Slow Money Effort

Slow Money Effort

In July we talked with Slow Money Northwest’s Ethan Schaffer about the Farmer Reserve Fund, a loan loss reserve fund launched in partnership with North Coast Credit Union in 2012 to help beginning farmers grow their businesses. Japhet Koteen, Project Manager with Slow Money Northwest, provides an update on how the Farmer Reserve Fund program is doing thus far.

KOTEEN: People have really gotten excited about this. It’s a small program, and we didn’t get a lot of money on the street but it turns out the problem that North Coast Credit Union had a lot of other financial institutions are having - they have money to lend but there’s a shortage of businesses and the new businesses are kind of a big risk. So we’re actually working with another community development finance institution who said, “hey, that’s a great idea. If you can get me $60 thousand in donations, I’ve got a million dollars I can lend out to new businesses.” So, we’re going to try and scale this up and expand it beyond the bounds of North Coast and Viva Farms. We’re in the Pacific Northwest and there are philanthropists and foundations that want to invest in food and want to help build a better local food economy. There’s money out there to do it, it’s just connecting them to the right businesses and helping buy down the risk a little bit so they can say this is has been a good investment for us.

Koteen provides one of the success stories with the Farmer Reserve Fund.

KOTEEN: We sort of launched in the middle of the growing season, and so we haven’t had a lot of new loans taken out, but one of the farmers Santiago Lozano paid back his line of credit - he had a good season, and (the program) worked exactly as we hoped because he is engaged with a credit union, he built his credit score, and he was able to scale his business and have a little bit of a cash cushion so he could survive the season.

Tomorrow Koteen talks about “Seeds of Success”, Washington’s first rural agricultural Individual Development Account program.

 

I’m Lacy Gray and that’s Washington Ag Today on the Ag Information Network. 

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