The Farm is a Community Asset

It's a sunny afternoon here in Boulder and I've found myself a cozy coffee shop with free wifi in hopes of sharing some of the reasons I find myself in this outdoor hippie haven called Boulder.

I'm here for the 4th annual Slow Money gathering happening this Monday and Tuesday. Are you're unsure of what Slow Money is all about go check it out!! (http://www.slowmoney.org). Slow Money is about bringing money back down to earth: literally. Both in the speed in which it is invested and deinvested and in the kinds of things we invest money. Slow Money's website starts off with this statement “In order to enhance food security, food safety and food access; improve nutrition and health; promote cultural, ecological and economic diversity; and accelerate the transition from an economy based on extraction and consumption to an economy based on preservation and restoration, we do hereby affirm the following Slow Money Principles....”

I spent some time on the plane ride today reading Marjorie Kelly's book Owning Our Future. The first half of the book is a engaging narrative of how we got to the current state of the economy. While this was much of my course work in the first quarter of my BGI MBA I still enjoyed Kelly's story telling narrative. Once she establishes the big pictures, she goes deeper and finds alternative models of doing business that are happening right now. These included cooperatively owned business, cohousing developments, and community banks. She claims the future of business will be one of generative business. I agree. She claims generative business follows these five principles. Living Purpose, Rooted Membership, Mission-Controlled Governance, Stakeholder Finance, and Ethical Networks. I won't go into detail here as this wasn't the original point of my post, but I think it frames so well why I am here. I want to find ways to create generative business. Especially business focused on creating a healthy, stable, generative and engaging regional food system.

When I think about what is wrong with our food system and why the regional food system is lagging, one of the things that I continually come back to is that small to mid size farmers are not making money. Most farmers I've talked with don't want/need to make a lot of money and do not want luxurious lifestyles but they do want to have enough money to continue to farm and maybe make sure they themselves, and their families have health insurance. This seems to me a reasonable expectation.

One of the issues my project team identified in the first quarter was the lack of capital for farmers. I've spent some time researching this further and what I find interesting is there are actually a lot of fairly low cost capital options for farmers. Anna Richter identifies some of them in her blog http://sustainablepickle.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/financing-your-agricultural-dreams/ when she discusses how a first time farmer might fund their dreams.

I was specifically drawn to two models of financing that are currently available to farmers. The first is a large national network called Farm Credit Network. Our Northwest branch is called https://www.northwestfcs.com/. They are very progressive and funding many local farm business throughout the region. The Farm Credit Network is all lender-owned. Meaning if you borrow money from the Farm Credit you become a member with stakeholder rights and patronage yearly benefits. This is pretty cool and from what I've been able to research they are making a lot of positive impacts in the local food movement as well as simply keeping farming in our region. One thing I noticed they didn't talk about was sustainability. Which is interesting but also not surprising. I think sustainability for traditional farmers may mean a variety of different things, but when you get past the jargon you often find out most farmers are passionate about their soil, animals, and the health of the environment; it is their livelihood. Sadly, the current economic system puts such economic pressure on their business they are forced to make short term decisions to keep their farms operating. If farmers were making more money maybe these decisions would be non issues.

I think that while the Farm Credit is great I can't help but wonder how farmers can pay even low interest rates. With thin to nonexistent profit margins even low interest rate loans can be a burden.

I truly believe that for our regional food system to be healthy and vibrant we need local community engagement and investment. An investment that is made that is about preserving our current and future food not strictly about stock market return rates. What if it become cool to invest or even own a share of your local farm. Something beyond the common CSA weekly box model. In some parts of the country getting a weekly CSA box or shopping the co-op are cool so why not take it to the next level. With increasing fuel cost, environmental degradation, peak phosphorus, etc it is a good idea to hedge our risk and invest in regional food systems. Small farms in our region exist but how do we create community wealth through these farms? This is a questions we need to be dealing with.

I'm brought back to a quote from Marjorie Kelly about ownership. I wonder if some of the answers are around how we think about ownership of our food system. Who is our farmer and who owns the rights to the community benefits farms add to the local citizens. In the same way we as a society continue to push business to internalize negative externalitities like pollution why can't we as a community internalize the positive value of sustainable regional farms.


“..The idea that ownership is a bundle of rights, which can be unbundled and distributed in novel ways. They show that the problem is not the disaggregation itself but the purpose behind it. When the Haroldson's gave a twig of ownership rights to a mortgage lender, which wielded it against them, extractive purpose was the problem. With the community land trust and catch shares, twigs of ownership are given to parties with Living Purpose and in some cases, disaggregation helps create solutions” -Marjorie Kelly

There are conservation programs such as Equity Trust (http://equitytrust.org/) that help farmers, communities, and cooperatives keep farmland in community ownership. While these models are not perfect they do keep the farm as a community asset protecting the lands from the pressures of developers or becoming someones second home.

Farms are community assets and I'd be willing to pay/invest just to ensure regional farms are their for the next 10, 20, 100 years. My reward for my investment is simply the community benefit. I'm in grad school right now and have no money to put my money where my mouth is so this is all very theoretical to me. If I had money to invest how much would I be willing to invest with only a community return? What if there was a slow financial return? or none at all at the community farm stopped farming?

Can we work with farmers to rethink the ownership of farmland that empower the farmer and engage the community?

This is why I am at Slow Money, I don't know the answer but I'm inspired to hear what others are doing and how they are thinking about this important issue.