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Bringing My Money Closer To Home

March 31, 2018

Bringing My Money Closer To Home

Walden Pond

Henry David Thoreau lived 200 years ago, but his influence continues, inspiring the likes of Tolstoy, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., E.F. Schumacher, Wendell Berry, and Bill McKibben, to name an illustrious few.

Thoreau’s Walden set the bar of thinking and doing so poetically high and yet so pragmatically down to earth that it just may be that no one will ever again get over it or under it quite as eloquently and profoundly:

“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.”

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”

“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.”

We are still figuring out, today, the relationship between means and ends, between economy and culture. The dissonance between how we make money and whether it is possible to give back enough to redress the ills inherent in the way we made that money is, still, the crux of the matter.

The modern economy has created 2,043 billionaires with a combined net worth of almost $8 trillion (up 18% in 2016); the wealthiest 1% of the world’s population owns more than everyone else combined; almost three billion people around the world have come to own smart phones in a little more than a decade; 86,000 private foundations in the U.S. have over $700 billion in assets; and yet this very same momentum of wealth creation and consumerism prevents us from responding adequately to the most fundamental crises of our time.

Thoreau’s wildly prescient words in Civil Disobedience still ring true for anyone concerned about how, despite best intentions, our money finds its way to distant activities in which we do not believe:

I do not care to trace the course of my dollar, if I could, till it buys a man or a musket to shoot one with—the dollar is innocent—but I am concerned to trace the effects of my allegiance […]

I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, cooperate with, and do the bidding of, those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless […]

It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined.

Where Thoreau refers to law, I hear markets. (Reread the preceding paragraph making that substitution.)

So, I believe that the most conscientious thing I can do is bring some of my money closer to home, shortening the distance between me and that which my money supports, lessening my complicity in distant ills and increasing my connection to things that I can support directly.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Agricultural Innovation with John-Paul Maxfield

March 22, 2018

Agricultural Innovation with John-Paul Maxfield

John-Paul founded Waste Farmers with $9,000 and a belief that idealism and capitalism can coexist. Waste Farmers has evolved into an innovator respected by leaders in the global community for developing simple solutions to the complex problems of modern agriculture and food security.
Mar 20, 2018

John-Paul Maxfield

John-Paul Maxfield | Photo by Joshua Lawton

Woody Tasch: What made you go into the soil business?

John-Paul Maxfield: I started with the desire to push toward a more sustainable food system. Soil is the place to start. We saw an opportunity to innovate around products and technology that reconnect people to soil. Long term, we want to be an agricultural innovation company.

Soil seems like a funny place to start with innovation . . . as basic as it can be.

Soil is incredibly complex. Just as with the human microbiome project, there is so much we have yet to discover. If we want to fix climate change, the answer is literally right beneath our feet. Da Vinci had it right when he said we understand the movements of the heavens better than we understand what is happening underfoot. We understand the soil at an intuitive level but not at a practical level.

What do you mean by the “intuitive level”?

It’s the place where all life comes from and to which it returns. We all pretty much know this. It’s not an accident that kids gravitate toward playing in the dirt.

What do you mean by the “practical level”?

We need greater understanding of how to work with soil to achieve broader goals of feeding people without destroying humanity’s ability to continue living on the planet.

So, what was the first thing you did as an entrepreneur?

I was working in private equity, but I was a square peg in a round hole. I’d always admired my grandfather. We’d drive along I-25 to go visit my grandparents in Wyoming, looking at corn fields as we went. My great-grandfather was the largest sheep producer in the country, pre-WWI. He lost everything in the Great Depression. My grandfather had feedlots and corn farms and had one of the largest livestock-sale barns in the country. It was not a mom-and-pop operation. It was vertically integrated. He was a tough old cowboy. My father and brothers sold the operation to their employees back in the ’90s. Torrington Livestock is based in Torrington, Wyoming. But I hope that, if he were here now, he’d recognize the need to redesign the food system.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

The Future of Urban Farming

November 16, 2017

From left, Nataka Crayton-Walker, Greg Bodine, and Bobby Walker at a City Growers microfarm in Dorchester. | Photo by Leise Jones/City Growers

From left, Nataka Crayton-Walker, Greg Bodine, and Bobby Walker at a City Growers microfarm in Dorchester. | Photo by Leise Jones/City Growers

The Future of Urban Farming

Some sights in the neighborhood were so common that I had stopped noticing them; but then one day they came into view. While driving down Harold Street on the way to my cousin’s house, I noticed a vacant lot on my left and then, just a block down, I saw two large vacant lots on my right. At the end of Harold Street—right before Howland Street—stood a huge half-acre vacant lot. This area had been labeled the “H-block.” It was a tough neighborhood in Boston, Massachusetts, known for the significant number of shootings that occurred—which primarily were gang related. It also was a neighborhood with beautiful housing stock, long-term residents, and strong community leadership. Later that week, intrigued at the amount of vacant space, I walked the streets and tallied approximately 1.5 acres of land sitting vacant among the homes and apartment buildings.

Not long after that day, in the commissary kitchen of my company—City Fresh—the staff was preparing meals for one of the summer camps in session. The team members were cutting heads of lettuce that had been shipped in from across the country, and a question occurred to me: Why couldn’t we be growing this lettuce closer to home?

In answer to that question, I—along with a small group of community residents—founded City Growers. It was the spring of 2007. We set out to convert vacant lots—primarily located in the Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan neighborhoods—into intensive micro farms: to put our community idle hands to work and supply fresh, local, organic produce to the growing and insatiable market for local and sustainably grown food.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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A Conversation With Dr. Daphne Miller

September 28, 2017

Daphne Miller, MD

A Conversation With Dr. Daphne Miller

Daphne Miller: These days I’m focused on the true cost of food. We have the cheapest food in the world. Food purchases make up something like 8% of our GDP. But when you start to factor in all the chronic diseases and environmental impacts—the health footprint of food—then all of a sudden we have the most expensive food in the world. Not 8% but 25% or higher. How is it we have something that is so cheap but so expensive?

Woody Tasch: How do we tackle this?

It’s clear to me that we need to start with the soil. It’s a vertical process. The businesses that are putting food on our table must have an interest in the soil. Their financial return has to be linked back, somehow, to the substrate of the soil. Any consumer goods company that isn’t thinking about the ecosystem in which the food is produced isn’t going to produce healthier food. We can slightly unprocess this or that, but unless we start thinking about the soil, we’re not going to get the shift we need. Farm policy is one shift we need, but the other is to shift the way the food companies do their business. And we need to change our understanding of health.

How does this affect your medical practice?

People are getting so sick because they aren’t connected to a healthy food system. Medicine is putting out fires, it gets to people way too late. We need to work upstream, outside the medical model.

When you say this, what’s the response of your colleagues in the medical community?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Investing in Soil Health, One Piece of Land at a Time

April 18, 2016

Jim Baird in a field of organic vetch in the Columbia River Basin

Jim Baird in a field of organic vetch in the Columbia River Basin

Investing in Soil Health, One Piece of Land at a Time

Three years ago, in collaboration with a group of farmers and investors, my spouse and I formed an LLC called Living Lands. Together we wrote our purpose and articles of incorporation to place the highest priority on soil health. Under the astute guidance and leadership of Jim Baird, a longtime farmer in eastern Washington and a founding member of Slow Money, we purchased a 100-acre piece of farmland in the Columbia River Basin. Jim manages the land in conjunction with his other activities, including Cloudview EcoFarms, an educational and experimental farm project with operations in Royal City and Ephrata.

Our conversations have been wide-ranging and spirited. We have talked about soil and carbon and the best way to figure out whether we are improving the health of the soil. We are all concerned about water, and it has been enlightening to hear from Jim and Sam (another investor and also a farmer based near Ellensburg) about the history of our state’s water districts, irrigation programs, and farmer involvement. We are currently in the process of transitioning the land we purchased to certified-organic status, an important element in our pursuit of soil health, although by no means the “silver bullet.” Last year we leased the farmland to a young couple Jim has been mentoring. By leasing our land and raising commercial crops (currently alfalfa), they are able to make a living as farmers while continuing their explorations of farming practices.

We are not going to “scale” Living Lands. We may form Living Lands II and buy another piece of farmland. When we do, we’ll need to pay as much attention to it as we have to LLI.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Slow Money and the State of Soil

February 18, 2016

Slow Money and the State of Soil 

“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 several Colorado food enterprises (more details here- https://slowmoney.org/beetcoin). 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 politicians, CEOs, technologists, economists, regulators, certifiers, fiduciaries, and pundits—are choosing a constructive, hopeful course of action. We are affirming our sense that in the world of faster and faster, bigger and bigger, more and more global, we need not only new technologies and new policies, but also 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.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why Slower Money Is the Key to a Real Economic Recovery

November 13, 2015

Why Slower Money Is the Key to a Real Economic Recovery 

An exciting crop of organizations are financing businesses in a way that creates real wealth. Here are a few ways to scale them up so that they can truly challenge Wall Street.
Patient finance illustration by Jennifer Luxton.

There’s a financial fault line that runs through the heart of our economy. Wall Street’s most recent rumblings—which saw the major indices take a dive in response to weak growth in China—are a stark reminder of the danger. If the stocks go tumbling in, so do our businesses, jobs, paychecks, and pensions. The tremors may have subsided for the moment, but if we’re to give the late financial seismologist Charles Kindleberger any credit, the next big one could be right around the corner.

What we really need is a comprehensive rebuild beyond the quake zone.

According to Kindleberger’s classic book Manias, Panics and Crashes, the market sees notable financial quakes or “panics” roughly every seven years or so. The frequency has increased recently, with significant panics occurring in 1989 (Savings and Loan crisis), 1992 (Britain’s Black Wednesday), 1997 (East Asian crisis), 1999 (Tech Bubble), and of course 2007-08. Whether the recent seven-year twitch turns out to be just a minor temblor or a foreshock to something much worse remains to be seen.

But one thing is for certain: If we don’t find a way to shift our increasingly financialized economy to stable ground, the next big crash is inevitable.

The Wall Street formula for disaster is simple: ever-greater money chasing ever-bigger bets with ever -faster payoffs on ever-riskier financial products  equals crashes of seismic proportions. Greater, bigger, faster, riskier. It’s like a twisted Daft Punk song.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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