3c hapter - Index of

148 Locavesting
Through Slow Money, a nonprofi t organization, he aims to create
new pathways for investing in local, sustainable food and agriculture
enterprises, the kinds of businesses that are passed over by conventional
fi nance. To bring fi nance back down to earth. Slow Money is the
pragmatic cousin of Slow Food, which celebrates food diversity, taste,
and tradition and from which Tasch liberally (and literally) borrows.
Petrini has called attention to the question of where our food comes
from. Now Tasch is urging us to ask, where does our money go?
As Tasch tells it, it goes fl ying around the globe at a mindboggling
pace in pursuit of profi t and usually ends up in a smokestack
in China. Our voracious fi nancial system has enabled an
industrial food system that consumes vast amounts of fossil fuels
and water and spits out cheap, fast food. As we have seen, that system
is taking a terrible toll on our health, our environment, our
food security, our communities, and, especially, our small- scale
farmers and food production.
Slow Money
Slow Money is a national organization made up of semi-autonomous
local chapters dedicated to creating fi nancing solutions for smallscale
food and agricultural producers.
In the 1950s, there were 25 million farmers in the United
States. Today there are fewer than 2 million. 1 We lose two acres
of farmland per minute. 2 Industrial- scale megafarms farms supply
the bulk of our food. Four companies control 85 percent of
the nation’s beef production, 70 percent of pork, and 60 percent
of poultry, according to Slow Food. One company (Dean Foods)
controls 40 percent of the milk supply. These concentrated animal
feeding operations routinely feed antibiotics to their livestock,
contributing to dangerous levels of resistance among pathogens.
Industrial farming is also heavily dependent on chemical inputs.
Each year, 80 million tons of nitrogen- rich fertilizer is spread onto
fi elds, the vast amount of it washed away (along with topsoil) into
rivers and waterways, creating algae blooms that snuff out life,