Category: Food Systems

Crowdfunding the Future of Food

How many great ideas for starting or expanding small community-based food businesses have gone languishing for lack of access to capital – even relatively small amounts? One of the frustrations in growing our regional food economies has been the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules preventing most Americans (all but the richest 2%) from investing in small, local enterprises.

Unless a business can afford $50,000 to $100,000 (or more) to spend on lawyers to prepare private placement memoranda or public offerings, it is effectively prohibited from soliciting funds from private investors in return for a stake in the business. Yet, often it is a budding entrepreneur’s friends, family and community who would love to pitch in to help launch a local company.

Even Unemployed Americans Won’t Take Work as Farmhands

All those Americans who are talking about farming – whether buying from farmers markets, becoming members of CSAs, or building urban farms – aren’t ready to actually work on a farm. Not at current farm wages. Not even if they don’t have a job.

Preserving Our Farmland

Good local food depends on farming and farming requires clean, fertile soils in functional working landscapes. “And once productive farmland is converted to residential or commercial use, it’s converted forever. It’s practically impossible to bring it back,” Steve Ventura, University of Wisconsin, Land Information and Computer Graphics Facility.

The Next Job Generator

With the pressure on to create employment in a faltering economy, local food systems are drawing interest as a possible source of green jobs. But just how many is still a guess. A recent study for the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture by a University of Iowa economist takes a stab at estimating the economic value and employment impact of increasing fruit and vegetable production to satisfy local demand in the six Midwest states of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin.