SustainableWork

Mark and I got to talk with a wonderful group at a meeting last week in Chicago. It was a gathering of the Good Food Network of the Upper Midwest.

I got to reconnect with friends and meet people I'd only known through email. There was a wide-ranging discussion about our local food processing proposals. People in the room included universities, foundations, research institutions, food sales and distribution firms, and funding collaboratives representing local governments and large public institutional food buyers.

It was flat-out invigorating to participate. The very best parts of the discussion were the ones that pushed us hardest to justify the concept and details of our local foods processing project.

The give and take was really great. Mark and I got to disagree with each other on new stuff right in front of them. It was like doing the most fun parts of a startup in front of a live audience. I love my job.

These good folks are in a national conversation sponsored by the National Good Food Network (NGFN). This arises from the Wallace Center and Winrock International, which are all linked below.

Here is a short introduction to the NGFN: "The National Good Food Network is bringing together people from all parts of the rapidly emerging good food system – producers, buyers, distributors, advocates, investors and funders – to create a community dedicated to scaling up good food sourcing and access."

"The challenge presented by the food system is our opportunity—to revolutionize business models, develop new market relationships, and add value to traditional supply chain infrastructure, so that the growing business of good food is sown in the values of good food – all the way from farm to fork."

This was very interesting to me to be included in this larger national conversation about revolutionizing business models to meet clear market challenges. These are significant players, all well connected into the agriculture and food industries, and they are nurturing and inspiring change, not running from it. My kind of meeting. My kind of people.

As we roll out the Dirftless Foods / Iowa County Initiative, we're down to a few key details as I see it. We have a choice of doing this with largely private money or focusing on government grants. A hybrid model is likely and the implications of that decision will keenly influence the legal structure the project adopts.

Seeing how the Good Food Network is reaching across many traditionally closed boundaries to create new conversations about change and effectiveness, I feel much more confident about helping build a hybrid business model for our local foods processing facilities. They are after results not more discussion. That's what I want for this project: long-lasting, high quality results that benefit all stakeholders.

Our ideas for community sponsored development fit well into this model of a hybrid organization. We are designing a model to attract the investment from local investors and local groups, regional governments, as well as regional and national enterprises both public and private.

As the GFN says of themselves, "The National Good Food Network represents practitioners across the value chain building a new food system that rewards sustainable production, treats growers and workers fairly, improves the health of families and the wealth of communities, and meets the growing demand for healthy, green, fair, affordable food."

Sign me up. Let's get this done.

Many thanks to the Good Food Network of the Upper Midwest for a really illuminating introduction to their work and, best of all, a new way of looking at mine.



National Good Food Network

The Wallace Center

Short biography of Henry Wallace

Labels: business plans, Driftless Foods, entrepreneurship, funding, innovation, new product development, regional fair trade

When Woody Tasch from Slow Money came to town last week I was startled to hear him respectfully and with gratitude reference the book Small is Beautiful.

I'd read Slow Money and was struck by the possibilities but hadn't connected the work to E. F. Schumacher and his great book, "Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered."

But this is a natural 21st century marriage. Efficient, market-driven financial discipline, with sustainable goals and methods, (Slow Money) meets smart, appropriate-scale technologies, in this case taking the form of local foods and sustainable agriculture.

What a magic time for this combination to occur. Demand is off the chart for local foods. Production and processing techniques are faster, smarter, cheaper. Tools for design, organizing, marketing, sales and distribution have never been better or less expensive. I'm back to the fact that this is indeed the Renaissance age of entrepreneurship, and it's just beginning.

Food is an issue whose time has come. There is a wonderful quote from Wisconsin's own Aldo Leopold in his Sand County Almanac that ties in here. Think about the following Leopold quote in terms of sustainable agriculture, local processing, local foods and healthy, more compelling communities; "By and large our present problem is one of attitudes and implements. We are remodeling the Alhambra with a steam-shovel, and are proud of our yardage. We shall hardly relinquish the shovel, which after all has many good points, but we are in need of gentler and more objective criteria for its successful use."

Free markets have nurtured the greatest freedoms in human history, but we need to apply those tools in less destructive, more successful ways especially in the way we feed and nurture ourselves and the place we live.

As a group of us works to design an efficient, reproducible local foods processing system with our Driftless Foods, Iowa County initiative, none of us are taking anything as gospel. Small is beautiful not because it sounds good as a theory on paper but because technology has evolved small, smart, nimble processing equipment that makes better use of resources and produces higher, more sustainable profits. That's why small is beautiful. Schumacher was [is!] right.

Small is a matter of perspective certainly. The multiple local foods processing plants we are designing to work in a self-supportive coalition, are not garden sheds. They will take a lot of money by anyone's standards. They will be technologically and environmentally brilliant. Small? No, compared to farmyard vegetable stands. Yes, compared to the Wall Street backed food system now falling apart.

One of my favorite Schumacher quotes sums up what a new local foods processing system might look like: "The aim ought to be to obtain the maximum amount of well being with the minimum amount of consumption." That is, an ultra lean, wise production system that creates great multi-generational jobs for a community, passing the bulk of the profits into a pool that all contributors are compensated from equitably.

I'm going to post the first Driftless Foods Cooperative white paper that we produced by separate headline following this. It's a short overview of the project.

Small is beautiful because it is smart, sustainable and profitable. Above all else small is valuable because it is reproducible .

In economic terms, that's a beautiful thing.



The E.F. Schumacher Society

Small is Beautiful. Wikipedia

The Aldo Leopold Foundation

Aldo Leopold. Wikipedia

The Aldo Leopold quote in this post is from the dedications page of the 25th Anniversary edition of Small is Beautiful.

Labels: boomers, bootstrapping, entrepreneurship, green tech, innovation, regional fair trade, slow money, startups, The slow start up movement

A great week for local food processing.

What a week of positive steps. Entrepreneurship is flowering in the world of local foods in ways that I have never seen. This is the renaissance age of entrepreneurship and it's happening extensively in local foods.

Several great highlights to report.

Wood Tasch was in Madison last Monday for their 5th Slow Money Institute. Woody and Slow Money are linked below.

My friend Bartlett Durand is from Otter Creek Organics in Iowa County, home farm of Gary Zimmer, a new friend I greatly admire and United States 2008 US Organic Farmer of the Year. Bartlett summed up the positive emotion in the room on the day of the Slow Money presentation when he fists-up challenged the room and the world with, "It starts here. It's starts now." That was not rhetoric. It was 'run toward the sounds of the guns' stuff (listen to the interview with Woody linked below to get an idea of the buzz in the room all day). The time for local foods is now. And it is erupting in Wisconsin in many amazing ways. Local food development and local food processing models will emerge from our region that will empower people worldwide.

I was privileged to be able to make a presentation about our Iowa County initiative, the Driftless Foods Co-Op, at the Slow Money Institute (SMI), along with my great partner in this adventure, Mark Olson from Renaissance Farm. Margaret Bau, legendary cooperative developer from USDA Rural Development and a member of our Driftless Foods organizing committee, also presented to the SMI.

The next day a few of us had an amazing two hour meeting with Mr. Rod Nilsestuen, our Secretary of Agriculture Trade and Consumer Protection in Wisconsin.

Mr. Nilsestuen was over-the-top helpful. Mark Olson and Lois Federman, both good friends I've written about, were at this gathering. When I think about all the meetings I've been to in my life, I count this among the few that I would call the most productive. We got to discuss the Iowa County initiative that we outlined at Slow Money the day before. Because we are proposing to organize as a cooperative, Secretary Nilsestuen's background and bias-for-action were transformative. What he was able to bring to our discussion was immeasurably helpful. Mark and I were executing valuable action steps before we hit the parking lot based on what we learned from the previous couple of hours.

Mr. Nilsestuen was the leader of the Wisconsin Federation of Cooperatives for 24 years, which represented about 860 co-ops with 1.8 million members in endeavors ranging from finance and insurance to rural development and agriculture. In 2003, Mr. Nilsestuen was inducted into the National Cooperative Hall of Fame at the National Federation of Cooperatives.

Driftless Foods will be organized as a cooperative because it makes sense for this specific application. I have not been a co-op guy in the past, but there are some inherently beautiful ways to design systems of interdependent, self-supporting enterprises that are perfect for a cooperative structure.

And as for the bigger picture of creating those enterprises and nurturing entrepreneurship...

As a working entrepreneur, the only secret I can reliably pass on about what kind of businesses are best to start is that you should look for what's broken and create opportunities from that. I can't ever remember a moment where entrepreneurship was on such a verge to flourish and succeed.

In the world of local foods, local food processing is the missing link. We have created enormous demand for local foods with consumers, food stores, and restaurants. The production, or supply side, is not being developed in ways that are sufficient to meet this demand.

My immersion into Slow Money early in the week followed by clear, valuable, tactical support for action from key stakeholders in government, academia, and the investor community was invigorating. This is a moment for local foods and for economies of all shapes and sizes to, as Bartlett said above, recognize that the time to change is 'right here, right now'.

I am personally enchanted with the work of Slow Money, and I am empowered by the vision of Mr. Nilsestuen.

I've been a working entrepreneur for more than 35 years. I have never in my life seen this level of commitment to entrepreneurship and creating new enterprises. Watching it happen in the world of local foods is breathtakingly cool.

I can't wait for next week!



Woody Tasch interview with Bill Lubing

Secretary Nilsestuen's CV at the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture Trade and Consumer Protection.

Otter Creek Organics


Lubing Creative

Slow Money new friend Odessa Piper: "Local is the distance the heart can travel." Odessa is the founder of the world renown L'Etoile Restaurant in Madison. She has promised to share her essay behind this quote in a future post.

Labels: boomers, bootstrapping, business plans, entrepreneurship, new product development, open source economic development, regional fair trade, slow money, startups, The slow start up movement

I have been smitten by the ideas championed by Woody Tasch in a wonderful book titled "Slow Money. Investing as if food, farms, and fertility mattered".

The title is a riff on the theme of slow foods, the concept of beautifully prepared simple, local foods, natural diversity and nurturing community. Mr. Tasch has devoted his life to investment capital and knows those ropes well. He has now turned his skill toward building an organization that takes the principals of investment and applies them to the widespread needs of our broken food system through his Slow Money Alliance.

I've pulled a set of representative quotes from this great book below. Mr. Tasch will be giving a public talk in Madison, WI next Sunday evening, July 26. Details follow this post.

What draws me to this effort is the realism that is embedded throughout. Throughout my life I've watched many, many well-intentioned 'movements' dissolve into inaction. This Slow Money effort feels significantly different. They are planning their rollout of millions of dollars of investments into Small Food Enterprises (SFEs) through a series of Institutes held around the country. Madison will host the next Slow Money Institute, and I'm honored to be involved as a presenter. I will be discussing the '760 square mile incubator' we are creating in Iowa County, WI. That effort will create and integrate multiple SFEs, primarily local processing facilities, under the guidance of a leadership co-op that follows the operating principles for economic development first created at Mondregon in Spain.

I highly recommend 'Slow Money', by Woody Tasch. I do so mostly because Slow Money does not present itself as another 'ism' or another theory. Slow Money is a tool for our times.

Check out some quotes from the book:

"It falls to us to undertake a new project of system design: the creation of new forms of intermediation that catalyze the transition from a commerce of extraction and consumption to a commerce of preservation and restoration". NOTE: It is not left to someone else, the challenge is directed to "us."

There are many new thoughtful investors and angel investment groups beginning to focus on early stage companies that create commercial solutions to social and environmental problems.

"A 'patient capital' marketplace is emerging to better serve such companies, since most are not easy candidates for the same dollars that are seeking the next Google. Patient capital does not yet exist as an organized or disciplined asset class; it is the gestalt that emerges as socially responsible investing matures and the wave of triple-bottom-line [social, environmental and economic accounting] entrepreneurs and investors builds… Applied to the food sector, patient capital becomes slow money - whose name carries with it more than a doff of the cap to Slow Food, the international NGO that promotes biodiversity, artisan food traditions, heirloom varieties and connections between small farmers and consumers. Slow money can be thought of as a subsector, or sub-asset class of patient capital, focused with appropriate patience on the health of soil and bioregion."

If you are a thinking of becoming an entrepreneur, now is your time. If you are an investor looking to go beyond 'social investing', now is your time. I believe slow money is a real tool that will have real positive consequences, right down to the farm family with the best tomato chutney recipe, somewhere out there in our beautiful rural landscape. The time to fix this mess in right here. Right now.

Mr Tasch discusses a new kind of market that is rapidly developing around slow money. "We need a market that rewards humility and promotes patience and invites the participation of all those individuals who will sleep better at night knowing that some of their dollars are swirling around cyberspace a little bit slower, lending a little bit less of their energy to the economic engine that brought us, last year, 8 million light trucks and SUVs, and who knows how many million Twinkies. We need a peaceful market, a market that rewards peaceful companies, a market that dares to recognize explicitly, publicly and financially, that growth, growth, growth is predicated on dislocation and churn and continuously reinvented and unsatisfiable consumer demand, and that these conditions constitute a form of economic violence."

There are many, many more quotes highlighted in my dog-eared copy of Slow Money. Too many to put into a single post.

As the soul of Sustainable Work is entrepreneurship, let me close with a beautiful piece that helped me knit together the ideas of rural economies and entrepreneurship as I started in my current role doing rural economic development.

"Entrepreneurs and farmers are the poets of the economy. They are holders of ambiguity and risk. They cultivate interstitial spaces, where demand and need and aspiration coexist in a mildly turbulent state of chaotic possibility. They continuously test the boundaries of quality and quantity, as a poet tests the boundaries of denotation and connotation. Ideas in a business plan; seeds in potting soil; rhymes in search of new reasons."

Great language. Great concepts. A thoroughly great book.

This is the Renaissance age of entrepreneurship and it's just beginning, my entrepreneur/farmer/poet friends. Forward!


The Slow Money web site

The next Slow Money Institute (Madison, WI), will be Monday, July 27th. Woody Tasch will give a public talk on Sunday, July 26th at 7:30 p.m. at Morphy Hall on the University of Wisconsin campus, 455 North Park Street in Madison.

Triple botton line, Wikipedia

Labels: entrepreneurship, open source economic development, regional fair trade, slow money, The slow start up movement

Since moving into rural economic development I have learned many new perspectives for thinking about how to make things happen appropriately.

When I worked in heavy industry, our challenge was to get international as fast as possible. That fit the situation, and it fit the market.

Now I am privileged to be able to work with food and farmers, along with artists, and a wonderful quilt of small and large enterprises. I'm learning new markets and searching for models that will add real value to the communities I get to work in.

Entrepreneurs look for problems to solve. That's where our opportunities are. When I look around rural economic development I see a really unusual problem. There are customers galore but very little infrastructure in place to support the production and marketing efforts needed to fill the demand.

My friend Lois Federman, a farmer (Marr's Valley View Farms, their family farm since 1874), head of the great 'Something Special From Wisconsin' program, and an all round great observer of ag market trends helped me focus on this issue.

According to Lois, we have done an outstanding job of educating consumers and food retailers of the value of buying local and regional foods. We have created the demand. The problem is that we have not created the support infrastructure to fill the buy-local supply chain.

Specifically Lois Federman discussed the need for what she calls 'local food processing' to match the demand for local food purchases. I really love the phrase. It also matches the experiment we're building out in Iowa County, WI, to create a series of small, smart, nimble, interrelated food and ag processing plants at a county-wide scale.

Local food processing does not mean tiny unregulated food funnels in people's kitchens. Like technology in every other industry, ag processing tech can now create wonderful efficiencies of scale at points on that curve that used to be reserved for only the largest, most capital intensive plants. Now the equipment is faster, smarter and cheaper. Processing tools can be rapidly swapped in and out to match supply and demand in real time.

You don't need large monolithic food processing plants to reach economies of scale. Local foods can be gathered locally, processed locally, and distributed locally in ways that would be impossible for the large processors to reproduce. You can achieve economies of scale with smart new tools and business organization models that match the markets, that match the consumer demands of this early 21st century world we live in.

I know this to be true. We're running numbers for our first plant now and what's emerging looks to me like the early days of the Internet and the efficiencies that brought to enterprise. It feels like lean manufacturing and Six Sigma meet winter squash.

So I thank my friend Lois Federman for the concept of local food processing. I think it's the key to growing not only the local foods market but to growing farmers of all kinds and the communities they live in.


Lois Federman's family farm

Something Special From Wisconsin program

Labels: business plans, entrepreneurship, marketing, new product development, regional fair trade, The slow start up movement

I usually use these posts to share something enlightening that works in support of my premise that we need to create economic security for ourselves and for our communities by making jobs through new enterprises.

For folks who have tagged along on these essays, some of what I do for my day jobs has come through. This post will be one of those essays, following up on a couple of recent ones about developing new smarter, faster, cheaper startups.

I currently am privileged to work in rural economic development in a very special place, Iowa County, Wisconsin. It's immediately west of Madison and just up the road from Dubuque, where IBM has just transformed the economic landscape by moving a huge data support center there. The landscape of where I work is spectacular. It's called the 'Driftless region' because the landscape has never been flattened by glaciers. It is a land of ancient mountains and pristine valleys, now softened by time into a scale that is so pleasant I can't do it justice.

This beautiful upper Midwest landscape is surrounded by 35 million people within a few hours drive. The rise of regional economics, especially in foods is compelling. In service to this economic and geographic landscape I'm working with wonderful new friends to launch a new job creation platform we hope to make transparent and reproducible in other counties, and other states. If we do it well enough it will work in other continents. That would be a good gift from the upper Midwest Driftless region I love so much.

So, here's a first report from the field.

We held a kickoff meeting for interested stakeholders in a wonderful one room schoolhouse built in 1875. Just down the hill from Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesen, it now serves as the Town hall for the Town of Wyoming in Iowa County. When we first assembled our mailing list 12 days before the meeting, we only had 15 people on the list. As word spread during those first days, over 200 people had asked to be included. When the day came, I sat in the empty schoolhouse whistling past the graveyard as they say. When the time came however, the building came alive.

More than 50 people from all over Wisconsin attended. We had a wonderful group of farmers, food buyers, ag specialists, investors, community bankers, people from every place on the political spectrum, University folks, people from USDA Rural Development, and on and on. This is a topic people really want to delve into.

And we did.

The gist of what we are proposing is the creation of a leadership co-op based on a model developed in Mondregon, in the Basque region of Spain. They start and launch new interrelated enterprises based on a proven system of training, research, financing and mentorship. [See links at the end]. Rather than gush about the good stuff, let me highlight one number. When new enterprises are created under this model the success rate for those new businesses after 5 years is 97%. You read that right. In doing so they have created about 200,000 good paying sustainable jobs.

What this means is that investors, who typically have to wrench huge returns out of startup investments because so many fail, can now approach this model with a sense that their risks are largely mitigated, and they can participate in the economics of these emerging enterprises with longer term, more secure return expectations.

What this would mean to my beautiful county is that we can create a leadership co-op of a few key visionaries who are not afraid to fail and who hold a new vision for creating jobs and building economic independence in a real and lasting way.

In a post I put up earlier this month I talked about smarter, faster, cheaper economic development models for rural economic development.

Our new effort in support of this plan is what we are doing about it. We are calling the effort the Driftless Foods Co-Op. The people that are coming to join this new effort are amazing. I've done many startups before and I have never ever seen talent and ethics like this emerge.

We are working to develop the financing and the infrastructure to begin processing foods that we refer to produced and marketed under 'regional fair trade' standards.

We are forming the leadership co-op now. It is my hope to begin build the first food plant so that it can start processing this year. I would like to build 2 more plants the following year under the umbrella of the Driftless Foods Co-Op. The following year I hope to add 3 more plants.

We are promising our stakeholders and anyone who cares to listen that we are doing this as an experiment. We want our work to be used to create case studies and documentation such that our efforts and policies can be reproduced elsewhere, with different ag assets, probably even non-ag assets. I posit that it's the process that needs to be honed to a reproducible model. Given all that entails - financing, production, mentor relations, community relations, worker participation, buyer transparency, and on and on - this little experiment can be used to make the economics of business creation and job growth far more sustainable and valuable than the policies responsible for what we're experiencing now.

This is my kind of economic development. Work that drives revenue and security to the producers and the communities they live in. It's an energetic, well-grounded launch with wonderful people and noble, sustainable goals.

If we do it right, we just may be able to change the world in small but important ways that last for generations.

Happy Independence Day!


Mondragon in the Basque region of northern Spain is the shining example of an entrepreneurial economy shaped by over 100 co-ops owned by 200,000 people. Thanks to the Mondragon co-ops, the people of the Basque region enjoy one of the highest standards of living in all of Europe while being phenomenally entrepreneurial. Mondragon is proof that co-op ownership can work on a grand scale and compete globally.

Article about our Driftless Foods Co-Op kickoff meeting in the Wisconsin State Journal

Download our working definition of regional fair trade, in PDF

The Mondragon model comes to the inner city Mid West.

Labels: boomers, business plans, entrepreneurship, new product development, regional fair trade, slow money, startups, The slow start up movement

My wife and business partner for decades, Mary, describes it as making the brochure on your way to the sales call.

While I counsel that entrepreneurship is a slow process, the day-to-day activity level can be breathtakingly fast. It can sometimes feel like you're leaning into a howling wind tunnel at a 45 degree angle and struggling to stay rooted to the ground. Making the brochure on the way to the sales call stuff.

I am working on an economic development project with a wonderful new friend, Mark, a farmer, entrepreneur, and regional legend who lives in Wyoming Township, Iowa County, Wisconsin. There is a link to Mark and his Renaissance Farm below.

Mark and I are working with others on a project to cite a vegetable processing and freezing facility in the Village of Highland, WI. Highland has many strategic assets from an economic development point of view, but more importantly for me personally, it is also the pie capitol of Wisconsin.

Our goal is to help build a business model that allows sustainable, regional agricultural producers to thrive. It is also to create a robust, nimble, and sustainable production system that is sufficiently scaled to make that happen.

Mark and I were talking about how to describe this yesterday as we traveled to meet an important new market partner. Organic is a legal term, and while we certainly want to process organic certified foods, there will also be a role for farmers meeting our new organization's goals of regional and sustainable.

Mark said 'what about calling this process regional fair trade'?

Lovely. Just right. The standards for fair trade are generally understood and acceptable. The idea of applying those standards to sustainable regional economic development make perfect sense.

Mark bet himself that I'd use the term 'regional fair trade' during the meeting we were traveling to. He won the bet. I had it out in our introductions. Mary would have smiled knowingly.

I like the term a lot because it lets me speak to economic development on an appropriate scale with the kind of passion I feel for the entrepreneurs and the wide range of stakeholders who want to support them.

We kicked around what a standard for regional fair trade might look like and, riffing off Wikipedia, think this may be a starting place for the discussion:

Regional fair trade is a market-based approach to empower producers and promote regional economic sustainability. The work advocates the payment of fair prices, communities of all kinds working together for the benefit of everyone in their region, and sustainable environmental standards.

Regional fair trade's strategic intent is to create sustainable information, production, and marketing systems that enable producers, consumers, businesses, institutions, and communities to work together to jointly grow regional economic self-sufficiency and security. Regional fair trade creates this environment through 'open source', transparent, reproducible economic development programs that support the region's people, their livelihoods, and their environment.

This idea is not meant in any way to diminish the goals and roles of global fair trade efforts. Those must be supported of course. This idea of regional fair trade honors that groundbreaking, world-changing approach and applies it to new geographies. Neither is excluded. Both are required.

Regional fair trade. Open source economic development. Time to make a brochure….


Mark Olson and Renaissance Farm

A great article about Mark Olson and Renaissance Farm

Village of Highland, Iowa County, Wisconsin

Town of Wyoming, Iowa County, Wisconsin

Labels: open source economic development, regional fair trade, slow money, The slow start up movement