Buying local, artisanal, and organic is one way to help change the way our food is made — but getting a real alternative production system off the ground will also take cold, hard cash.

We’ve written about the Slow Money Alliance on Grist before — it sprang up as an alternative to “fast money” and what founder Woody Tasch calls our “out-of-control capital markets.” Slow Money steers investment dollars to small food and farm businesses. And it’s no coincidence that it sounds an awful lot like Slow Food, the movement that came to life in the late 1980s in response to the rise of fast food and the breakdown of local food traditions.

But, until recently, Slow Money has been aimed at people who can write a check for $5,000 or $50,000 to finance a food or farm startup. Now the organization has made it easier for people like you and me — people who want to see big changes in the food system but don’t have big dollars — to get involved through a new fund called the Soil Trust.

Now, the regular Joes can chip in as little as $50 online to help organic farmers, butchers, and jam-makers grow, and small-scale meat processors and food hubs get off the ground. The Soil Trust is meant to democratize the world of venture capital for people without deep pockets or investment experience but who happen to care about where their food comes from.

“If you want there to be Slow Food, we have to use more than our consumer dollars,” Tasch says. “We also have to use investor dollars.”

Small food businesses need help. Some large banks have all but given up on lending to small businesses, and venture capitalists often can’t be bothered with small food companies in particular because they’re never going to see the explosive growth you might find with high-tech startups. In this world of “fast money,” small food businesses may appear as unattractive as a winter tomato.

If it weren’t for Slow Money, companies like Austin, Texas-based Greenling might not even be around. The company takes food from local organic farms and delivers to people ordering through a website. Raising capital has been a constant headache, says Greenling owner Mason Arnold.

“In seven years, I’ve had three months where I wasn’t actively fundraising … Traditional banks don’t want to touch us,” Arnold says.

So he went to the 2010 Slow Money conference and raised several hundred thousand dollars that he spent making the company’s website easier to use.

“We weren’t able to meet the demands of growth,” Arnold says. “People wanted to buy from us, but they were frustrated by our website. If we couldn’t have fixed that, I think we might have chased away more customers than we earned and we would have gone under.”

Arnold went back to the third Slow Money conference a year later and drummed up even more cash. It was used to expand to Dallas, and in a few short months, Greenling will be delivering organic food throughout Houston, a place where nearly six in 10 adults are obese. Soon he plans to expand throughout the Southeast.

“Slow Money,” Arnold says, “has been integral to the growth of this organization.”

The Slow Money Alliance already works with angel investors and foundations, which write checks for $50,000 to $500,000, and the $5,000 investors who may pull a little from their retirement accounts and attend their local Slow Money chapter meetings. Those who give to the Soil Trust, on the other hand, may never go to a meeting.

“They just say, ‘Right on, make it happen. Here’s my 50 bucks. Put it to work,’” says Tasch.

Most Soil Trust investments will be loans to small food and farm businesses, ranging from a couple thousand dollars up to a couple million. The bulk will fall into the $20,000 to $50,000 range. The Soil Trust may also offer other types of financing, such as equity investments, grants, and royalty arrangements, where a percentage of a company’s revenue is used to pay back the investment.

Tasch introduced the Soil Trust fund to the Slow Money network in October. By April, when the next Slow Money conference takes place in Boulder, Colo., he hopes the Soil Trust will have received enough donations that it can begin investing in promising food businesses spotlighted at the conference. About 30 or so small food entrepreneurs pitch their business models to investors at each national gathering.

They are companies like AgSquared, a small business in New York that raised $20,000 through Slow Money to help it create software tools that can make recordkeeping and planning easier for farmers. Or there’s Brooklyn Grange, a commercial farm that grows organic fruits and vegetables on 2.5 acres of rooftops in Brooklyn and Queens. The venture raised $25,000 through Slow Money, and began operating at a profit during its second year.

One of the group’s investment principles involves putting back into the soil what is taken out. To that end, the Soil Trust was created as a nonprofit. Investments put into the fund are considered tax-deductible donations, which are pooled together and invested in food businesses.

The model, where all returns stay within the Soil Trust, is similar to Habitat for Humanity or the Acumen Fund, which finances social entrepreneurs trying to tackle global poverty. But the Soil Trust is the only grassroots group of this type that is funded with small donations and focused exclusively on local food systems, Tasch says.

“Those funds get to be recycled, recaptured, and reinvested,” Tasch says. “So you’re really creating something that’s more about putting back, rather than taking out.”

Do you ever wonder how many vendors at your local farmers market are really local?

Cameron Reed did. So she mapped them for a school project. As she expected, the vast majority — more than 80 percent — did indeed come from within 100 miles, but Reed was surprised to find that a wide mix of products were grown and produced even closer to home — within 50 miles of where she lived.

An updated version of the map Reed made will appear in an upcoming collection called Food: An Atlas, which will chart the world of food in some of its most inspiring and somber dimensions — from food production, distribution, and food security to cuisine. Like many of those behind the atlas, Reed hopes to inspire people to think more closely about the origins of their food.

“It’s a book about the geography of food,” says Darin Jensen, a University of California at Berkeley professor and cartographer who is spearheading the project. Jensen issued a call for maps in June and the submissions began pouring in. Food: An Atlas is crowdsourced from roughly 100 volunteers spread across parts of the globe, including a loose band of what Jensen calls “guerrilla cartographers.” That means they created maps and contributed to the project voluntarily, not because they are under assignment.

You can also call Jensen a guerrilla publisher. He will take a non-traditional approach and self-publish Food: An Atlas, courtesy of a Kickstarter campaign that ends Tuesday. (As of last week, it had already hit its $20,000 goal, as well as additional $1,500 to create a website for the project and release it as an e-book.)

The $20,000 will be used to print the first 1,100 copies. The balance will go to print additional copies and toward sales and distribution, which will begin in early December.

Some maps, such as one of a tomato tour of Europe, raise interesting questions about global trade. Spain, for example, exports some of its best tomatoes out of the country at a premium, according to author Lucia Argüelles of Barcelona, but it also imports tomatoes for consumption from other nations, such as Morocco and France, or from the Netherlands during the winter. These inefficiencies exacerbate environmental problems, such as climate change and air pollution.

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Several maps look to the past, such as the one that examines how the vast agricultural landscape of Los Angeles County has largely disappeared over the last 70 years. There is also a series of six maps that depict worldwide agricultural land use every 50 years from 1700. Taken together, the maps show an incredible intensification of agriculture in areas such as North America, Russia, and Europe.

Even with this huge expansion and intensification of agriculture around the world — in many places we’re pretty close to our agricultural limits — there are still several pristine areas that haven’t been used for farming, says cartographer Bill Rankin, referring to undeveloped regions in the Amazon, Congo, and Southeast Asia.

“We already know the rainforests are areas of key concern, but I really think the maps underscore the kinds of pressure they’re facing, and the pressures are agricultural,” says Rankin, a professor of science history at Yale.

Other maps in the collection are downright sobering, such as one that outlines the farmers markets in large U.S. metro areas, with an overlay of the number that accept food stamps, which is smaller than what Jensen would like to see.

“There are a lot of farmers markets — the Northeast and West Coast have an abundance — but that food is mostly available to people who can pay cash dollars, and farmers markets aren’t cheap anymore,” Jensen says. “We’re withholding accessibility to fresh, often organic produce, from the people who sometimes need it the most.”

There are also maps for children and a chapter focused on conceptual maps. And some maps are designed to bring out your inner food nerd, particularly in the cuisine section. For example, there is Meatpaper magazine’s map that takes you on a journey of the world’s familiar and exotic national dishes, which include Peking duck in China, poutine in Canada, ceviche in Peru, and the hamburger in the U.S.

Another calls out all the community supported agriculture (CSA) and community supported fishery programs in Massachusetts (i.e. the food delivery programs dedicated to supporting small farms and fishermen).

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And who wouldn’t be interested in a map of the U.S. “beer shed,” which plots the dominant regions for growing the ingredients used to make most beers? If you live in Oakland, a map of the taco trucks in that area would probably come in very handy.

Jensen plans to take Kickstarter donors who have given generously to the project on a tour of those same taco trucks with the core team behind Food: An Atlas. Backers may also receive a copy of the book, other dining rewards, he says, and, of course, the chance “to be counted among the guerrillas.”

Soon she had the idea for an “edible churchyard,” reminiscent of Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard project. The concept evolved and is about to become a reality, as King plans to launch as many as six faith farms this year in collaboration with a local church and nonprofits. Congregations will have the final word on what to do with the food, but King now envisions a larger network of small urban farms being developed, including schools, homes, and nonprofits, where the produce grown in the gardens will be aggregated, distributed, and sold at a profit.

King says the idea may not have evolved if she hadn’t attended an accelerator program from Local Food Lab. The company helps people develop business plans for food and farm start-ups that are both financially sustainable and environmentally responsible, with a big-picture goal of becoming the de-facto global resource for local food entrepreneurship. (Similar to incubators, which can last years, accelerators are usually intensive, boot-camp-like). For a $2,500 fee, Local Food Lab participants receive six weeks of mentoring and feedback on food and farm concepts that address sustainability challenges in the food system. They finish with a complete business plan and a chance to pitch their ideas to a group of investors and stakeholders on the final day.

Cynthia King attended an accelerator to help her take her idea for edible church gardens to the next level.

“It was absolutely a catalyst,” King says of the program. “It turned my idea into something real and forced me to ask questions I wasn’t asking myself. It gave me the belief that I could do this.”

Local Food Lab founders Krysia Zajonc and Mateo Aguilar launched the company this summer with seed money from the Entrepreneurial Greenhouse Program at Columbia Business School (Zajonc graduated in May, Aguilar graduates next year).

The pair had previously launched three small food start-ups in Costa Rica, where they learned many lessons the hard way and found few resources aimed at food businesses.

With a background in tech — she was an early Facebook employee — Zajonc wants to help the sustainable food community tap into a network of like-minded food companies and become more business-savvy. That means creating financial projections and budgets, establishing their brands, and selling the concepts to investors who may be more accustomed to the larger profit margins found in other sectors, such as technology.

“As it becomes crystal clear that we need some major changes to our food system, we need to support these food and farm entrepreneurs regardless of how large the return on investment will be,” Zajonc says.

The pair started in Silicon Valley, but they’re thinking big. The for-profit benefit corporation will host a third accelerator program in Palo Alto, Calif., in February before bringing the program to New York next spring. They’d like to expand Local Food Lab to other major cities and offer resources in smaller cities and outside the U.S. Applicants hail from across the country, as well as from Chile, Mexico, and India.

“I would like it to go international and be the best place for people to find out about entrepreneurship and innovation in local food and get started,” Zajonc says.

This kind of small food business resource isn’t totally original, but isn’t exactly common either, says Caleb Zigas, executive director of La Cocina, a similar program in San Francisco that inspired Zajonc. Local Food Lab’s Palo Alto location has a kitchen that can be used to test recipes, but any food products that are to be sold to consumers must be made in a commercial kitchen. Many traditional food incubators are attached to commercial kitchen space as an asset, Zigas says, pointing to programs that offer some of the same types of services, such as the Appalachian Center for Economic Networks in Ohio, Rutgers Food Innovation Center in New Jersey, and Food Craft Institute in Oakland.

There are roughly 1,250 business incubators in the U.S., mostly serving a variety of sectors, says Linda Knopp, director of knowledge services at the National Business Incubation Association. Many offer intensive, accelerator-type programs like Local Food Lab’s, but less than 5 percent are dedicated to food.

Interest in food incubators is growing, Knopp says. La Cocina, which also offers consulting services for food incubators, receives a ton of requests for information.

The Bay Area is a hot spot for these programs — it’s a natural extension of the area’s burgeoning local and artisan food scene — but Zigas notes that many in cities like New York are also investing in incubation for food enterprise.

“That’s pretty big evidence that other people are thinking about it, that they see it as an economic driver,” he says.

Even with all the interest, Zigas says no one has hired La Cocina yet to help launch a food incubator. This may not be surprising considering the many challenges such a project often faces, such as a diverse food industry and access to capital, especially if commercial kitchen space is involved.

Raising capital is a constant challenge for food start-ups, too, along with growing these businesses and getting the product to the people, but there are also opportunities, especially if a gap in the marketplace can be filled.

Rachael Mamane noticed such a gap in 2010 while working for a livestock company: Some ranchers sold bones at farmers markets, others routed them for dog food production, but many didn’t bother getting them back from the slaughterhouse because they didn’t have the capacity to handle the weight.

Mamane launched Brooklyn Bouillon last year to turn lesser-used bones into stocks and demi-glace, adding value to small, regional farms by moving raw materials in bulk and offering a profit-sharing distribution feature. So far the model has been profitable for both the company and the farmers it serves.

Local Food Lab’s program helped Mamane reassess her business model; she’s now seeking investors to expand within New York and beyond.

“I was able to take what I originally saw as a concept,” she says, “scale it to a full size business, and then think even larger than that in terms of what the impact could be across the country, and still be local to different regions.”

Eric Davidson has no grand plan to turn you into a vegetarian.

But in order for us to avoid catastrophic climate change, this senior scientist and executive director at Woods Hole Research Center says people in developed nations may need to eat half as much meat. Yep — you heard that right. This isn’t about the way animals are treated, nor is it about reducing heart disease. For the sake of the climate alone, we — as a culture — need to eat half as many burgers, and half as much bacon.

According to a recent study from Davidson, this controversial dietary shift is crucial if we want to get serious about reducing emissions of nitrous oxide (N2O), a potent greenhouse gas.

We’ve long known that eating animals (who eat grains) requires a great deal more agricultural production than eating those grains ourselves. And since farming involves fertilizers and animal manure — two factors that have recently been pinpointed as major contributors of atmospheric N20 — we need to use much less of them. Oh, and while we’re at it, the way we farm also has to change, to the tune of 50 percent fewer N2O emissions.

“We have the know-how to create an intelligent food production system that meets human needs in a sustainable way — if we had the economic and political willpower to do it,” Davidson says.

With the study, Davidson wanted to determine how to meet four future scenarios for atmospheric N2O being evaluated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The scenarios range from the least aggressive, business-as-usual approach, to the most aggressive reduction, which would stabilize N2O concentrations by mid-century.

And although it would be a heavy lift, that less meat/less nitrogen scenario is what’s required for the latter.

“In order to reach the most optimistic, or most aggressive, mitigation scenario … you really have to have an all-of-the-above strategy,” Davidson said.

As he explained in the study:

Technologies exist to achieve such improved efficiencies, but overcoming social, economic, and political impediments for their adoption and for changes in dietary habits will present large challenges.

All of the above

Eighty percent of N2O emissions come from agriculture, as soil organisms, such as bacteria, break down the nitrogen in livestock manure and the synthetic fertilizers applied to soil in crop production. After carbon dioxide and methane, N2O is the largest contributor to climate change, and has soared 20 percent since the Industrial Revolution. It is also our biggest human-made ozone-depleting substance.

Nitrogen, however, is vital for food production, posing an even greater challenge for reductions as the population grows. New research identifies overuse of synthetic fertilizer as a key driver behind the accelerated rise in atmospheric nitrous oxide as farmers apply the stuff too liberally on row crops as a hedge to insure yields. Even the smaller number of farmers who use nitrogen-rich manure for their crops often use too much, while far too much of the manure is produced in industrial livestock and dairy operations, and ends up in lagoons where it can leach into the water table.

“The more we eat, the more fertilizer we need, the more manure that’s produced, and more of this gas is produced,” Davidson said.

Where’s the beef?

Reversing multi-decade trends are never easy. For as long as we have kept records, meat consumption has steadily risen in both developed and developing nations, according to Roni Neff, research and policy director at the Center for a Livable Future at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“Today in this country, we’re eating about 41 pounds of poultry, 38 pounds of beef, and 27 pounds of pork per person per year, which means we’re slaughtering more than 9 billion animals per year,” Neff said.

Meat consumption has dipped slightly in the U.S., likely due to a combination of factors including the down economy, ethanol production’s upward pressure on meat prices, and a growing awareness of meat’s nutritional and environmental challenges, Neff said. Overall, however, long-term forecasts point upward, in part from steady global population growth.

Yet there are promising signs that some are thinking twice before ordering that burger, such as the growing Meatless Mondays movement. Neff also noted recent, much-reported on research findings showing a direct correlation between mortality rates and red meat consumption.

“The message I’d take from all this,” Neff said, “is that there are strong arguments for a significant reduction in meat consumption, from both environmental and public health standpoints.”

Four ways farmers can reduce N2O

• Optimizing nitrogen use: Farmers want to use fertilizers more efficiently because it’s an expense. Applying it at the optimal time and in the right amounts may help them get the most bang for their buck, but so much of fertilizer use is dependent on the weather.

• Technology: Tools called “variable rate applicators” can help keep farmers from using too much fertilizer, while other technologies can help them avoid overlapping their applications. A team at Washington State University is also studying how to use remote sensors to evaluate nitrogen uptake and removal in the soil.

• Changing other farm practices: Feeding livestock seed that is lower in nitrogen may reduce emissions. Planting winter cover crops can also provide root systems that use excess nitrogen.

• Financial incentives: Davidson mentions the possibility of insurance to protect against economic loss for farmers using less fertilizer. There is also a program in Maryland that will pay farmers to put in winter cover crops to reduce nutrient leaching into the Chesapeake Bay. Although the 2008 Farm Bill provided incentives for nutrient management through the Conservation Stewardship Program, it’s unclear what kind of shape this will take in the next bill.

A 50 percent reduction will be a tall order, says Dave Huggins, a soil scientist with the USDA Agricultural Research Service’s Land Management and Water Conservation Unit. Reducing overlap may save up to 15 percent in some areas, while technology and support to help farmers make decisions that drive nitrogen use efficiency could increase overall reductions to about 25 percent.

Of course, an increase in the number of organic farming systems, which by their very nature rely on a slower release of nitrogen and a much more closed nutrient loop, could also have an impact.

“Beyond that,” Huggins said, “it almost takes a change in the cropping systems themselves, in terms of what kind of crops are grown.”

Shifting from annual crops, for example, which need to be replanted every year and are inherently leaky as far as nitrogen use, to biennial or perennial grain crops, could make a huge difference. Breeding efforts are underway to perennialize wheat, for example, so it doesn’t need annual planting. (Sadly, the research is underfunded, so don’t expect to see that wheat on the market any time soon.)

“Progress is slow,” Huggins said, “and there are not enough crop breeders working in this area.”

Of course, that could change — and it wouldn’t be a moment too soon if it did. The IPCC’s most stringent scenario of stabilizing N2O emissions by 2050 may sound far into the future — but in order to make that happen, we need to get started today.