We live an age of catch phrases, devised to drive home a point. "Slow Food" is about basing our dietary decisions on some qualitative measures about where what we’re eating comes from. "Peak Oil", if you’ve heard that term, is about how we should prepare for the end of oil as an abundant resource.
Woody Tasch adds the term ‘peak soil’ to the list – to highlight his belief that industrial agriculture is a business with diminishing returns in terms of productivity and its depletion of the world’s resources. The alternative, he argues, is small, local agriculture…and to support it takes more than buying what our farms produce.
Tasch wants us to consider what the world would be like if we invested 50 percent of our assets within 50 miles of where we live…and if a new generation of companies gave away fifty percent of their profits. It’s an approach he calls Slow Money.
Tasch is the author of the book Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered and he’s in Vermont to speak at the Vermont Fresh Network’s annual forum which took place over the weekend. Tasch is Chairman Emeritus of Investors’ Circle, a nonprofit network of investors who support companies and ventures dedicated to sustainability. He is president of the NGO Slow Money. He has a background as a venture capital investor and entrepreneur.