Flower Farm Financing

Courtesy Slow Money Blog

This post combines the kind of inspiration we got from GROWING A FARMER with the harder to understand information we touched on in THE GENIUS OF MONEY.

One of many innovative "new economy" ventures I've run across is the Slow Money Institute, whose mission (according to their website) is, "To catalyze the flow of capital to local food systems, connecting investors to the places where they live and promoting new principles of fiduciary responsibility that 'bring money back down to earth.' "

Maybe some of you business majors would know what "fiduciary responsibility" means, but it sounds good, solid, and conservative to me.

Anyway, picking up on the BOTANY OF DESIRE (the Tulip/Beauty section we didn't watch—here are two representative clips: Antique Roses and the Wall Street of Flowers) and FIXING THE FUTURE videos we watched in class, I found this recent post on the Slow Money Blog, "How A Zero-Percent Loan Is Helping this Colorado Farm," to be particularly fun as well as enlightening. 

Here's a quote from the article by Don Lareau that made me think: "Oh, not only is a flower farmer really good at writing this blog post, but he's got the intelligence to know when something makes good business sense—duh! Advanced Writing for Business!

After local banks scoffed at us and loans for a new truck seemed way too expensive, we heard about the 2Forks Club, a local Slow Money investment club.... They gave us a $23,500 zero-percent loan, which we are paying back over a few-year period.
The part that amazes me to this day is the degree to which the members of 2Forks worked with us to customize the loan for our benefit. For example, they said, “You are not asking for enough to get a good truck,” so they gave us more than we were originally asking for. “This is not how a bank works!” we thought. If that wasn’t enough, they also looked at our cash flow and structured a bit more time to pay the loan back, with some discretion built in. They understood that we are not selling widgets, that we are dealing with Mother Nature and biology and many variables not in our control, such as late frosts, early heat, hot winds, and the like.

Zephyos Farm owners Daphne Yannakakis (left) and Don Lareau
Courtesy of the Slow Money Blog

Reaction for "The Poetics of Money" from John Bloom's THE GENIUS OF MONEY

Walking the Labyrinth in Hogsback, South Africa
(From "Walk the World's Meditative Labyrinths," Smithsonian.com)

A Zen Koan

If you asked a fish, "How's the water?" most fish would respond, "What's water?" I think in "The Poetics of Money," John Bloom may be asking us to contemplate the "water" of our current economic reality. 

What's the difference between handing a couple of dollars to a strawberry farmer at a Farmer's Market and programming your computer to electronically move millions from one currency or equity (Wells Fargo, for instance) to another in the blink of an eye?

You look the strawberry farmer in the eye, compliment her on the sweetness of the berries, ask how the recent torrential rain affected the current crop, inquire after her son, who just enlisted in the Navy, etc. 

On the other hand, your computer dutifully adds virtual "value" on paper at the end of one day, only to subtract that "value" on another, completely unaware that one of the digital blips indicates Wells Fargo stock. And what you prefer to remain in the dark about is that Wells Fargo is a major source of funding for the Dakota Access Pipeline, which violates the sovereignty of the Sioux people across whose land the pipeline is scheduled to cross, threatening the safety and health of people who not only have been living on the land it passes through for thousands of years, not only have experienced aggression and violation from non-native interests for hundreds of years, but who have not given their permission for it to be built.

Is it "just money"? How is a willfully unconscious digital blip from the magnetic strip on the back of a piece of plastic in my wallet—or from the processor on my laptop or smart phone—moving to another digital receiver 10,000 miles away in a nanosecond different from a lump of rock with the chemical symbol "Au," which much be consciously verified for authenticity by another lump of rock, a touchstone —with the chemical signature SiO2—to determine its relative value....

What have we gained? What have we lost? What is the cost—financially, spiritually, culturally, personally?

What is True: Kristof vs. Miller

Compare Nicholas Kristof's New York Times article, "Husbands are Deadlier Than Terrorists" to the discussion of voter fraud reproduced below.

Questions:

• What do we know about Kristof?*
• What do we know about Miller?**
• What evidence does each present?
• Who or what does each represent?

Source: Media Matters for America, a Web-based, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation 
in the U.S. media.

From ABC's This Week, February 12, 2017

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS (HOST): Let me move on, though, to the question of voter fraud as well. President Trump again this week suggested in a meeting with senators that thousands of illegal voters were bused from Massachusetts to New Hampshire and that’s what caused his defeat in the state of New Hampshire, also the defeat of Senator Kelly Ayotte. That has provoked a response from a member of the Federal Election Commission, Ellen Weintraub, who says, “I call upon the president to immediately share New Hampshire voter fraud evidence so that his allegations may be investigated promptly.” Do have that evidence?

STEPHEN MILLER: I have actually having worked before on a campaign in New Hampshire. I can tell you that this issue of busing voters into New Hampshire is widely known by anyone who’s worked in New Hampshire politics. It's very real. It’s very serious. This morning, on this show, is not the venue for me to lay out all the evidence. But I can tell you this: Voter fraud is a serious problem in this country. You have millions of people who are registered in two states or who are dead who are registered to vote. And you have 14 percent of noncitizens, according to academic research, at a minimum, are registered to vote, which is an astonishing statistic.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You can't make a -- hold on a second. You just claimed again that there was illegal voting in New Hampshire, people bused in from the state of Massachusetts. Do you have any evidence to back that up?

MILLER: I’m saying anybody -- George, go to New Hampshire. Talk to anybody who has worked in politics there for a long time. Everybody is aware of the problem in New Hampshire with respect to --

STEPHANOPOULOS: I’m asking you, as the White House senior -- hold on a second. I’m asking you as the White House senior policy adviser. The president made a statement, saying he was the victim of voter fraud, people are being bused from --

MILLER: And the president -- the president -- the president was.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you have any evidence?

MILLER: If this is an issue that interests you, then we can talk about it more in the future. And we now have our government is beginning to get stood up. But we have a Department of Justice and we have more officials. An issue of voter fraud is something we're going to be looking at very seriously and very hard. But the reality is, is that we know for a fact, you have massive numbers of noncitizens registered to vote in this country. Nobody disputes that. And many, many highly qualified people, like Kris Kobach*, the Kansas secretary of state, have looked deeply into this issue and have confirmed it to be true and have put together evidence. And I suggest you invite Kris Kobach onto your show and he can walk you through some of the evidence of voter fraud in greater detail.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Just for the record, you have provided absolutely no evidence. The president’s made a statement.

MILLER: The White House has provided enormous evidence with respect to voter fraud, with respect to people being registered in more than one state, dead people voting, noncitizens being registered to vote. George, it is a fact and you will not deny it, that there are massive numbers of noncitizens in this country who are registered to vote. That is a scandal. We should stop the presses. And, as a country, we should be aghast about the fact that you have people who have no right to vote in this country registered to vote, canceling out the franchise of lawful citizens of this country. That’s the story we should be talking about. And I’m prepared to go on any show, anywhere, anytime, and repeat it and say the president of the United States is correct 100 percent. [ABC, This Week With George Stephanopoulos, 2/12/17; ABC News, 2/12/17]

Stephanopoulos is right. The White House continues to provide zero evidence to back up its claims of voter fraud. Officials instead retreat to the same bogus talking points that have been repeatedly shown to be false.It’s pretty ridiculous to cite research in a way that even the researcher says is inappropriate, and yet Miller keeps saying 14 percent of noncitizens are registered to vote. The Republican governor of New Hampshire has admitted that he was wrong to say buses of illegal voters voted in the election, and yet Miller shamelessly suggests that is the case. Miller cites a supposed expert on voter fraud, Kobach, who has been mocked for failing to prove his own claims of voter fraud. Miller also repeats a claim about people being registered to vote in two states, even though that is not an example of voter fraud. 

Miller earns Four Pinocchios — over and over again. [The Washington Post, 2/12/17] 

http://mediamatters.org/research/2017/02/13/white-house-put-stephen-miller-four-sunday-shows-dodge-lie-and-attack-media/215319

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*Nicholas Kristof has been a columnist for The New York Times since 2001. He grew up on a farm in Oregon, graduated from Harvard, studied law at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, and then studied Arabic in Cairo. He was a longtime foreign correspondent for The New York Times and speaks Chinese, Japanese and other languages.

Mr. Kristof has won two Pulitzer Prizes for his coverage of Tiananmen Square and the genocide in Darfur, along with many humanitarian awards such as the Anne Frank Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

With his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, he has written several books, most recently “A Path Appears” (September 2014) about how to make a difference. Their last book, “Half the Sky,” was a No. 1 best seller.

Mr. Kristof, who has lived on four continents and traveled to more than 150 countries, was The New York Times’s first blogger and has 1.4 million followers on Twitter, 1.3 million followers on Google+ and 600,000 followers on Facebook.

Mr. Kristof and Ms. WuDunn are the parents of Gregory, Geoffrey and Caroline. Mr. Kristof enjoys running, backpacking and having his Chinese corrected by his children. Read his blog, On the Ground. Follow him on Google+, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. His column appears every Sunday and Thursday.
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** http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/31/politics/stephen-miller-immigration-trump-administration/