Iowa State has published research on the potential for slow money in local food and agriculture.

Slow money investors typically promote locally produced, environmentally friendly food and other artisanal goods and services, said Priyanka Jayashankar, an assistant adjunct assistant professor of management at the College of Business and the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture and lead author of the research paper.

Jayashankar collaborated on the project with Mark Rasmussen, director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, and Arvind Ashta, a finance professor at the Burgundy School of Business in Dijon, France.

Jayashankar said that slow money “circulates locally and takes its inspiration from the slow food movement.”

“Essentially, it’s used for channelizing capital locally towards local food enterprises, sustainable agriculture and other artisanal sectors,” she said. “It’s all about taking money back to the soil.”

Jayashankar wants to develop new financial inclusion tools, and research the slow money movement further.

“I think Iowa State University can definitely be at the cutting edge of this research,” she said.

The slow money research has added meaning for Jayashankar.

“It’s always been a personal journey for me because I have always been passionate about financial inclusion,” Jayashankar said. “My doctoral research primarily focused on microfinance-financial inclusion for disenfranchised women in developing countries.”

Jayashankar wants to begin looking into the viability of slow money in the developing world.

“It’s really confined mostly to the developed world… in North America and Europe,” she said. “I would be interested in how my native country, India, can adapt, and how developing countries can adapt.

“If we begin to work to enable farmers to access capital and promote local food, this could actually help develop agriculture and nutrition.” 

While continuing research on the slow money movement and how it can promote local agriculture and nutrition, Jayashankar is also working on other sustainability-related projects on collaborative consumption, food deserts and the motivation of organic farmers with collaborators at the College of Business and the human development and family studies department, she said.

The paper has been published on Ecological Economics, an academic journal. It will be available in print this August.