Investing in Local Food and Organic Farms
Could there ever be an alternative stock exchange dedicated to slow, small, and local? Could a million American families get their food from CSAs? What if you had to invest 50 percent of your assets within 50 miles of where you live? Such questions—at the heart of slow money—represent the first steps on our path to a new economy.
Indispensable reading, to be placed on the same shelf as Wendell Berry and E.F. Schumacher.
This book is going to unleash a major movement in this country.
This is the path toward a financial system that serves people and place as much as it serves industry sectors and markets. To discover this path and to begin to walk down it: That is the mission of Slow Money.
Is is a movement or is it an investment strategy? Yes.
We have to find a new form of economy, an economy that knows how to govern its limits, an economy that respects nature and acts at the service of man, a situation where political and humanistic choices govern the economy and not the other way around. We have to discover new economic relationships that move at a more natural pace. This is the potential of slow money.
Woody Tasch has one of those fast minds that always seem to ask the right slow questions. He is on to something: a new vision of deploying capital in a way that might offer a true alternative to faster and faster, bigger and bigger, more and more global. I’ve been saying for years that we need to feed the soil, not the plant—slow money is about feeding the soil of the economy.
Woody Tasch is the founder and chairman of the Slow Money Institute. Since 2010, via local Slow Money networks in dozens of communities in the U.S. and a few in Canada, France and Australia, over $66 million has gone to 697 small, local and organic food enterprises. Tasch is former chairman of Investors’ Circle, a nonprofit angel network that has facilitated more than $200 million of investments in over 300 early-stage, sustainability-promoting companies. Utne Reader named him “One Of 25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.”