Economic Gardening: Planting the Seed for a Healthier Economy

"You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus."
-- MARK TWAIN

 

When we look at assets and liabilities, we traditionally identify such things as cash, investments, inventory, equipment, or land as assets and accounts payable, salaries, and debts as liabilities.  This is all well and good, and easy to track from a numbers standpoint.

Thinking about assets and liabilities on a community level (using Montana/Greater Yellowstone as an example), we might identify as assets our 4-year universities and 2-year community colleges, and the students and families they bring to our communities from outside.  The tourism potential of our natural resources in our three National Parks and boundless recreation resources.  The quality of our schools, our hospitals, our emergency services, our roads.  The economic potential of our farm and ranch lands or timber on public lands.  Liabilities might include cheap outsourced labor, fewer skilled workers.  The seasonality of our economies, competition for tourism from other communities.  And more recently, the unpredictable yet measurable liabilities of wildfires, mudslides, record low snow years, or river closures due to drought. 

How do we grow our “assets”, that is, our GDP within our community, and increase our economy?  One traditional approach would be to identify some potential outside entity, a manufacturer or large tech firm for instance, and entice them to move their operations to your community.  Another might be to take advantage of a natural resource that can be extracted (or more appropriately, as in the case of the Bakken Oil Fields, exploited) for financial gain.  We don’t generally look at this from a systems perspective—how are our short-term actions today tied to long-term ramifications?  We’re just interested in creating jobs, any kind of jobs, to boost the local economy. 

Economic gardening flips this idea on its head.  Economic gardening asks, “What resources do we have here in our community already, in which we can invest and help grow?”  The concept is to grow an economy from the inside out. 

According to Chris Gibbons, the co-creator of Economic Gardening, “90% of the businesses in the United States have 10 or fewer employees, and never grow beyond that.  The stage 2 companies, those with 10-100 employees, have the greatest intention and capacity for growth.  This category comprises about 10% of the businesses in the country and about 38-40% of the job growth.  The larger companies, the Fortune 500 have not added a net new job in the US since 2000; they are moving jobs overseas.” 

YourEconomy.org, a free business census providing aggregate data on business performance over time from a local, regional and national perspective (a resource developed by the Edward Lowe Foundation, which houses the National Center for Economic Gardening), shows that “small businesses create the lion’s share of all jobs in the U.S. Recent job growth figures show that:

• Resident companies, those that are either stand-alone businesses in the area or businesses with headquarters in the same state, created nearly 100 percent of job growth in the U.S. between 2006 and 2008
• Of these resident establishments, self-employed individuals and companies with two to nine employees created virtually all of these new jobs”

This challenges the concept that the best way to grow your economy is to have a huge outside company swoop in and employ everyone, but rather the focus should be on small businesses and local entrepreneurs within your community to provide them with the data, training and resources needed to grow their operations.  “Recruiting a company is economic hunting, that is if you go and recruit a company to move into a town…if you stay and work with the entrepreneurs in a community, that’s economic gardening,” says Gibbons. 

Economic Gardening focuses on cultivating a culture to go beyond physical infrastructure and consider quality of life, intellectual capital, and cultivating local talent.  It creates a structure to provide information and data to businesses to help them not only survive but also grow and thrive. Small companies have a limited capacity to conduct market research, tools for team building and system development.  Economic gardening increases the capacity of those businesses to access and utilize information.  Additionally, an economic gardening culture helps facilitate connections among businesses and the resources and people that can take them to the next level; it inherently minimizes the competitive “winner takes all” approach to business and relies on collaboration and information sharing.  The Edward Lowe Foundation has a useful info sheet that dives deeper into this concept and offers tools, resources and certification programs.

I have a strong interest in this concept, working with businesses across Greater Yellowstone that primarily fall into the stage 2 or smaller categories.  What I don’t see in this equation of assets and liabilities so far are people, aside from the listing of payment for their services as a liability.  Why is it that we do not support or even realize our greatest assets, those of the people in our communities, who are passionate and dedicated to the community? People don’t move to Montana because they can make big bucks.  They move here because they love the land, they love the communities.  Or they grew up here are trying to figure out a way they can afford to move back.  In Greater Yellowstone we have a saying: “Our children are our greatest export”.  They can’t afford to stay here, because there aren’t enough jobs to entice them to stay, to allow them financially to stay.  So they move on, to communities that can provide them with a career and income to support their families. 

Montana realizes this, and has embraced the concept of economic gardening.  Local governments are employing economic gardening as a strategy for growth and community revitalization.  The Montana Economic Developers Association (MEDA), a statewide organization, has an economic gardening working group.  Its purpose is “to raise awareness among economic developers and share information regarding the process of Economic Gardening to encourage planned entrepreneurship growth in Montana”. 

To encourage planned entrepreneurship growth.  What a fabulous concept.  It’s one I hope more communities will embrace in the future.