Investing in Local Food and Organic Farms
Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money
Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered
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.
Gregory Whitehead
Treasurer, The Whitehead Foundation
This book is going to unleash a major movement in this country.
Steve Costa
Point Reyes Books
A meta-economic vision
A new way of seeing what is going on in the soil of the economy
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.
Carlo Petrini
Founder, Slow Food
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.
Eliot Coleman
Farmer and author
About the author
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.”