Financing Our Foodshed (4 page)

I was in Orlando a few months back to help a young friend get settled into a new apartment. We made a stop at a grocery store, and I headed to the produce section. I was psyched about getting some Florida oranges and grapefruits to take back with me to North Carolina. I found two kinds of oranges: one stack was from South Africa and the other from California (and the tomatoes were from Peru). But this store was in Florida! I’m guessing they shipped all the local oranges to New York.

This is madness. The entire distribution system — the entire food system — needs our attention. A foodshed can be defined as the square acreage of local soil it takes to provide enough food for a community’s basic, healthy diet. As our watersheds are our source of water, our foodshed is our source of food. We need to look at the system and ask how what is grown in one foodshed can at least feed the people who live there before the excess leaves town. We may reach outside for coffee or olive oil, but protecting natural resources within 50 miles (or a few hundred) so enough food can be grown to feed a local population creates self-reliance, and self-reliance brings with it countless social benefits. So how do we support our local foodshed so it can be a more efficient and sustainable source of our food?

One thing we need to do is get back on track — literally. When we stopped riding passenger trains a few decades ago, we pulled up the tracks in most communities all across the US. We switched to cars, expecting never to need to those trains again (sitting in commuter traffic for a few hours makes one regret
that
hasty decision!). When they disappeared, they took with them a valuable, regional distribution mechanism to move, market, and sell food closer to where it comes from.

We must rebuild, repair, and restart efficient local food distribution systems. Getting our food from farm to kitchen requires a myriad of businesses and lots of great job opportunities. Local
economic development folks should be all over this idea! We sure are at Slow Money.

Promoting local, sustainable food systems just makes sense. It means having fresh, good quality food easily available, independent of global markets. It means not worrying about what strain of
E. coli
or
Salmonella
might risk your family’s health. And it means buying high-quality food from people you know and trust, at markets where you can visit with people and enjoy the outing. But, perhaps as importantly, freshly picked food bought at a local farmers market or food co-op tastes so much better!

If we want resilient, vibrant and healthy local food economies, action is needed. The availability of locally grown food depends on solving the financing challenge not only for local, sustainable farmers, but also for the businesses that support them — the restaurants serving their food, the bakers using local grains, the millers grinding those local grains, the local co-op grocery stores, the farmers markets — all the various enterprises needed to fill in the gaps from farm to kitchen, from soil to saliva. Slow Money takes on that financing challenge.

In the last 50 years, we’ve become dependent on highly processed foods that comes in boxes, bottles, cans, and plastic containers, most of it covered in multi-layers of packaging. These super-packaged foods are delivered to big corporate-owned chain grocery and convenience stores, ready for us to buy, take home, heat, and eat. Globalization brought us vast numbers of choices — and we try them all. Marketing campaigns, jingles, slogans, coupons, and clever packaging entice us to buy, buy, buy — and remind us not to “eat just one.”

Comply, we do. The result: an obesity epidemic; a new generation that has never seen anything being “made from scratch”; and a soon-to-be complete disconnect between what we put into our mouths and the land where it is grown and the people who grow it for us.

Food labels have long lists of “ingredients” we can barely pronounce
and too often can’t identify. We see the claims on the packaging and in the ads, but can we trust them to be accurate? “All natural” “organic” “whole-grain” “local”
—
all
these words have now been used and abused by companies to sell products that are none of those things. One new business in my area calls itself “Local Yogurt,” yet uses virtually no ingredients that come from farms in our foodshed. I asked them why they chose that name. Their answer? “Local” refers to the fact that their business is in your town, regardless of where the food is grown.

I think we can do better than that.

There are now some 30,000 items on offer in our supermarkets. In 2000, about half of those were produced by ten multinational food and beverage companies. So what about all that choice? It’s a mirage. It’s branding and marketing trickery designed to get the most profit out of each and every item. These are big, publicly traded companies; to do less would violate the companies’ primary obligation to maximize profits for their shareholders.

Today, the numbers are even worse. The vast majority of food in stores and restaurants comes from only a handful of corporations. How do they make their decisions about what we will eat? Do they base them on our health, our well-being, our soils, our kids, our future on this planet? What are their priorities?

Their priority is to
sell.
Their job is to manipulate us into believing that their products will make us happier and more comfortable, so we’ll spend our dollars
—
and then spend some more. The more the better. Consumer spending and debt are what keep them so highly profitable.

Agricultural economist Larry Swain, who helped start micro-dairies throughout the Midwest, says, “The huge margins in the food biz aren’t in growing crops, they’re in marketing.” That’s contrary to many of his colleagues who promote the “get big or get out” theory of modern farming.

But the tides have begun to change. Slow
Food
was an excellent catalyst. Thank you, Carlo Petrini. Bringing back more locally grown food has become a movement. Local farmers markets, CSAs, urban gardens, and even many new farms are on the rise.

Inspired by Slow Food, and recognizing the need to address the financing dilemma, enter stage right (or Left, more likely) — Slow
Money.

Slow Money Comes to Town Within hours of hearing Woody Tasch make his pitch in North Carolina, an inspired trio began making loans. They made history in the Slow Money movement and launched a local initiative that would reverberate throughout North Carolina and beyond.

2

On May 20, 2010, Woody Tasch came to our small town in the Piedmont of North Carolina to talk about Slow Money and to peddle the idea that we need to invest in our soils. He was on a three-year walkabout, promoting his book,
Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money,
and presenting this Slow Money one percent challenge: If one million Americans invested just one percent of their assets in the local food economy within the next decade, the impact would be monumental. Like the food system as a whole, “the financial model is broken at a fundamental level,” he told us. “Food is the entry point to fix the whole economy. We need a revolution in how we think about our money, and how we feel about it. We need to connect money to the earth.”

I was on the short list of people invited to hear him speak and spend the afternoon and evening with him. His passion and his command of his topic made him an engaging speaker. After sizing us up, he decided to skip his Power Point presentation. Instead, he delivered a fast, rambling verbal download of his vision. He laid out a delightful buffet of possibilities for us to attempt to digest.

The room was a Who’s Who of North Carolina’s leaders in the sustainable agriculture movement. There were farmers, developers,
chefs, and teachers. I could have spent the afternoon talking to any one of them.

I loved being part of the expansion of Woody’s ideas. The sense that we were part of something that could reshape our entire food economy, and certainly our local community, was palpable. At times, the room was electric.

Woody fed us some numbers: one million seconds is 12 days. One trillion seconds is 32,000 years. Trillions of dollars is more than we can really comprehend. My favorite data bit is that more money changes hands in the stock market on Wall Street each day than exists in the entire world. And of course, every time it changes hands, someone, somewhere extracts a fee.

Woody takes prominent author, professor, and outspoken environmentalist David Orr’s concept about water and applies it to money. Orr says that when the velocity of water is too high, it becomes violent. Tasch sees a parallel. When money moves too fast, he argues, it does the same thing. We need to slow our money down and make sure it is doing good, not harm.

Venture capitalists may have motives that do not square with thoughtful community development. Slow Money, Woody explained, tries to combine philanthropy, the success of small farming, and the strengthening of healthy local food systems.

He predicted that in the future industrial farming would have to change, either because of the overt disruption of the supply chain from China, or because of soil depletion, or both. His advice:
fund farming that builds soil fertility.

Woody talked about the need to invent new ways to invest in our SFEs (sustainable food enterprises) and the need to figure out legal structures to collect and distribute money to these businesses.

After Woody spoke, a lively discussion followed, as we chewed on how these concepts might be implemented in our communities and in our lives.

A few weeks before, I had tracked down Woody’s book,
Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money.
I bought two copies — one to write
in and turn down the page corners (a habit from my student days), and a second, clean copy to share with others. Before I walked into that meeting at the community college to hear Woody speak, I had read his book from cover to cover. It’s an unusual book. Woody is a brilliant thinker and a poet. His book reads like a series of conversations and is clearly meant to inspire the reader to
take action
to help strengthen local sustainable foodsheds. While he claimed (at least during his remarks) not to know exactly how to execute all the concepts he was putting forth, the book already had me convinced that I wanted to be a part of the effort.

A few groups around the country were independently trying to put his ideas into practice. Each group was responding uniquely to his call, holding meetings and occasionally making investments in food-related projects.

Presentations by food entrepreneurs made at the 2010 Slow Money National Gathering resulted in investments of about 4 million dollars. About 9 million dollars over the previous several years had been invested in local food enterprises as a result of connections made between investors and entrepreneurs at Slow Money local, regional, or national gatherings. But, as Woody said, 9 million was just a rounding error to Goldman Sachs or budget dust to the USDA. He also said
—
or at least it’s what we
heard
— that no one to-date had made a straight-out, direct, peer-to-peer Slow Money loan.

So, why, I thought, couldn’t we do that, right here in Chatham County? I had made loans in the past to a couple of small businesses to help them get started, and that had worked out just fine.

I spent several years as an organizational development consultant, and I often said to groups I worked with, “Yes, you need a five-year plan, but if you wait until you finish writing that plan to begin your work, you will end up too discouraged and bored to get the job done. You need to do something now. Pick a winnable victory and just start. Meanwhile, you can get the long-range plan written, adding in what you learn in these early attempts. You may make mistakes, but you have the interest, passion, and energy today in this
room to get started, so use it. Begin today, and make something happen right now.” That’s exactly how I felt about getting started with Slow Money. I was hooked, and I wanted to get started moving money
right away.
There was bound to be enough interest in that room to get Slow Money moving
now
in our area.

After Woody spoke, I went out to the hallway with my friends Jordan Puryear and Lyle Estill. Together, we decided to take on the challenge. Our conversation went something like this: “Did he say no one has made a Slow Money loan yet?” I asked. “I think he did.” Lyle replied. “And why not?” he continued, “I’ve made plenty of loans. It’s simple. I use a Promissory Note, and loan them the money.” Jordan agreed and clinched the deal, saying simply, “We should do this.”