Hunter Hopcroft, a partner in JM Stock Provisions and a driving force behind the Richmond Grange Project (Photo by Jay Paul)
It all started with some onions.
It was a problem Hunter Hopcroft discovered when he first opened Harvest, his Fan specialty grocery store since merged with JM Stock Provisions: It was winter, and the only local vegetables he could get were onions. The problem wasn’t that farmers couldn’t produce, or that customers weren’t buying. It was access to capital, which small farms most often don’t have.
“Small farmers are naturally risk takers,” says Hopcroft, a partner in JM Stock Provisions. “But they’re also cautious business managers.”
A small farm could extend its growing season with hoop houses — simple greenhouses built with metal hoops and covered in plastic — but those can run up to $10,000, a sum too small for most banks and too large to put on high-interest credit cards. There are federal and state microloan programs, but the paperwork is daunting, requiring as much as 80 hours to complete, and, Hopcroft warns, the changing winds in Washington have left more than one farmer stranded halfway through projects, with no guarantee they’ll receive the rest of the money to finish the job. Enter the Richmond Grange Project, Hopcroft’s new social enterprise for funding local farms through community-financed microloans.
The former financial research analyst is leveraging his background in finance and partnering with nonprofit urban-farming advocates Tricycle Gardens to identify worthy projects. From there, the proposed projects will be voted upon by members of the grange as early as June 28, when the Richmond Grange Project hopes to launch.
Who are these members? Well, they could be you, the consumers. The microloans will be financed primarily by $10 to $50 donations from those in the community. Donors determine the loan recipients through online voting, and the winner could have their project financed with a three- to five-year loan at 0 percent interest, with progress documented on richmondgrange.org to foster a consumer-producer relationship.
“[It’s] a return of capital, not necessarily a return on capital,” Hopcroft says. There’s no interest given back to donors; instead, there’s a philanthropic bent to it.
To keep efforts from being buried by deep-pocketed donors, corporate donations will be diverted to administrative costs, and to enable Grange capital purchases.
“A small farmer might only need a tractor for 10 days a year,” says Hopcroft. “A community-driven grange can get them access to that.” And, given the difference one tractor can make in a farmer’s business, potentially so much more.
