This story was recently carried by National Public Radio where it aired as Wary Of Wall Street? Invest In A Dairy Farm. The premise:
…some as yet undefined portion of capital should be steered toward smaller, local farms and businesses that are friendly to the environment.
The story begins with a description of a young dairy farmer, Dante Hesse, who rents land and a barn outside of New York City and sells organic milk at $5 a quart in the city. He could sell much more if he could afford to build his own processing plant, but needs investors to grow his business.
“We feel pretty strongly at this point that there are a lot of people out there who are interested in helping, and the way the economy is now, one argument might be that it’s a bad time to be doing something like this,” Hesse says. “But I think the inverse is true, that it’s actually a good time because people are scared of the stock market, and they know that food is a vital part of survival. And local food is going to become very important in the very near future.”
Woody Tasch is the venture capitalist who founded Slow Money to find investors for such businesses.
