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Jeremy Grantham, one of the world’s leading money managers, called out soil erosion as a crisis of historic, global proportions, citing FDR’s admonition: “The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.” Despite explosive growth in our
knowledge, our ignorance of life teeming in the soil remains humbling: it is estimated that in a gram of soil, there may be a billion single-cell organisms and millions more multicells, as well as over 4,000 species, most of them not yet named or studied by scientists. Yet we’ve slipped over the past
half-century, into a food system that treats the soil as if it were nothing more than a medium for holding plant roots so they can be force fed a chemical diet. We have become dependent upon technology and synthetic inputs, subsidized by what was, until recently, cheap oil. This facilitated not only the production of nitrogen fertilizer, but also the management of large-scale, mechanized farms and the energy- intensive system of processing and long-range transportation necessary to bring products to distant markets. The fact agriculture accounts for
more than 20 percent of greenhouse emissions is all the more shocking given recent science indicates fertile soil is a potent carbon sink. Soils hold approximately 75 percent
of the total carbon stored on land, and the amount of carbon stored in soils worldwide exceeds the amount in the atmosphere by a factor of three to two. Currently, farms and rangelands store approximately 20 million metric tonnes annually in the US. With improved management, they could store additional 180 million metric tonnes, for a total of 200 million tonnes— or 3.6 percent of US annual carbon emissions. The good news: as consumer demand for organic food continues to grow, it drives improved farm management practices, increasing organic matter inputs and reducing the use of biocides. There are on average 19,000
earthworms per acre on conventional farmland in Boone County, Iowa, but
WWW.CARBONWARROOM.COM
on Thompson Family Farms, an organic farm in that same county, there are 1.9 million earthworms per acre. The benefits of organic agriculture
go beyond our health and the many community benefits generated by the presence of organic farms near where we live. They extend to the potential for the restoration of local food systems to put carbon back in the soil. Think of these denizens of the
restorative economy: seed companies, compost makers, creameries and grain mills, small organic farms, artisan cheese makers, stewards of pasture-fed livestock, restaurants that source locally and organically, niche
where we never fully know what it’s doing or to whom, and put it to work in things we understand, nearer home, starting with small food enterprises. By doing so, we can begin to put culture back into our communities – and carbon back into the soil. It’s a sobering commentary on
modern circumstance that something so commonsensical would be called “one of the top five trends in finance for 2011” by
Entrepreneur.com and a “revolution” by Acres USA. “The problems of the global food
system mirror the problems of the financial system,” observes Slow Money founding member Judson
The fact agriculture accounts for more than 20% of greenhouse emissions is shocking given recent science indicates fertile soil is a potent carbon sink
organic brands, developers of benign agricultural inputs, biochar companies. Think of such small food entrepreneurs and the investors who invest in them as earthworms – stewards of the soil. This is the story of Slow Money. We are working on the ground to
complement the work of policymakers and global investors as we try to rewrite the 21st-century story: mankind heading towards a population of 10 billion and the global economy growing from $60tn per year to who knows what, with stresses and strains on political, economic, and ecological systems. The idea behind Slow Money is simple: we need to take some of our money out of the accelerating and complex global financial marketplace,
Berkley of UBS. “Investing in small food enterprises begins to fix these problems at their roots.”
At last count, 15,000 of us had signed
the Slow Money Principles; 2,000 had joined the Slow Money Alliance. Last year, 600 of us got together in Vermont and invested more than $4m in carbon- sinking small food enterprises. This October, even more are expected to gather in San Francisco. Eleven Slow Money chapters have emerged in the US, putting millions of dollars to work. Is there life after fast money? Yes. All the breakthrough cleantech will not be able, by themselves, to put soil fertility together again. But working together, one small food enterprise and one community at a time, we can. ||||
ISSUE 04. SEPTEMBER 2011
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