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