Last night I had the distinct pleasure of hearing Carlo Petrini speak at the Slow Money National Gathering at the beautiful Boulder Theater in Boulder, Colorado. Always charismatic, his remarks were engaging, electric, challenging, and inspiring.

His keynote address united Slow Food and Slow Money as important institutions charged with leading the efforts to reverse the effects of a broken “criminalized” food system. As we know, the focus of Slow Food is protecting and promoting food that is good, clean and fair; the focus of Slow Money is to bring money “back down to earth” by encouraging investment in food and farm entrepreneurs. The Slow Money network has had a hand in shifting over $24 million into over 190 small food enterprises over the past few years. Lucky Penny Farm and Creamery included.

Petrini spoke of the importance of a new way of doing politics at this historical moment where change really matters and we must show strength in this new economy. Citing the challenges of soil fertility, water scarcity, loss of biodiversity, climate change and landscape destruction, Petrini stated we need to understand the central role that food has as a vehicle for change.

He went on to say that food is the energy of our lives and for this reason our vision of food must be holistic; respect for nature, love of landscape, music, spirituality, knowledge of family and agricultural traditions, and knowledge of other cultures. “ We must respect food because it is the very essence of life- Food is not just economic and political, it sustains life, and to do this we must return money to the soil. As Americans you do this through reciprocity and the exchange of resources at farmers markets, CSA’s, and more… You have started a revolution with your money!”

Because of important organizations such as Slow Food and Slow Money the opportunity to join this revolution has never been so ripe. The local food scene throughout the world is being invigorated with an entrepreneurial spirit that needs to be supported, rewarded, and nutured. At Lucky Penny we are proud to be a part of this revolution. Come join us; make change.

Following taped remarks from Senator Sherrod Brown (a very active supporter of long overdue changes in food and farm policies), USDA Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan kicked-off the day with a quick summary of the impact of the Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food program that she has spearheaded since 2009.  She extolled the improved functionalities of KYF2 mapping tool and she announced that Ohio is the first State to participate in the USDA’s Cooperative Interstate Shipment Program.  A much-awaited step in the right direction to restore the viability of local processors, stymied by decades of consolidation and pro-big business regulation.

The first panel, Why Local? The potential of a Local Food Economy, featured Doug O’Brien (USDA Deputy Under Secretary for Rural Development), Casey Hoy (ecologist, professor at OSU, powerhouse of Local Food Systems), Brad Masi (well-known to our group and one of the sustainability heroes from Oberlin) and Jeff Eschmeyer (owner of Harvest Sun Farm in New Knoxville).  The latter two’s comments were particularly inspiring.  Brad further enlightened us on the many facets of the Oberlin Project and broke down to community scale some of the numbers discussed in the 25% local food shift study on Northeast Ohio.  With a population of 10,000, 400 Oberlin dot the 16 NEO counties.  If you divide the $1bn funding need estimated for said shift, all it takes financially is $2.5m per community or $250 per person …  On the other hand, Jeff delivered a riveting speech, filled with crisp farmer humor, climaxing with the description of himself and his father planting a single row of veggies during the same time it took their neighbors (father and son as well) to sow an entire 30-acre cornfield, powered by an intimidating, 300hp wing-spreading tractor.  As Jeff wisely noted, both practices encapsulate the values of family farming and knowledge transmission, but what about the subsidies (and taxes and regulation, I may add) on the other side of the fence?  What a well put “level planting field” manifesto!

Mr. O’Brian handled a quite confrontational first question from the audience (Where is the FDA?  Might it be that the Government is the problem, rather than the solution?) with a bittersweet remark: 5 years ago an event like this would not have been possible … Ok, let’s celebrate progress at every step, but how longer do we have to wait for structural changes?  Bryn Bird (another darling of our crowd) asked another sharp question.  We keep hearing jobs, jobs, jobs, but where is the labor force needed by her and many other farms to ramp up local food production?  What workforce development efforts and incentives are being put in place by the plethora of governmental and other agencies professing their support for healthier communities?

The rest of the Q&A hovered around access to capital and federal, commercial and community ways of securing it.  A perfect introduction for the following panel on Good Food Financing.  Bob Kramer gave us a snapshot of ECDI programs, and Jonathan S. (?), the founder of a soon-to-be-launched local crowdfunding platform, explained the main features of the still-to-be-implemented CROWDFUND Act.  Leslie Schaller pleaded once more for the transition from locavores to locavestors (amen), calling on Slow Money and its principles a couple of times (thank you Leslie – it’s always a pleasure to listen to and learn from you).  Gary Matteson (Vice President of Young, Beginning, Small Farmers Programs, Farm Credit System) painted a picture a tad too rosy about his institution’s support to small-scale agriculture; plenty to elaborate further on this, but it is unquestionable that the FCS has long realized that the local food revolution is happening (nonetheless) and is trying to catch up.   He also articulated three sound strategies to achieve scale for “retail” agriculture: (1) layering multiple enterprises and/or marketing channels within the same farm; (2) increasing the number of networked farms selling jointly or through a common distributor; (3) increasing the volumes handled by such networks.

The brief remarks of this panel’s moderator, David Wilhelm (influential power-broker in Ohio, the Mid-West and beyond) deserves a separate comment.  Opening a conversation on farm financing in the U.S. can be conducive to all sorts of intimations, and the choice of Mr. Wilhelm to riff on financial sustainability sounded a bit condescending and off-pitch.  The fact that the concept of sustainability is widely abused, mostly co-opted by corporate spin, is well-known, but there is very little value in reminding people that any business has to bring in at least enough money to keep itself above water (paying bills, rents, salaries, etc.).  Otherwise it goes out-of-business and is no more, and this holds true – it may be worth adding – across the for/not-for profit spectrum.  But there is more, even without reverting to farm subsidies, taxes and regulation.  In his earlier remarks, reflecting on the challenges of running a profitable small-scale diversified farm, and raise a family on it, Jeff posited that much may well depend on how we define profitable.  To afford sending kids to college may not be regarded as a fundamental human need but it is hardly an unreasonable expectation for anyone living in this country.  What seems utterly unreasonable is to let debt-bubble-fueled tuition fees, among others, drive unsustainable farming practices because otherwise growing veggies in the Corn Belt is not profitable or, so to speak, financially sustainable.

Oran Hesterman, special guest, enlivened our lunch by feeding us in on the most significant developments from The Fair Food Network and its teams of “solutionaries”, notably the groundbreaking EBT/SNAP incentive strategies and their sizable impact on farmers’ markets and growers’ bottom line.  The three afternoon panels showcased an impressive roster of local practitioners (advocates, entrepreneurs, policy-makers and managers) but as it is often the case with daylong events, momentum waned a bit.  Before ending where we started, two conversations are worthy reporting.

Randy Riley, Division Produce Sales Promoter at Kroger, got some heat and almost all the attention during the Q&A for his panel on institutional purchasing and the infrastructure challenge.  Although he fired a few cheap shots at the “evil” competitor, I could not detect any echo of the debate surrounding the Walmart/Let’s Move partnership in the context of the Healthy Food Financing Initiative and no one dared to spotlight the most outlandish comment of the day.  After telling that his company’s concern #1 is food safety, Mr. Riley felt somehow compelled to qualify the otherwise innocuous soundbite.  Kroger’s priority does not stem from the fear of multi-million suits and class-actions, but the simple fact that “we don’t want people to get sick!”.  Well, I guess we are left wondering how diabetes, obesity and many other ailments festering in our inflamed bodies fueled by highly processed, and unremittingly advertised, calories factor into Kroger’s priorities and Mr. Riley’s idea of sickness.  Another reason to pause on Jeff’s insightful comment on how we define the concepts and categories that inform our conduct in life.  In E.F. Schumacher words, “Our mind is not a blank, a tabula rasa.  When we begin to think we can do so only because our mind is already filled with all sorts of ideas with which to think … Each word is an idea … The way in which we experience and interpret the world obviously depend very much indeed on the kind of ideas that fill our minds.”

The last speaker on the policy panel was Katherine Ferguson, Agriculture Policy Advisor to Senator Brown.  She touched on various crucial issues surrounding the ongoing Farm Bill negotiations, particularly the crop insurance provisions.  Even if the Senate version prevailed in the end, however, all we would get is a “directive” to the USDA Risk Management Agency and incentives for private companies to come up with better insurance tools for specialty crops (fruit and vegetables).  Still dumbstruck by the GIPSA fiasco, I am inclined to see the latter as the most promising option, but I also have to admit that when you overlay current health care policy, agriculture safety nets and climate change scenarios it takes exceptional civic virtue, passion and faith to remain engaged and keep the good work going.  Yet, if it is true that we are the ones we have been waiting for (at least in Central Ohio, I think Simply Living is to be credited for popularizing the adage), we ought to do it, as directly instructed by Lenny Eliason, Athens County Commissioner: we must enable policy-makers to say yes (by growing and sharing our compelling story), ask them why (before any law is enacted) and keep rattling the chain.  Even the Dean of the College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Studies at OSU agreed in his closing remarks!

In short, raising less corn and more hell could not be a more timely motto.  We know we have little to lose and much to gain because our Wizards of Oz have long been naked.

We also learned about basic irrigation and water efficiency practices and how the harshly dry season risks wiping out the whole sweet corn production for the year.  But we did not let fatalism or pessimism sink in, as we sat at the flowered table to enjoy the delightful local menu arranged by Kitty Leatham (thank you Green Chef!).  Quite the contrary, as Chuck Dilbone brightened us up telling the success story of his district Farm to School program, mutually reinforcing Bird’s Haven Farm growth.

Alas, the reality of the worst drought in decades was lurking in the news.  Over the past few weeks, I had already a few conversations about skyrocketing corn prices, how this may affect local livestock and dairy businesses (not to mention the international markets).  But it’s only when I saw that The New Yorker (!) was running its first comment of the current edition on “The Big Heat” that I suddenly realized how bad it is going to be.  Elizabeth Kolbert titillates the reader ranging from corn sex complications, as originally brought to the larger public by Michael Pollan, to the climate change pantomimes of American politics.  I will try to stay ‘on’ the ground instead, especially after having listened to yesterday’s edition of Talk of the Nation (also covering the record heat).  In fact, the NPR agriculture correspondent from Kansas City did not miss the opportunity for the customary plug, pointing out how the situation might be even more severe than what we can tell from the fields.  Genetically modified crops, engineered or cross-bred for drought-resistance, are in fact preventing even larger crop losses …

Let me make a couple of steps back here.  2011 was a memorable harvest with record-high cash crop prices.  BigAg and many others made a killing and the excitement at the beginning of this season was palpable and disquieting even for an outsider like me.  Quoting from The New Yorker, “just a few months ago, the United States Department of Agriculture was projecting a record corn crop of 14.79 billion bushels … last week the USDA officially cut its yield forecast by 12% … also last week, the USDA declared more than a 1,000 counties in 26 states to be natural disaster areas.  This was by far the largest such designation the agency has ever made”.  Such scenario reminded me of an unintentionally prescient warning “penned” by two agricultural economists in late 2011.  Moreover, I thought of an investment risk disclosure I drafted around the same time: “Any one farm’s financial position can be significantly impacted by the weather. Human induced climate change and accelerating global warming are making weather patterns more unpredictable and weather manifestations more extreme. Insurance crop programs and policies have historically been and remain skewed against small scale, sustainable farmers, particularly those growing specialty crops, who may therefore suffer great losses and disruption without the safety nets provided to other kind of farming operations.”

Is this going to have any impact on the lingering negotiations on the Farm Bill?  Is this going to help prevent another morally (and economically) hazardous bail out? In the meantime, the NPR’s correspondent tells us that it could actually be even worse than what we see!  I am not qualified to link here all the studies I have come across by virtue of my over-indulgence of the Internet, questioning all evidence of actually increased drought resistance by any of the many industrialized crops out there.  But one thing that sustainable agriculture has taught me is that the key factor in drought-resistance is not crop genetics but the quality of the soil.  Many other studies, national and international, consistently prove how higher soil organic matter equals higher (much higher!) water retention capacity and therefore drought resistance (not to mention erosion prevention and a score of other positive externalities).  Of course, if we keep systematically subsidizing monocultures on millions of acres laden with toxic chemicals, those famished little critters dwelling in the rhizosphere cannot have much of a good time eating (and pooping) each other out.

Long story short, it could be much better!  And it will have to be over the coming years, if any residual hope for the current election cycle is still too naïve … Looking at the plant rather than the soil is like seeing the tree just to miss the forest, the marker of a reductionist thinking that so pervasively shroud our economic policies and dominant beliefs, corrupting our minds and our bodies (in David Suzuki words, it was most timely brought to my attention, conventional economics is a form of brain damage).

Which makes me think of people like Joel Salatin, who proudly remind us that what they really are farming is soil, and then of Italy.  The correct translation of farmer in Italian is fattore.  Whereas fattoria (farm, noun) is used all the time, fattore is very rarely used.  We instead refer to farmers as either agricoltori (like in viticoltori and apicoltori, winemakers and beekeepers, for instance) or more naturally as coltivatori, cultivators, with an implicit and immediate reference to the land, rather than crops: coltivare la terra is in fact the most effective way of translating “to farm”.

Peak soil and peak water are formidable challenges and a crucial piece of the ecological imperative riddle.  Sustainable agriculture is a crucial part of the right answer.

Thank you again Bryn and family for your gracious hospitality.  Thank you for cultivating our land.

Food sovereignty resonates vibrantly with Slow Money’s vision and action. But, what is sovereignty?

Although “We the People” is as close as three words come, this is a tricky question to answer. A 16th century French scholar devised the concept to legally ground the absolute power of his king. The same concept is used today by components of a transnational movement advocating for food security and justice and challenging the corporate oligarchy that has reshaped world food systems and much else.

It is a particularly timely question too. The unprecedented amount of money in politics is accelerating the drift of our democratic institutions. Even where local food self-governance ordinances are tested from Maine to California, it is still much easier to buy and sell automatic rifles than raw milk.

The dizzying feeling that the world might be upside down is particularly vivid in the financial realm. Woody Tasch repeatedly hit on this during OEFFA’s annual conference in Granville: even Wall Street insiders aren’t buying the fairy tales anymore—they are abandoning ship. Some are doing it discreetly, withdrawing long-term savings from the global casino and reinvesting it into more productive, often local and sustainable, uses. Some are doing it with a bang, like the Goldman Sachs executive who recently resigned after 12 years of diligent employment telling the public that “the environment now is as toxic and destructive” as he has ever seen it.

If we resist the urge to be cynical or ironic about the mourning for a bygone culture of honesty and integrity in investment banking, we can wonder what a financial system built on relationships might look like. Even before entering into fiduciary or business relationships (where we play fair with our clients or workers, buyers or suppliers), what does integrity mean to us as citizens, consumers, and savers/investors?

To achieve a personal (private) and civic (public) wholeness that can powerfully reverberate throughout our communities we can no longer keep money and “love-truth-beauty-spirituality” in two separate boxes. We can no longer engage in short-term purchases and long-term investments with two separate mindsets and geographic or industry preferences.

Woody invites us to reflect on the concept of investment: “If you ‘invest yourself’ in something, you commit yourself fully, deeply, you enter into relation with that in which you are personally invested. But if you ‘invest your money,’ the whole process is reversed. Financial investing…is about anonymity, limited liability, liquidity, exit–pretty much the opposite of investing yourself in something.”

In its attempts to bridge this gap, Slow Money is also shaping a universally appealing notion of sovereignty: investing oneself in something one can wholly understand and engage with, taking full responsibility before and on behalf of her or his whole community.

Along with kindred initiatives, Slow Money is here to help, and needs your help, in making sustainable agriculture and food systems investment within reach of more people.

Slow Money NEO was included in the “Community Investment & Finance” workshop.  Slow Money NEO enthusiasts left the Summit — which we are now referring to as a “Valley” as a much more fertile term– ready to expand the Slow Money concept espoused by Woody Tasch to include multiple forms for financing local food entrepreneurs including how community banks can become involved……truly an exciting day and collaboration reaching from Oberlin toWest Salem to Wooster to Youngstown to Appalachia–truly from the Lake to the Ohio River.   All participants are now part of the Slow Money NEO network, and future meetings of attendees will be scheduled.

Catalyzing investments in the local food systems, creating and expanding a nurture capital industry, investing as if food, farms and fertility mattered is easier to say (approve of, congratulate, exhort, etc.) than to do.    Not only it takes time and money, like with many other things that are also easier said than done.  But time and money, the building blocks of finance, are both at the center of the transformative action.  Slow, first, Money, second.  Slow Money.  Woody’s choice from his book for his keynote speech seems quite apt in this regard.

<<… Money that is too fast creates an environment in which, when questioned by the press about the outcome of the credit crisis, former treasury secretary Robert Rubin can only respond, “no one knows.”

There is an appropriate velocity for water set by geology, soils, vegetation, and ecological relationships in a given landscape.  There is an appropriate velocity for money that corresponds to long-term needs of communities rooted in particular places and to the necessity of preserving ecological capital.  There is an appropriate velocity for information, set by the assimilative capacity of the mind and by the collective learning rate of communities and entire societies.  Having exceeded the speed limits, we are vulnerable to ecological degradation, economic arrangements that are unjust and unsustainable, and, in the face of great and complex problems, to befuddlement that comes with information overload (David Orr, as cited in Our Land, Our Selves, edited by Peter Forbes (San Francisco Trust for Public Land, 1999).

As long as money accelerates around the planet, divorced from where we live, our befuddlement will continue.  As long as the way we invest is divorced from how we live and how we consume, our befuddlement will worsen.  As long as they way we invest uproots companies, putting them in the hands of a broad, shallow pool of absentee shareholders whose primary goal is the endless growth of their financial capital, our befuddlement at the depletion of our social and natural capital will only deepen.>>

Slow is therefore the imperative, rather than an adjective.  Yet it is relative, rather than absolute.  We need Slow Money fast, as someone once quipped, is not only easier said than done, but it also misses the point.  Appropriate velocity and carrying capacity, quantitative growth and qualitative development are all required for social relationships to take root, expand and prosper.  They build over life cycles, not quarters or fiscal years.

Relationships have of course been a central and recurrent theme of our three days in Granville.  From the value chains pioneered in Athens and across central Appalachia, to the conviviality way reasserted by CSAs, food coops and investment clubs.  Relationships are more difficult than transactions, for sure, but they also are the cure against the “cold evil” of  ”totalitarian technologies”, to quote from Andrew Kimbrell’s equally important remarks, which refuse to acknowledge how “the human economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of ecology” (an economist-friendly formulation of the ecological imperative … maybe they’ll get it).

Relationships are built on trust.  A particularly insidious and self-destructive trait of the unjust and unsustainable economic arrangements evoked in both keynote speeches is the disruption of this crucial component of social interaction.  The repeated betrayal of public trust is just one of the many shared features of the food and financial crises, but it may speak more about the state of our democracy rather than specific dynamics of either industry or system.  It is in the intimacy of face-to-face exchanges, however, that trust is directly and most vividly experienced, fostered or broken.  This is particularly true with money and investments.

Which outcomes and relationships can we expect from the endless growth of financial capital or GDP, the endless quest for the highest risk-adjusted return – all of it at a ‘safe’ distance, of course, and framed by economic imperatives like utility maximization (whatever that is) and opportunity cost?(*)  Is it possible to bridge the gap between money and beauty, money and fairness, money and truth?  We believe it is.  Sustainable agriculture (organic & beyond) is the bedrock of the sustainability transition and is learning how to do it.  Why don’t you join us?  In soil we trust.

(*) Update March 4, 2012:

Last Thursday night, while driving home from a great Slow Money NEO meeting in Cleveland  (thanks so much Erich for hosting us and Jan for facilitating it!), I listened to a riveting 2011 lecture by Raj Patel: Feeding 10 Billion.  Following many insights on the often misconstrued “Green Revolution”, Raj briefly touches again on the principle of opportunity cost.  In particular, he uses it to challenge mainstream assumptions of our agricultural policy experts.  Previously, in his latest book (The Value of Nothing), he made the fundamental observation that “there is no single opportunity cost.”  This is particularly noteworthy for our Slow Money work, as the mantra “money has a time value” is just a financial offspring of the same foundational idea of modern economics. Money has a time value, has it not?  We will certainly have the opportunity to learn more about such cornerstone of our financial architecture.  In the meantime, please find the time to enjoy the lecture!