Inquiries Into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered [Paperback]

Woody Tasch (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 15, 2010

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.

Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money presents an essential new strategy for investing in local food systems and introduces a group of fiduciary activists who are exploring what should come after industrial finance and industrial agriculture. Theirs is a vision for investing that puts soil fertility into return-on-investment calculations and serves people and place as much at it serves industry sectors and markets.

Leading the charge is Woody Tasch-whose decades of work as a venture capitalist, foundation treasurer, and entrepreneur now shed new light on a truer, more beautiful, more prudent kind of fiduciary responsibility. He offers an alternative vision to the dusty old industrial concepts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when dollars, and the businesses they financed, lost their connection to place; slow money, on the other hand, is firmly rooted in the new economic, social, and environmental realities of the 21st century.

Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money is a call to action for designing capital markets built around not extraction and consumption but preservation and restoration.

Is it a movement or is it an investment strategy? Yes.

Editorial Reviews

Review

aEvery once in a while, an idea comes around that you immediately know is not only a good one, but in fact is an absolutely necessary one. Slow Money is such an idea. Money is a powerful thing and whatever we collectively put our money into goes a long way toward creating the world that we live in. So far, those choices have led to many things, including a broken world food system, where nobody knows where their food comes from or what it takes to grow it. To become so divorced from something as essential as our food has had many disastrous consequences. I have great hope that sustainable, locally based food systems will help us all in more ways than we imagine. Slow Money can play a huge role in doing this and Woodyas book is an inspiration to all of us working in sustainable agriculture. I canat wait to live in a world supported by Slow Money.a--Tom Stearns, President, High Mowing Organic Seeds

About the Author

Woody Tasch is president of the newly formed NGO Slow Money and Chairman Emeritus of Investors' Circle, a nonprofit network of angel investors, venture capitalists, foundations, and family offices that, since 1992, has facilitated the flow of $130 million to 200 early-stage companies and venture funds dedicated to sustainability. He lives in northern New Mexico. For information about Slow Money please visit www.slowmoneyalliance.org.

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing (May 15, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1603582541
• ISBN-13: 978-1603582544
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #98,418 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #40 in Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Agricultural Sciences > Sustainable Agriculture

More About the Author

Woody Tasch is Founder and Chairman of Slow Money, a 501(c)3 non-profit formed in 2008 to catalyze the flow of investment capital to small food enterprises and to promote new principles of fiduciary responsibility to support sustainable agriculture and the emergence of a restorative economy. Tasch is Chairman Emeritus of Investors' Circle, a nonprofit network of investors that has facilitated the flow of $150 million to 230 sustainability minded, early stage companies and venture funds. He is an experienced venture-capital investor and entrepreneur, he has served on numerous for-profit and non-profit boards, and was founding chairman of the Community Development Venture Capital Alliance, which supports venture investing in economically disadvantaged regions. In 2010, Utne Reader named Woody one of "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World."

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This Book is the Start of a Movement, January 28, 2010

By 

L. Brunjes "Lopa Brunjes" (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered (Hardcover)

Every once in a while, you come upon a book that impresses you with the feeling that you are watching history unfold with each page--you find yourself daydreaming mid-read about telling your children and your children's children about who you were when you first read that book, and how you had the kernel of foresight that it would be the start of something that would influence our world and our relationship to it. For better, forever.

This is one of those books.

Slow Money is medicine for our diseased relationship with money and the tangible resources that it was originally intended to represent. It is a poetic, profound de-conditioning of our standard, abstracted views of economics. Woody Tasch's background in traditional venture capital investing allows him to speak the lingo we all know with aplomb, while also breaking ground for the new languaging that is needed to start this critical conversation. It represents the transition from money as depleting to repleting, from money as numbers to money as what has stood the test of time as the apotheosis of human culture and survival: food.

As a leader in the biochar field, I am intimately familiar with the catastrophic dangers inherent in eroding our soil health, and work daily to help us avoid them. Enter Slow Money: I am floored. I am inspired. I am rejoicing. Slow Money is exactly what our soils and the people that depend on them (read: ALL OF US) need, and it brings poetry to economics in a way that is deeply and unexpectedly healing to our collective psyche.

This book is so riddled with gems that I realized immediately that underlining key phrases would be pointless, because I would be underlining the whole book. I am going to read it several times so that I can systematically adopt the healthy mental gestalt that Slow Money brilliantly expounds.


May all who read Slow Money be agents of this meme, which promises to change the way we view money, forever.

36 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful vision, January 13, 2009

By 

Mark Mills (Glen Rose, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered (Hardcover)

The vision, goal and poetry of this book are beyond reproach. Unfortunately, it is written to fellow true-believers. The average reader will find it difficult to translate into action or new insight.

For example, the book suggests more money should be invested in corporations with very long term plans. The author points out that top-soil takes hundreds of years to become a mature ecosystem, so we need companies with similar outlooks. Of course, that is a great goal, but most readers will wonder how such an organization could survive when government policy currently promotes mad consumerism as a sort of patriotism. The author regularly points out the absurdity of this 'pro-growth' religion, but never investigates its history, institutional power base nor weaknesses. The new comer to 'slow money' will find the omission frustrating.

22 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bringint it all together, December 25, 2008

By 

SunshineGirl (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered (Hardcover)

Disgusted with the garbage we call food and the markets and government that subsidize it? Impatient with politicians who refuse to connect the dots between ag subsidies, obesity, childhood diabetes, shriveling family farms and an environment poisoned by ag chemicals? If you found Michael Pollan's works provocative and insightful, you'll recognize this book as the next "ah ha" moment on the path to food and farms that nurture rather than weaken our communities. "Slow Money" is a way to fight back. It has a message of hope and empowerment like the one that propelled Obama to victory: together we build momentum for change. We pool our money and invest it in a food system that builds instead of harms environmental and human health. I invested in three copies of this book: one for me and two for friends, who will tell their friends. The movement begins.