From Sustainable Agriculture to a Sustainable America
by Cliff Feigenbaum, founder of GreenMoney
Welcome to the Slow Money issue of GreenMoney. Before we get started I want to thank Patrick Davis who served as Guest Editor for GreenMoney’s February edition on “Millennials, Money and Meaning.” Don’t miss this insightful issue, completely written by Millennials.
Now, on to this March 2016 issue on Slow Money where we bring our discussion back down to the earth, grounded in the soil where we grow our food and sustain our planet and its many living systems. As we spend our money on a myriad of food products, our dollars can help redirect farming towards a more sustainable and healthier world. You’ll read about how people are investing in sustainable agriculture to achieve healthy returns. This issue will help you understand why stewardship of our land and water using sustainable agriculture should not only be part of your shopping and diet, but also a healthy portion of your financial portfolio.
Slow Money and the State of the Soil
by Woody Tasch, founder and chairman of the Slow Money Institute
“Beetniks Against Global Warming” There’s a placard you never saw in Paris. Because to a Beetnik – someone who has participated in a Slow Money Beetcoin campaign or anyone whose occasionally countercultural tendencies are tempered by an appreciation of local entrepreneurs and farmers – investing in a small food enterprise near where we live is as important as traveling thousands of miles to negotiate international targets on CO2 in the atmosphere. Which is not to compare the two. But it is to say that even while faced with global social and environmental challenges of imponderable complexity, we can affirm the significance of the slow, the small, and the local.
This is what those of the Slow Money persuasion did, once again, in 2015. More than $6 million has gone this year into 83 small food enterprises, bringing the total since 2010 to more than $46 million into 450 deals. The 2Forks Club (Carbondale, CO) made its first loan this year – a $23,500 zero-percent loan to Zephyros Farm of Paonia – and the Knives and Forks Investment Co-op (Vancouver, BC) introduced a new model to our family of investment clubs. Our first regional online Beetcoin campaign exceeded its target, raising more than $56,000 for three Colorado food enterprises. Slow Money Minnesota launched. Slow Money North Carolina hosted its first regional gathering. Slow Money Northeast Kansas held its first entrepreneur showcase.
We are building a movement of individuals who – not content to delegate our fate to new sensibilities and new behavior, without which the words sustainable and transparent and accountable and socially responsible and metrics and impact will mean little in the end. Our conversation about food, money, and the soil continues to deepen. While heads of state work towards international climate solutions, the earthworms among us keep busy in the soil of a restorative economy.
Moooo-ve Over Big Dairy: The True Story of a Goat Cooperative
by Taber Ward, co-founder & exec. director; and Madelynn Evensen, education coordinator
“I don’t know anything about goats…What do they eat? How do you milk them? Does the milk taste weird? How many babies do they have? Wait, they need to give birth EVERY YEAR to produce milk!? Where do you take them in the winter? Why don’t some of them have ears?”
We hear these questions every day at Mountain Flower Goat Dairy. Mountain Flower is a nonprofit, working, urban goat dairy and education center located near downtown Boulder, CO. For us, the answers to those questions are basic to our knowledge about goat care and the life cycles of mammals. But, as farms get bigger and further from population centers, the secrets of how agriculture, life and nature work are lost bit by bit, inch by inch, row by row.
Since Mountain Flower Goat Dairy opened its barn doors four years ago, we have been available to the public to foster a reconnection with dairy, agriculture and the Earth. What we have learned is that our community craves this lost knowledge and hands-in-the-earth experience with life. Our volunteer roster is full (with a waitlist), our raw-milk share is more in demand every day, our summer camps and tours are booked solid. We literally don’t have enough goats or goat products to go around. The logical next step is to expand. However, we started this downtown farm with a mission to provide humanely produced dairy products to the local community; it was never our intent to go big or industrialize. The challenge was to scale up, despite problems intrinsic to large-scale animal operations. How can we meet the demand of our consumers? How can we increase our revenue and capture economies of scale to pay living wages to our workers, charge reasonable prices to our customers and nurture the Earth and our animals? How can we make a living as farmers without industrializing our means and modes of production? The answers to these questions emerged unexpectedly in July 2015, when we met with Slow Money founder and Chairman Woody Tasch to learn about scale, investment, values and sustainable agriculture.
My Personal Journey from Conventional Finance to Slow Money
by Marco Vangelisti, founder of Essential Knowledge for Transition
It all started in the most innocent and promising way – a graduate student in math and economics at the University of California in Berkeley lands a job in the 80s with a think tank spearheading what would come to be called the quant wave in finance. We were applying mathematical models, statistical techniques and state-of-the-art computers to the field of investing, which at the time was the purview of fundamental analysts and stock pickers. Fast-forward 30 years, and that graduate student was now part of a team managing $20 billion in emerging markets equity in a very well respected investment management firm. It was a glamorous job. I had smart colleagues and influential clients around the world. We were also doing great – we were managing the best performing emerging markets equity fund with a 10 year track record and our clients loved us.
The only glitch was my curiosity about how our quantitatively constructed 300-name portfolio achieved such an amazing performance. You must know that I have always been a passionate and committed environmentalist. When I looked at some of the best performing stocks in the portfolio that year I found a palm oil company in Malaysia that had destroyed tens of thousands of acres of original rain forest in the Borneo to plant a monocrop of palm oil plants – eliminating massive swaths of orangutan habitat in the process. In fact, part of their stock performance was predicated on obtaining carbon credits for planting trees.
Ironically, most of our clients were foundations and endowments. In fact, some of the best-known environmental foundations had invested
in our fund and celebrated our strong performance. Paradoxically, I had donated to one of them for their work protecting the orangutan habitat. So, let’s recap. An environmentalist who donated to an environmental foundation for its work in preserving orangutan habitat finds himself managing that same foundation’s assets, and funding through one of the portfolio’s companies the very destruction of said habitat. That was when the cognitive dissonance between my personal values and my livelihood became too loud to ignore.