Impact Investing and Deep Intention
A Call to Farms is an upcoming public conversation about food, money, soil and peace presented by Slow Money Providence. The gathering will feature a number of Slow Money friends from around the country as well as local farmers, food entrepreneurs and other food system stakeholders from the Providence, RI region.
If there’s anything that frustrates and saddens me in this time of climate change, populism and war, it’s a high TALK:DO ratio. Which does pose a challenge for me, since I do like to talk…
That’s not as idiosyncratic a confession as it first appears. Because I’ve come to see impact investing and mission-related investing and ESG and shareholder activism as pale corporate shadows of deeper personal intention. If durable systemic change is ever going to be a thing, it will need to be rooted in deep personal intention.
My personal intention has been, ever since (gulp!) the 1970s, to “do” something about the gap between the wisdom of E.F. Schumacher (Small is Beautiful) and Wendell Berry (The Unsettling of America and much, much more), on the one hand, and the realities of the money culture and techno-utopianism, on the other. What will life look like after all the moonshots and unicorns and cyber pots of gold? Is it possible to move the economy (in Berry’s words) away from exploitation and towards nurture? After venture capital, could we find our way to nurture capital?
OK. That’s about to lead to a whole lot more TALK. So, let’s stick to the DO…
For the past 15 years, I’ve been steward of an unusual process of public experimentation, collaboration and shared learning. Under the loose banner of the slow money movement, $100 million has flowed to over 1000 small, diversified organic farms and local food businesses via volunteer-led activities in dozens of communities.
In this fertile field, seeds of a replicable, local 0% lending model have sprouted. There are now five “SOIL” groups (Slow Opportunities for Investing Locally) in the U.S. and one in Israel, using donated capital to make 0% loans, to the tune of over $4 million in aggregate to some 150 farms and food businesses. Four of these groups operate cooperatively, making loans by majority vote of members—one person, one vote, no matter the size of a member’s donation. An organic farmer who puts in $25? One vote. An angel who puts in $25,000? One vote. Farmers meet with the group, converse directly with members and decisions get made.
The beauty of this model is that it not only solves a bunch of securities hurdles and enables grassroots participation, but also creates permanently recirculating, slowly growing pools of community-controlled capital. If enough folks keep making annual member donations for enough years, and as most of the loans are repaid, the pools will grow to millions of dollars. Slowly…but not without a certain urgency. SOIL Boulder started with a few dozen members and $100,000 in 2017; today, it has 140 members and a portfolio of 34 loans totaling $840,000.
The challenge of this model is, quite obviously, its inefficiency. It is decentralized, has lots of moving parts and is dependent upon social capital. That last—social capital—being the key. Because in this model, social and ecological concerns come first. Financial metrics come second. Not just in the talking, but in the doing.
Personally, I’ve come to believe—after 50 years of “thinking globally and never managing to act locally nearly enough” and 28 years of COP meetings and all the reports and studies and advocacy and, lately, new investment terminology aimed at rejiggering incentives, reigning in excesses and healing the wounds of globalization—that solutions to the multiple, compounding crises of our times are more likely to come via bottom-up, grassroots engagement than via top-down, institutional programs. Which is to say: When it comes to systemic change, both approaches are long shots. But we do, for the sake of our sanity and survival, need both.
So why, when it comes to our own money, do we keep acting as if global capital markets and institutional investment products are all there is? Why do keep thinking that fiscal prudence is synonymous with giving almost all our money to people we don’t know very well, for them to invest in things they often don’t understand very well, in places half-way around the world that are virtually invisible to us?
Deep down—in the realm of personal intentions—we know that something about Buying Low and Selling High is fundamentally, and woefully, incomplete, and insufficient.
Which brings us back around, once again, to the DO. Here’s what some of us are doing: We’re putting some of our money to work near where we live, in things that we understand, starting with local farms and food systems.
And leaving the returns in. Small acts, deep intentions, first steps on a new path, towards an economy of health and peace.
In 2022, two months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I penned A Call to Farms, excerpts of which follow.
This is a Call to Farms. It is and is not a response. It is not a response to any one brigade’s route, the military mind that mapped it or the propaganda that is translating it into ideological talking points. It is a response to the forces that turned — lo these few brief millennia, and lo’er these few brief centuries, and lo’er yet (you’d think lo’est, surely, but no, there seems no end to the Great Acceleration) these few brief decades, these few brief tweets, these few brief algorithmic breaths, these few brief ultrafast bursts of ones and zeroes — the Fertile Crescent into the Oil Patch and amber waves of grain into food as a store of cheap, shelf-stable calories, food as fuel for internal combustion engines, food as industrial power.
This is a call to farms because there is healing to be done. Trust to be restored. Mutuality to be rekindled. Biodiversity to be valued. Conviviality to be nurtured. Carbon to be sequestered. Bread to be broken. Affection to be shared. Humility to be cultivated.
Rather than tallying what is good and what is bad in McWorld, let’s look to the question of balance. Isn’t it obvious enough that both McWorld and Jihad as poles, as worldviews institutionalized and ideologized in opposition to one another, do harm? Isn’t it obvious that consumerism, militarism, exceptionalism and fundamentalism too easily run to the extremes?
Less obvious, but no less important, is something we can call investorism. This is the culture of Buy Low/Sell High, Wealth Now/Philanthropy Later taken to extreme, the culture that prioritizes transactions over relationships, that, in Oscar Wilde’s famous formulation, knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
The price of a Tomahawk missile is $1 million. The price of a pallet of two-by-fours is $X. A loaf of bread in Cairo costs $Y. The price of a dose of insulin is $Z.
We cannot get all the way to peace and health solely by being more conscious consumers, nor even by being more conscious investors — at least not so long as we understand investing to mean the anonymous trading of securities and portfolios of financial instruments that are too complex, too abstract to be fully transparent and comprehensible. That’s investing 20th-century-style, courtesy of a few centuries of industrialization and corporatization and fiduciarization.
In the 21st century, we need to put some of our money, and lots of our intention, and meaningful chunks of our time, into a new kind of investing—putting money to work near where we live, in things that we understand, starting with food, not with an eye toward how much money we might make, but toward how effectively we promote cultural, ecological and economic diversity, community resilience, health and peace.
Healing the wounds of the industrial food system is not, as a project, on the same pedestal of urgency as ending the war in Ukraine, but it is an urgent project nonetheless, and not entirely unrelated.
We are called to respond to immediate crises and to attenuate causes of future crises. This includes mitigating overreliance on global supply chains. It also means actively working to restore mutuality and trust, from the international and national levels down to the level of bioregion, community, neighborhood and household. But not necessarily in that order. In response to military crisis, a few extraordinary souls may choose the difficult and complicated path of conscientious objection. In response to the collateral damage of globalization, the choice to become a conscientious investor is far less dramatic, far less binary, far friendlier — driven, sure, by being mad as hell and not wanting to take it anymore, but at a deeper level by a sense of conscientious affection.
Perhaps it is historical coincidence that NPK, fertilizer was brought to market after WWII by munitions manufacturers and that pesticides were derived from lethal military gas, or perhaps it is a cosmic clue. The industrial, command-and-control mindset that brings us confined animal feeding operations, meat laced with antibiotics, genetically modified organisms and vast acreages of monoculture is the same mindset that brings us Mutually Assured Destruction.
Mutually Assured Destruction. It’s hard to write a sentence that comes after these three words, these words that make the gloomiest of acronyms. Surely there must be another way.
“I think of what I’m doing as biological diplomacy,” says Eliot Coleman, describing his work as an organic farmer.
Which might seem to have nothing whatsoever to do with Mutually Assured Destruction until Eliot continues: “If, in this most basic of human endeavors, agriculture, we can learn to live in harmony with biological limits of the planet, then we can similarly learn, on the plane of human existence, to live in harmony with ourselves.”
Mutuality and trust have always been a particular problem for this nation of refugees, pioneers, settlers, colonists, revolutionaries, traders, miners, entrepreneurs, laborers, robber barons, campaigners, protestors and speculators. Our dogged — many thought divinely inspired — determination to throw off the yoke of monarchy and enshrine democracy was matched only by the stubbornness with which we refused to recognize the soul-crushing cultural contradictions inherent in our decimation of Native Americans and enslavement of Africans. We put “In God We Trust” on our money. We became an economic superpower. In a few centuries, the land of “people of the corn” had become the land of corn syrup.
Today, the idea that nodes of mutuality and trust could proliferate in the wake of financialization and fundamentalism, that Making a Living could one day hold its own against Making a Killing, isn’t quite beyond imagining.
The entirety of A Call to Farms is available free online, where a hard copy may also be purchased.
Article by Woody Tasch, founder of Slow Money and Beetcoin. He is also the author of Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered (Chelsea Green); SOIL: Notes Towards the Theory and Practice of Nurture Capital (Slow Money Institute); and AHA!: Fake Trillions, Real Billions, Beetcoin and the Great American Do-Over(Slow Money Institute).
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. As treasurer of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation in the 1990s, he was a pioneer of mission-related investing. He was founding chairman of the Community Development Venture Capital Alliance. Utne Reader named him “One Of 25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.”