The Slow Money movement focuses on deploying capital, locally, to strengthen small food enterprises. Its goal is to improve the quality, dependability and sustainability of our food source, while financially nurturing communities and delivering an attractive return on investment to native investors.
Woody Tasch is the founder and chairman of Slow Money – in this week's podcast, he and Chris discuss the templates his organization is piloting across over 350 ventures in local food production, processing, distribution and marketing. $38 million in "slow money" has been deployed to-date, and that amount will hopefully accelerate as the movement's viral and self-organizing expansion gains steam.
The problem isn’t that the system doesn’t work. It's that it works too well for its own good.
We’ve created super cheap, super shelf stable food and in the process externalized all the costs of soil erosion, depleted aquifers, etc. They involve toxins in the environment, chemical interactions they’ve never even studied, all these different things that are kind horrible, carbon in the atmosphere. Some people don’t realize how much agriculture, especially large-scale investor, produces carbon in the atmosphere. So you have a couple hundred years of industrial projects doing that.
Now we’re starting to move back in another direction. If you suddenly start internalizing all the costs that have been externalized for 250 years you are going to face some pretty serious market hurdles. The market doesn’t know how to deal with all of this stuff. So that’s a very big historical thing.
Everybody can’t afford to eat food that has the full cost of food production in it. We all got hooked on this really cheap, subsidized, externalized cost food. Not everybody’s going to wake up one day and go: You know what? I’m willing to pay twice as much for this. I’m willing to pay twice as much for that. I’m going to go down the street and pay the farmer everything he or she needs to make a fuller day on their farm because I know it's the right thing to do. Very few people are going to be able to do that. But some people are.
And I would say we at Slow Money are part of that vanguard. We’re saying you know what? We’re willing to start internalizing all those costs because we’re kind of freaked out, if I can use a non-scientific term, about what things are happening over the next 25 to 50 years and we don’t want to wait till the market strikes. We want to push ahead.
For those interested, the next Slow Money annual gathering will take place in Louisville, KY, November 10-12, 2014. More information can be found here.
Click the play button below to listen to Chris' interview with Woody Tasch (46m:29s):
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