You’ve heard of Slow Food. What about Slow Money?

Thanks to Twitter, I learned about the Slow Money conference — I hadn’t heard of it until I saw Stowe Boyd’s 140-character updates Thursday.

BusinessWeek writes:

There’s a conference going on in Santa Fe this week about Slow Money. The idea behind slow money, modeled on the 20-year-old slow food movement, is to create an infrastructure for investing in local food systems.

Financial markets exist to connect people who have extra capital (in retirement accounts, pension funds, nonprofit endowments, personal savings, etc.) with people who need it (to go to college, buy homes, start and expand companies, buy inventory and equipment, etc). In the old model, a bank, fund, or other institution is usually the intermediary in the marketplace. That intermediary invests capital from savings wherever it has the greatest return for the institution’s shareholders — and sometimes that meant a lot of money flowed to destructive assets, like subprime mortgages.

The new model is a way of allocating capital that accounts for other factors, like how it affects the local community. When businesses borrow or get investment directly from their customers (in the CSA model, for example), that means that customers’ interests are aligned with creditors’ or shareholders’ interests — they’re the same group. In a local economy, they’re part of the same community, too, so they have incentives to create value beyond just pure financial returns, by doing things that benefit the local environment and community. (E.g., a farm chooses not to use pesticides that pollute the local water system — a benefit local shareholders see.)

The Slow Money Web site describes it more simply:

Slow Money.  It’s a new economic vision.  It’s an emerging network of investors, donors, farmers, and activists committed to building local food economies.  It’s about the soil of the economy.  It’s the beginning of the “nurture capital” industry.

Slow Money founder Woody Tasch explains his view in this YouTube video:

I’ve blogged before about committing to supporting your favorite businesses, which the 3/50 project made more formal with the call to spend at least $50 each month at three local businesses.

Slow Money appears to take it to the next level, calling for investment with a social mission. The Slow Money principles say:

Paul Newman said, “I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer who puts back into the soil what he takes out.” Recognizing the wisdom of these words, let us begin rebuilding our economy from the ground up, asking:

•  What would the world be like if we invested 50% of our assets within 50 miles of where we live? 
•  What if there were a new generation of companies that gave away 50% of their profits?  
•  What if there were 50% more organic matter in our soil 50 years from now?

What do you think about investing locally? About businesses committing to giving away a percentage of their profits? About businesses raising capital from customers?

I heart farmers’ markets — or how a kid raised on canned veggies loaded with butter learned to love the real thing

John got inspired by a NY Times slide show on people who dress up for farmers' market, so we got dolled up and went to Union Square. Click here for the wonderful narrated slide show.

I grew up in an agricultural state. Michigan grows cherries, apples and sugar beets, among other things, and to live in Michigan is to know the mantra “knee high by the Fourth of July” is a growth measure for the huge expanses of corn fields all over the state.

But I don’t think I’d even heard the phrase “farmers’ market” until I was out of college. We sometimes bought produce from roadside farm stands — there’s a guy by my old church that sells sweet corn my aunt swears by — but those were more ad hoc, one product or one farmer at a time operations.

I grew up very much a child of the ’70s. My working mom loved convenience foods so although she tried to get a lot of vegetables into our diet, mostly they came from a can and were served swimming in butter or covered in Velvetta. I bought fresh spinach for the first time when I was about 20 and I had no idea what to do to it. I had always loved spinach but only knew it in its canned form. I laugh when I think of my bewilderment the first time I encountered a fresh head of garlic.

In New York, many residents can find a farmers market just a few blocks from their home.

Ironically, it’s in super urban New York City where farmers’ markets have transformed both how we shop and how we eat, in both cases for the better.

New York’s Greenmarket program organizes nearly 50 markets around the city, many of them operating all year. The big kahuna in New York is at Union Square. Dozens of vendors sell everything from flowers and bread to local wine, beeswax candles, artisanal sauerkraut and wool made from the sheep on a farm that also makes feta.

We shopped at the Ann Arbor farmers’ market but typically bought a pretty routine selection: fresh tomatoes to supplement my own meager crop, sweet corn, berries. At Union Square, I saw so many things I’d never cooked before — some I’d never even seen — and discovered the real magic of a farmers’ market.

Farmers want you to eat what they produce. It’s how they pay the mortgage. So if you pick up a weird, bumpy looking root and ask what it is, the farmer will tell you it’s celeriac — celery root. At the booths I gravitate toward, the farmers will give you some ideas about how to cook the unfamiliar thing you’re inspecting.

I’m sure I’d seen celery root, turnips and parsnips at the grocery store before, but having a produce tour guide give me ideas of what to do with them turned me into a root fanatic. I had never cooked beets, only opened them out of jars or cans, and now John loves my roasted beets with balsamic vinegar and honey. I’ve learned to love all manner of greens — mustard, turnip and collard among them. When I buy beets, I make sure they still have the greens on them, so I can cook them, too.

During the summer, Stokes Farm from New Jersey sells tomatoes, cukes and herbs across the street from our old apartment. As it gets colder, they sell beautiful herb wreaths.

We don’t always feel like traveling to Union Square, or like dealing with the crowds at the big market. At our old apartment we had a market directly across the street every Saturday, and now we have one a few blocks away on Saturdays and a different one a few blocks the other way on Sunday. The smaller markets are fun, too, because you have more of a chance to get to know the vendors, like our friends from Stokes Farm.

If you’re still shopping at a chain grocery store and haven’t made farmers’ markets part of your routine, here are a few reasons to give it a try:

• You will get more in tune with what’s in season when locally, and your mouth will thank you. Tomatoes picked a few miles away on an August day taste so much different from those you buy at Kroger in February. That can be a revelation for some.
• If you think shopping at a farmers’ market means having to spend a small fortune or finding only snooty foods your family won’t eat, chef Daniel Meyer cooks up dinner for four for $20 on Bitten and Greenmarket offers some suggestions on affordable shopping.
• If you think you don’t have time to cook, let Mark Bittman show you 101 great picnic foods that take 20 minutes or less, or 101 inspired salads that take 20 minutes or less. He will admit some might actually take a bit longer, depending on your kitchen skills, but still. They’re fast and easy for the hot days when you don’t want to be in the kitchen all night.
• You can put more money in the pockets of local farmers. The National Farmers Union says only a small fraction of American food spending goes to the farmer — most of it goes to packaging, shipping, marketing and the like. Buy local tomatoes and basil and more of that money stays closer to home.
• If you think of grocery shopping as a torturous chore to be finished as quickly as possible, your farmers’ market might change that. Rarely did we go to the Ann Arbor farmers’ market when we didn’t see at least someone we knew, and going to our New York markets is so much more fun, social and laid back than pushing a cart up and down a store aisle.

If you are already a fan of farmers’ markets, you’re not alone.

• Eating Well reports on the growth of farmers’ markets nationally and names their 10 favorites
• USA Today asks local food advocate and chef Alice Waters for her 10 favorite U.S. farmers’ markets
• American Farmland Trust recently ran a contest to vote for the best farmers’ markets in America
• Care2 and Local Harvest have a similar vote going on right now

Are you a fan of farmers’ markets? What’s your favorite farmers’ market and why?

And with that, I’m off to the market to buy some goodies for dinner tonight …

Chris Warfel’s unlikely path to oyster farmer

Block Island, in Long Island Sound, is reached by a long ferry ride.

We’ve just returned from a relaxing, fun vacation on Block Island, a beautiful little piece of land in Long Island Sound.

And though mostly we goofed off with our great friends, Rob and Lara, stories of  reinvention seem to pop up everywhere — yes, even on an island where about half the land is preserved open space and the only town on the island proudly calls itself the smallest town in the smallest state.

On last year’s trip to Block Island, John and I were enjoying happy hour cocktails on the deck at Three Kittens when a pick up truck stopped out front. The driver hopped out wearing waders, then went to the bed of the truck, hauled out a mesh netting of oysters and headed for the kitchen. I scurried to the bartender and asked how I could get some of those oysters. He said to wait about 15 minutes. Now that’s fresh.

This year I recognized the oyster farmer at farmer’s market and chatted him up about raising bivalves. I expected him to be a lifelong man of the sea but Chris Warfel, an engineer by training, came to raise oysters unexpectedly.

As Warfel tended a cooler full of fresh oysters in the shade under a tree, he explained that he’d gotten involved in a research project figuring out a way to use solar power to incubate shelled critters like oysters. When the project was over, he wondered what to do with the oysters and someone suggested starting an oyster farm.

Hank Shaw’s 2008 article in Edible Rhody tells his story: (Be sure to follow the link for Holly Heyser’s beautiful photo much larger than it is here, too.)

Chris Warfel, engineer turned oyster farmer, now runs Sun Farm Oysters on Block Island

Chris Warfel isn’t a son of the sea. He is a son of the sun.
The Block Island oyster farmer came to his profession not from a love of the Great Salt Pond or even Narragansett Bay but from a passion for solar energy.Warfel, like many modern farmers, must walk in two worlds to make ends meet. Most days he’s a renewable energy engineer.
On some, however, he is the proprietor of Sun Farm Oysters, one of Rhode Island’s smallest oyster farms.
Warfel stumbled into his alter ego as an oysterman when a colleague asked him to make a solar-powered water filter to keep a batch of baby oysters happy. Six years later, Warfel’s Sun Farm Oysters are one tiny piece of Rhode Island’s growing aquaculture industry.The value of oysters grown in Rhode Island more than doubled between 2005 and 2007, and it’s now a $1.5 million industry; Warfel and his competitors sold more than 2.5 million of the tasty bivalves last year.

Warfel told me sales are doing well this year — he hears that when the waitresses at Finn’s, a casual seafood restaurant right on the harbor, tell diners that the oysters are local, they’re excited to give them a try.

I can understand why. After our chat at farmer’s market, I was a woman on a mission. I ordered a half dozen oysters from the takeout window at Finn’s and ate them upstairs watching boats come and go in the harbor. The oysters weren’t cheap at $2.10 a piece and they’re tiny compared to the ones I usually gobble down in New Orleans, but they were very tasty, briny and smooth.

And I loved that my afternoon snack helped support Warfel’s path to life evolution. That goes down really well with some cocktail sauce.

Brewing up a life change: Matt and Rene Greff, Arbor Brewing Co. and Corner Brewery

Matt and Rene Greff run two popular businesses – Arbor Brewing Co., a brewpub in Ann Arbor, which spawned Corner Brewery, a microbrewery in Ypsilanti where they bottle beer for retail distribution.

Both places draw big crowds and reviewers praise their beer. It’s quite the successful little empire.

Matt and Rene talked to the Kalamazoo Gazette’s KalamaBrew, which features a five-minute video of the couple talking about their career path. I can't make the embed code work, so click here to watch it on MLive.

Matt and Rene are two of our very favorite people back home, and we’ve talked at some great length about their bumpy early days as entrepreneurs. Neither of them had ever worked in a restaurant or bar and they simultaneously struggled with a steep learning curve and the closure of a huge city parking structure across the street from the pub.

Their journey from corporate cubicle dwellers to fledgling entrepreneurs to Ann Arbor area institution struck me as a perfect story of transformation. Since they’re working night and day on Corner Brewery, we had a tough time connecting by phone for a blog interview, so they shared their some thoughts by e-mail. Most of the quotes below are jointly written, as they passed my questions back and forth electronically before returning them.

How did you keep up your dedication to running the business when you were initially struggling?

We had no choice! When things were nearing the lowest point, we actually called our attorney who specializes in bankruptcies and asked him how that all worked. He simply told us it was not an option for us if we wanted any sort of future so we had better figure out how to make it all work.

More than that, we had put so much of ourselves into starting the brewpub that allowing it to fail would have been like letting a loved one die if you could save them.

It was also critical that we were in this together as husband and wife and business partners. We fed off each other and were always there to pick each other up and keep going. It was the sole focus of our lives and we dedicated literally every waking (and sleeping) moment to making the brewpub succeed.

(Matt and Rene have talked to us over the years about how miserable they were with their flailing business, until a book called Conversations with God inspired them to take charge of turning it around.)  You’ve told us the story of reading Conversations with God and having it transform your business. What about that do you think was most important in getting to where you are today?

The most mind-blowing and life altering concept was that we were living exactly the life we had created – the conditions of our lives and our business were the result of every single decision and action (small and large) that we had made either consciously or unconsciously up to that point. We realized that it was nobody else’s fault that we were in a difficult situation. And more importantly that it wasn’t a matter of blame at all. We are all subject to the laws of cause and effect and if we wanted a different business outcome or different lifestyle, we just needed to make different choices to create that outcome.

So we set about making conscious rather than unconscious decisions – being proactive rather than reactive. It gave us a sense of control and endless possibilities and our attitude toward the brewpub and our lives changed literally overnight. We clarified our goals and remained open to the infinite possibilities for achieving those goals.

We started with creating a positive rather than a stressful work environment for our staff (which was definitely in our control as the bosses) and from there everything else just started to flow. 

Matt and Rene Greff sport tattoos of the logo for one of their beers, Sacred Cow. My husband, John Tebeau, designed their logos, labels and six packs.

 What do you think you did right to get you where you are?

From the very start, we had a vision of a business that was rooted in the community. Our goal was to practice what we called capitalism with a conscience which encompasses everything from paying a living wage to recycling to being responsible in the way we serve alcohol.

We also had a vision of our favorite European pubs that were not only great places to eat and drink but were the social nexus of their communities. Since we didn’t have money to donate, we donated our time, our space and our goods and services and created lasting partnerships with dozens if not hundreds of local non-profits. We never shied away from supporting causes that we care about.

Because of those ties, even when we were really struggling we had such loyal supporters who were all pulling for us. And because we’ve opened our doors to so many groups over the years, we’re the first place many people think of when they want to host a fundraiser or a political event or a social gathering.

So not only have we gotten a lot of business but we’ve attracted the absolutely best and coolest people as regulars. That makes running the business so much fun. It makes us really happy when someone tells us why they love ABC and they start with “You are so active in the community” then quickly add “oh, and I love your beer and food, too!”

What do you wish you had done differently?

Not sucked from the beginning!

I wish we had spent more time planning how to actually run a large restaurant. We were so focused on just getting the place open and assumed it would be easy to run a restaurant once we got it open.

Obviously not the case.

We spent the first two years learning every job in the entire operation to get a grasp on how to successfully operate the brewpub.

The other thing we wish we had done differently was raised more money for the project. We really tied our own hands by trying to do the startup on the cheap and it would have been nice to have a safety net of operating capital for when times were tough. I think we were like a lot of first-time entrepreneurs. We didn’t want to consider the worst-case scenario and learned the hard way that it is better to fully consider how badly things could go wrong than to be blindsided by it if that’s how things end up going.

The label for Sacred Cow ipa, which features the logo that's now tattooed on Matt and Rene. My husband, John Tebeau, designed the logo and the labels.

What do you think you learned from your past jobs/experience that’s helping you now?

Matt – One thing I learned was what I didn’t want my own business to look and act like. One of the reasons I was ready to flee the corporate world while only in my mid-20s was because as an employee I felt disconnected from the goals and successes of the company I worked for and felt unappreciated and replaceable.

The company made it clear that the organizational priorities were profits, customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction in that order. I felt that if you put employee satisfaction first then customer satisfaction and financial success would naturally follow. Obviously this was easier said than done but we continue to put employee happiness and job satisfaction at the top of our priority list.

What advice would you give your 21-year-old self now if you could?

Figure out what you are passionate about and pursue that regardless of whether it is a traditional career path or not. Your life and work should not be compartmentalized. They should be intertwined to make you who you are. If you follow your heart and passion then success will follow. Although it may not be success in the traditional sense, you will be profoundly happy. I feel like our 42-year-old selves are proof this is true.

—

Rene and Matt have both been interviewed by Dave Askins in his Teeter Talks series.

Corner Brewery turns up pretty frequently on Mark Maynard’s Ypsi-focused blog.

—

Blogging disclosure: I am rarely unbiased about anything I write about. Think of Newvine Growing as my version of Oprah’s favorite things. In the case of Matt and Rene, we’ve been friends with them for more than a decade, and they’ve generously shared their beer with John — sadly, I don’t drink beer. They’ve also been clients of John’s as he designed logos, labels, six packs and tap handles for them.