
More than 100 jobs have been created in Hardwick over the past three years, all of them are related to North American's growing interest in healthy food.
Not just hippie-dippies
"This is not an organic-only club or anything like that," says Tom Stearns, owner of High Mowing Organic Seeds.
"We want to have farmers who are good stewards and for some that may not mean being organic. That's okay."
In his early 30s, Stearns is giving me his sustainable-development-in-Hardwick tour. Had he been born a generation earlier, he would have been one of those back-to-the-landers who thought going into business was a sellout.
Instead he is an entrepreneur who lobbies everyone in the community to pull in the same direction so that the Hardwick residents will prosper from a local economy designed for the 21st century.
"From High Mowing to Jasper Hill Cheese we are going to be passing about 15 organic farms," he says. "Next door to Vermont Soy is the Vermont Milk Company, which is transforming itself into a dairy-based incubator building. The food venture centre is an incubation kitchen that will be built later this year."
In the space of an hour you can see quite a bit of Hardwick because everything is within a couple of kilometres.
Here we are passing the soy guys who will soon be exporting to New York City. Over there are the compost guys who teach everyone from kindergarten students to seniors about environmentally friendly waste. And these are the cheese women who hand out hairnets and sterilized boots before you tour the Jasper Hill, underground cheese-aging cellar
It is as big as a hockey rink — 22,000 square feet — and filled to the rafters with thousands of rounds of cheddar, blue and goat cheeses.
The cheese centre is brand new and, it is said, there's nothing like it in North America. Local cheese makers pay Jasper Hill to take care of the ageing and the marketing of their cheeses in order to reach the broadest market possible.
Read the whole article here.
The Feast NOLA: The Connected Age Emerges from New Orleans
February 12, 2009
I’ve just been co-presenting (with Rachel Botsman of OZOlab) and attending Feast Social Innovation Conference in New Orleans. If you don’t already know the smart team of ‘Millennials’ behind it, you should know: they are Alldaybuffet and this was the second in their next generation conferences and social entrepreneur events. What marked their event on Friday, February 6th as special is a combination of things, which may in some ways all add up to a loose definition of the term “Social Innovation”. Never before have I been to a conference where the ‘place’ was equally relevant and rich as the ‘content’ of the day.
The words I’d like to use to summarize this special event are Connected, Restorative, Humanistic and Beacon; I’ve provided my commentary on each one below. Please hold these words lightly and let them not get in the way of the stories behind them.
Connected:
Social innovators come together to drive forward prosperity, collaboratively. This was apparent from day one of Feast gathering. Never have I felt so immediately connected to the culture of a city in such a short time. The event kicked-off on Thursday evening with Robbie Vitrano, the founder of Trumpet, hosting an impromptu speaker dinner at his large studio in the 9th Ward area (an area significantly affected by Katrina). Speakers were mixed with locals who’d returned to the city from the floods, with Robbie’s family, with entrepreneurs and the Feast team. We were all there with a shared goal – driving business as a force for good and building “social capital” as Jay Parkinson of Hello Health describes it. We are the stakeholders of social capital, a yet undefined or measured value.
Sounds real simple to say it, but social innovators are Connectors. This tribe, myself included, measures value as impact of collective good: we share or give away ideas, provide support and advice for no expectation of any economic return and mix together whatever tribe we’ve come from. There is very little that is proprietary or not wholly exposed.
Social innovators are also Connected thinkers: they see the world as whole relationships and are often addressing systems issues, because they are able to see them. Hello Health, presented to the Feast audience, is a powerful response to a broken system – US healthcare. Doctor Parkinson built his whole business model on an insight that the current healthcare system is siloed and completely disconnected. In his words, “the only thing connecting the patient and doctor is the waiting room”; patients are treated like a commodity –they exist to make transactions possible and generate more wealth within the healthcare sector.
“If I do a horrible job managing your asthma, I get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars; if I do a great job I might get $100” says Jay. He believes that being a patient currently sucks; for many it is financially out of reach, it is highly complex and involves little communication of shared information between practitioners. There’s no one central platform for your health.
Jay has created a connected “Product-Service System” for local health care. He took the middleman out of the process – insurers and surgeries – and in place he put a networked service and invited his customers to become stakeholders. In his words, “no longer working in a silo from my patients but building social capital together”. His model is a bit like Zipcar for health because it takes the burden out of the paying for a commodity designed for obsolescence and in exchange puts a pay-as-you-go membership model that benefits all stakeholders. And it’s wholly connected.
Woody Tasch’s hypothesis, author of Slow Money, is that money has become too fast (along with everything else), and as a result we’ve become completely disconnected from it. He’s right; and what greater evidence of our lack of vested relationship with money than the financial crisis. Fast money is made at the expense of society and the planet. When A LOT of money is made some of it is given to philanthropy to clean up the mess the fast spending created. There is no social capital in that way of making money.
Woody’s observation is that we’ve been too focused on “markets” and not “places”, when once upon a time we used to trade in marketplaces. He challenges the logic of 20% return on VC investment in a venture as a success, when we are subtracting such significant amounts of capital from the local economy. He asks “What if 50% of assets were invested within 50 miles of the marketplace?”. What if smaller returns became the norm in exchange for preservation and restoration of other forms of capital such as ecosystems, soil and communities? What if the connection between capital wealth and its provenance were once again made?
Restorative:
Does “restorative” resound with you at all lately? Are we in a moment of restoration? Possibly the oratory and policy development exuding from the White House of late might suggest so. The thing about NOLA is that it’s been ‘restoring’ itself since 2005 post Katrina. This is what was so fascinating about the conference: at times it was hard to tell if we were learning from the speakers on the day or the stories, evidence and people in the city who have ‘restored’ and transformed it. NOLA has become a leader for educational innovation because it was broken and exposed as broken when the city crashed under the pressure of nature’s force. John Alford of NOLA 180, KIPP charter school, is leading educational restoration. 107 out of 128 schools in New Orleans were failing; it’s the young and mission-driven generation who are moving into these schools and treating pupils like stakeholders in their school.
Woody describes an emerging Restorative Economics – because “we are past the point of sustainability”. And he’s right, we are. This planet, our economies and many of our social systems are broken. Restorative Economics, or “Nurture Capital”, is a new wealth creation from restoration – like the KIPP schools.
Brian Bordainick, age 23, spoke about his ambitious project to raise $1.85M to build a community football field and track on the campus of Carver High School – a recovery school. With no experience building ventures, raising finance or working in sport, Brian entered the Restorative Economy to create a job for himself with a mission. He is a story that the citizens of America should follow and the “Fame Game” story of our time.
What if instead of feeling bad about the mess in this country we took pride in restoring it?
Humanistic:
It goes without saying that social innovation is humanistic; it’s emerged from (the growing) tribes who are born with altruistic values or come to these values through a significant shift that happens in their lives. Katrina kicked New Orleans hard, but what’s kicked back is a generation of idealistic change agents and a city that could actually become the beacon of our times. (The rest of the country and world is feeling a different sort of kick right now). Dan Pink describes these emerging tribes and their work as the dawning of the Conceptual Age.
Alldaybuffet exemplify this tribe. Michael Karnjanaprakorn presented their new business model and social venture at the conference. The idea: an incubator that will invest in talent and passion to make something happen (human passion) versus an idea measured on how fast it will make money. Theirs is a fund that will invest in people to create good ideas that create social capital, instead of judging the numbers and short-term return of a business model. That is a new paradigm right? Have you heard of investors funding people and their values? Believe it, as it’s happening. They are gaining significant traction.
Team Alldaybuffet ARE the generation of the Conceptual Age. They’re young, smart, loaded with values and rejecting fast money jobs. This breed have built massive networks of support and interest, and with it are incubating social ventures. Thus far Alldaybuffet has been built on a platform of values, and a network of disciples and supporters.
Beacon:
This is a provocation rather than a discussion that actually came out of the Feast conference. The kickback from Katrina has resulted in a city that is fast becoming a ‘beacon’ of excellence in reforming charter education and developing green buildings. It is a city shaping the definition of Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship. And it is a magnet for “smart, idealistic change agents” in Vitrano’s words.
What if the lessons and innovation, and talent, were exported to other parts of the country and in exchange seed investment and talent invested social capital back into the city? I’ve been dreaming about brand NOLA in the 21st century, which then made me think about others parts of the country where ground-up innovation is driving greater prosperity. What if the country was divided into centers or “beacons” of excellence, each one building on the unique cultural, social, environmental and economic attributes of its place (the “marketplace”). But instead of siloe’d entities, the beacons actually exist to drive leadership and innovation in other parts of the county? Centers would cross-pollinate and exchange social capital with other centers.
It’s just a thought. Whatever way, I would urge business leaders, entrepreneurs, citizensof this country and the rest of the world to spend some time connecting with the innovators, like Robbie Vitrano, in New Orleans.
- Contributed by Tamara Giltsoff, Sustainability Strategist
Sunday, January 18, 2009 6:03 AM CST
Hope, change top wish list for new year
By DONNA WOOD
In the spirit of hope and change, I hereby submit my wish list for this new year.
I had hoped that President-elect Barack Obama would appoint Bill Richardson as special ambassador to terrorists, thugs and petty dictators, but alas, he tapped him for commerce secretary, shortly before the feds began investigating CDR Financial Products Inc., a California company that contributed mightily to Richardson's war chest and was awarded nice New Mexico contracts, not that there's any connection. Now we won't have Richardson to kick around anymore.
It looks like we will, however, have Blago to kick around. If Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich did even a few of the things he's accused of, I hope they throw the book at him. We must never return to the bad old days when congressional seats really were bought and sold, usually by big businesses.
I hope that New Orleans gets some serious attention this year, preferably in the form of housing and infrastructure reconstruction assistance, as well as levees that will withstand something more than a Category 3 hurricane. I mean, why does it make sense to remedy Katrina's devastations with the same levees that couldn't stand up to Katrina in the first place?
Perhaps he's suffered enough, but I don't think so --- therefore, I hope that Dick Cheney is indicted on massive criminal charges. I don't care which of his many alleged endeavors they nail him for, just so they nail him. Perhaps they could send him to Gitmo and waterboard him until he confesses everything. Let's send Dubya too; he's earned it. Oh, wait --- torture doesn't work!
I hope that President Obama and the Congress will restore the Constitution to its former pre-Bush glory. For starters, we must take the so-called Patriot Act apart, piece by piece, and then reassemble it so that homeland security practices are consistent with the ideals and objectives of this great nation. No more warrantless wiretapping; no more ordering Google to turn over all its records; no more secretive recording of citizens' library usage; no more prisoners held without access to due process and ordinary legal and human rights.
I hope that we do not ramp up military forces in Afghanistan. Let's fully fund Greg Mortensen's school-building efforts instead. Education can work so much better than violence.
I'm not alone in hoping that our jobs are safe and many more of them are created (like in the Clinton years), and that our 401(k)s march solidly back into the black. I hope, though, that the economy's turnaround does not depend on environmental disasters like coal-burning power plants or on relaxation of safety regulations. For more on how a sustainable turnaround might happen, check out the ideas and practices of Woody [Tasch], venture capitalist and proponent of "slow money."
Read the whole article here.
Between the Lines
What's up for Vermont book lovers
Published: December 21, 2008
Not so fast
What's next: Slow sleep? Slow air? The movement that started with food and progressed to medicine now gives us slow money.
White River Junction-based publisher Chelsea Green recently came out with "Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered," by entrepreneur and venture capitalist Woody Tasch.
He sketches a vision for a financial system that serves people and places as much at it serves markets and industries.
In exploring that vision, he visits the farm fields of Vermont and the board rooms of start-up companies (let's hope he wiped his feet first).
Ultimately he offers a new strategy for investing in local food systems that would make soil health part of the calculation of return on investment.
Read the whole article here.
Slow and steady wins the race
The need for speedy profits has brought the world’s financial system to its knees. Financial high-flier Woody Tasch believes his Slow Money movement, which invests in sustainable agriculture, can put the economy back on its feet.
Carleen Hawn | November 2008 issue
Ode Magazine
What if you were told that one solution to crises such as global warming and the worldwide financial meltdown could be unearthed in the simple act of growing your own food? Nothing drastic; nothing revolutionary. Just a window box for a tomato plant in your kitchen.
“It’s remarkable, but people who grow their own food, who reconnect with the soil, can immediately appreciate the implications of an economy that doesn’t respect the power of ecology,” says Woody Tasch, somewhat quixotically. But Tasch is no quack. He’s chairman of the Investors’ Circle, a national group focused on funding socially responsible companies. Since 1992, Investors’ Circle has placed $130 million into 200 such businesses and venture funds. Today, sitting in the bar of a San Francisco hotel, Tasch orders a local Syrah and a fresh batch of the bar’s potato chips. “I like them because they make them here,” he explains.
“Reconnecting with the soil” may sound like a bohemian throwback. But despite the progress the environmental and sustainability movements have enjoyed in recent years, Tasch believes one aspect of social responsibility has been left out that can no longer be neglected: a more personal connection to our food. Already imposing for his height (6’2’’, some 1.9 meters), Tasch gets more and more excited as he talks. He leans into the table and gesticulates as he tosses names about—Thomas Malthus, Google, Wal-Mart, American farmer and man of letters Gene Logsdon. But it all comes down to Earth and back to sustainable agriculture.
For years, Tasch, 57, has promoted a philosophy of socially responsible investment, prioritizing the social good over the urge to make a quick buck under an ethos known as “patient capital.” Today, Tasch believes, if we have any hope of curing society’s greatest ills—much less fixing the reliance on rapid growth and rising debt that created the current crisis in the global financial markets—being “patient” with our capital is no longer enough. We need to be slow. To explain what he means, this month Tasch unveils his latest investment treatise in the form of a book entitled Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered (Chelsea Green Publishing). Slow Money, Tasch writes, is “a new vision for investing that looks above the top line and below the bottom line [by] put[ting] soil fertility back into the calculus of investing.”
If Tasch’s connection between soil fertility and investing has you scratching your head, don’t worry—he intends it to sound radical. But recall that soil fertility is one of the most valuable tools we have to fight global warming, since it’s the soil and its carbon-absorbing plants on which we depend to sequester damaging carbon from the atmosphere. But being a money manager by training, Tasch isn’t entirely impractical. He doesn’t think raising your own tomatoes can solve world famine or the chaos wrenching the financial markets.
Tasch does firmly believe, however, that the simple discipline of greening our thumbs for the purpose of nourishing ourselves, of reconnecting with the planet through its soil, is an important step toward “connecting the whole person with the sustainability problem.” Do this, he argues, and we might finally change the cultural, industrial and economic systems that accelerate things like climate change or the mortgage-related debt crisis. So Tasch’s Slow Money movement is more than just a derivative of his “patient capital” social-investing agenda. It is, he says, an attempt to make a “step change” in socially responsible investing by focusing on sustainable agriculture. “Sustainable agriculture is the forgotten sustainable niche market,” Tasch laments. He quotes American poet Gary Snyder: “Food is the field in which we daily explore our ‘harming’ of the world.” If we’re to be sustainable, Tasch reasons, we must understand where our food comes from, how it’s grown and, above all, how it’s financed.
In addition to the book, Tasch has established a non-governmental organization also called Slow Money to promote his ideas through outreach seminars and marketing. Tasch’s most ambitious goal for the Slow Money movement is to raise the first venture fund dedicated to investing in local, sustainable agriculture businesses. Tasch will manage the fund like any other, but use its capital to finance only “small food enterprises” (SFEs)—companies that generate $100,000 to $1 million in annual revenues, and meet the criteria of supporting “appropriate-scale organic farming and local food communities.” Tasch plans to begin seeking investors for the fund in early 2009, and hopes to raise between $50 million and $100 million. As some of Wall Street’s most storied institutions implode—in large part due to complex schemes for making vast profits quickly—there may be no more urgent time to advance the investing mantra “Grow Slow.”
Unfortunately, the lessons of the biggest market failure since the Great Depression are hardly original. “None of this is new,” says Peter Kinder, president of the Boston-based financial services firm KLD Research & Analytics and a pioneer of socially responsible investing. “This is the second time in 20 years that this has happened ... when we’ve had a huge drop in the market as a result of these types of [abstract financial instruments],” Kinder adds, referring to the real estate market collapse of 1987. “I would hope that people in my industry have realized that investing in ‘paper,’ or securities that are not tied directly to something tangible, leads to this type of madness. Investing in real enterprises in real communities is the only type of investment strategy that makes sense.” Tasch’s Slow Money could be the connection back to Main Street that Wall Street needs right now, Kinder believes. “If you are investing in a store that is selling local produce and locally made goods you are building your community. You are building your local enterprise, and it is tangible.”
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