3c hapter - Index of

152 Locavesting
rise for the fi rst time in decades. Writers from Wendell Berry to
Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan have raised awareness about
food issues, and food blogs are exploding. Sixty- fi ve communities
around North America, from Allegheny to Wasatch, have
their own Edible Communities magazine. The forgotten arts of pickling,
canning, microbrewing, and even butchering are enjoying
a revival. Locally sourced meats and seafood, locally grown produce
and sustainability topped a list of food trends for 2011 in
a National Restaurant Association survey of chefs. 4 Sales of locally
grown food have grown from $2 billion in 2002 to more than
$5 billion in 2007—the same year that the New Oxford American
Dictionary crowned locavore word of the year.
Still, translating that momentum into fi nancial investment is
another story. If there is a fi nancing gap for small business, it is even
greater for those in the food and agricultural fi elds. Small- scale
farms and sustainable food enterprises are not exactly at the top of
most investors’ hot list. In fact, they are not on their radar at all.
By nature, these sorts of enterprises—small farms and dairies,
artisan producers, ecofriendly pest- management companies, or
sustainable- minded restaurants—are not the kind of hockey- stick
growth prospects that cause investors or bankers to pull out their
checkbooks. Their returns may be modest and their growth, well,
slow. They don’t promise the mind- boggling profi ts required by
venture capital, yet they are too risky for cookie- cutter bank loans,
as Dante Hesse and others have found. According to the Carrot
Project, 40 percent of agricultural startups are denied fi nancing.
More than half of farmers responding to a National Young Farmers
Coalition survey cited lack of capital as their biggest obstacle. 5 What
they require is patient capital—what Tasch calls nurture capital.
Sustainable may be an overused word, but what it implies—
that a practice such as farming or forestry or fi nance can replenish
as it produces, and nurture not destroy—is vitally important.
It recognizes the implicit relationship between farmer and earth,
logger and forest; the mutual and measured give and take. Just as
sustainable farming does not extract from the soil or earth more
than it can reasonably give, sustainable fi nance does not burden
small farmers and entrepreneurs with debt they cannot repay or