Slow Money Investing

This article originally was published here: https://www.greenchipstocks.com/articles/slow-money-investing/80018

Real innovation happens when we look back on previous innovations and say to ourselves, “On second thought, that might not have been such a great idea after all.”  

In the 1950′s, the McDonald brothers devised their “Speedee Service System” of mass producing hamburgers for half the cost of a traditional burger joint. This was the invention of Fast Food, where the focus was on high speed, low cost, and high sales volume.

By the late 80′s, when there were nearly 10,000 Mcdonalds’ restaurants worldwide, McDonald’s received its first major cultural pushback. An Italian named Carlo Petrini saw McDonalds –and indeed all multinational fast food operations – as a threat to Italy’s indigenous cuisine. In response, he started the Slow Food movement. He sought to preserve traditional and regional cuisine, if not for their cultural benefit, then for their health and environmental benefits.

Flash forward twenty more years.

When the United States was at the peak of the housing bubble in 2005-2006, two new television shows debuted on cable network CNBC: Mad Money and Fast Money.

These programs were very much a part of the hyped-up investing zeitgeist. CNBC’s prime time financial programming never fully recovered after day traders exited the market in 2001 with the dot com bust. Finally, it looked like it was beginning to recover when the market started coming back to life with credit default swaps and subprime lending. These shows were meant to cater to the new fast money crowd.

Before you could say “Lehman brothers,” the proverbial poop hit the fan with the liquidity crisis, the burst of the housing bubble, and the global financial crisis. Just like “Slow Food” was a response to Fast Food, a new movement called Slow Money was founded in 2008.

Its goal was to rein in the out of control capital markets, and refocus investors.

What’s it all about?

In short, Slow Money is a different perspective on investing. Instead of multinational corporations and too-big-to-fail banking institutions, it focuses its investments on small enterprises that anyone can understand: farming, food processing, food distribution, and nutrition.

The Slow Money mission statement explains it in the following way:

A new generation of entrepreneurs is starting to rebuild local food systems and the capital available to them is insufficient. If we want this capital to start flowing today, this year, this decade, if we share the belief that we don’t have another generation to wait for “them” to figure it out or be pushed in this direction by disruption or collapse, then we have to roll up our sleeves, sink our hands into the soil of the economy and start planting.

Though Slow Money’s goal is to get one million investors to commit one percent of their assets to local food systems, it’s already made major investments. So far, it’s managed to put $35 million into more than 300 small-scale food enterprises, and it’s on par with crowdfunding and microlending as one of the top new trends in financing.

The Vegan Butcher

Bacon. That’s something most red-blooded Americans can agree is amazing, right?

Unless you’re a vegan.

Maybe even if you are a vegan.

Fleisher’s organic butchers received $600,000 from Slow Money to open a second shop in the trendy Brooklyn neighborhood Park Slope. Their founder is Josh Applestone, who began the enterprise as a person who ate no animal products at all. He was the vegan butcher.

Today, he runs two successful meat shops that sell only grass-fed, locally-sourced meat that is butchered in house. The shop also has an attached restaurant and it sells a wide selection of carry out foods prepared in-house including pet food.

It also has a butchering school that costs $10,000 for an eight week course.

“We’ve had firefighters to restaurateurs to lawyers to accountants to housewives who are all strong in their will and drive to survive and change with the times. There’s not that many butcher shops left out there and a lot of people see this as an opportunity to do something that they’re passionate about, something they feel good about, and something they are able to make a living at,” Applestone told Bon Appetit magazine.

Though one might think Slow Money would focus on more traditional enterprises, it focuses on cutting-edge technological developments, too.

In the last two years, for example, it has invested in organic food e-commerce and in small farm management solutions.

Ag Squared

Ag Squared is an extremely useful cloud-based farm management solution. Do you remember the Facebook game Farmville? Imagine that, but applied to real-life farms. Users can record and track their farm tasks, manage their crop yields, and organize their books all from a Web interface. It’s still in its beta stages, and has under 10,000 users, but it has already managed 24,291 fields, and has recorded over 539,079 farming tasks so far. For a niche b2b service, these numbers are strong.

Mouth.com, meanwhile, is a New York-based web retail platform for local and independent food producers. Its goal is to unite consumers with independent food producers, and give both a simple way to do business. It expanded to offer products from 200 vendors across 30 states and in the last year, its traffic has more than doubled.

True to the Slow Money ethos, these investments are all pretty easy to understand.

The funds are mostly disbursed at Slow Money gatherings, which are held both by local chapters or by the main nonprofit itself. The big annual event will be held on November 10th through 12th in Louisville Kentucky.

Slow Money is in touch with the organic food movement, it’s pro-small business, friendly to technology, and works well with other trends in finance. It hits dozens of hot buttons at once, and isn’t a crazy scheme where money falls out of an arcane loophole that sucks the market into a bubble. 

It’s old fashioned investing for the 21st century, and I’m a fan!

This article originally was published here: https://www.greenchipstocks.com/articles/slow-money-investing/80018

Slow Money Investing originally appeared in Green Chip Stocks. Green Chip Stocks, your personal guide to investing in green, sustainable, alternative, and renewable energy stocks.