A Nova Scotia grown investment co-operative is coming to Queens County this month, to pitch investing in the local food economy.<\/p>\n
Farmworks provides loans to businesses that are part of the local food industry, and the funds are raised by the public buying shares in a diversified portfolio of local food businesses<\/p>\n
Those that invest in Farmworks are eligible for tax credits, and there are multiple ways to invest, says Linda Best, Co-chair and Treasurer of FarmWorks. As an added benefit, Best says it keeps invested money in the province, creates jobs and helps boost the local economy.<\/p>\n
\u201cFarmworks provides opportunities for people to invest closer to home and invest in things meaningful to them,\u201d she said<\/p>\n
Best said they spend over 100 hours on each application, to make sure all due diligence has been taken care of, before taking the application to board of directors for board to decide<\/p>\n
So far they have funded 93 businesses, with loans ranging from $5,000 to $50,000<\/p>\n
In Queens County, the Port Grocer in Port Medway received a loan to start the business, and use local food in their restaurant.<\/p>\n
Annabelle Singleton is the owner of the Port Grocer, and says when they started looking for loans to get their business off the ground, major lending agencies did not have faith a business in such a small community would work. However it was Farmworks who looked at their business plan and lent them the funds to help bring the Port Grocer to life.<\/p>\n
\u201cInstead of blank stares and people telling us it wouldn\u2019t work, we had a room full of people cheering us on,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
As both an investor and a recipient of a loan Singleton says she has no problem recommending Farmworks to those looking for a loan to start a food industry based business, as well as those looking for a way to invest locally.<\/p>\n
Farm works will be at the Port Grocer on Feb. 9 at 2:30 pm, and at the North Queens Business Centre in Caledonia on Feb. 22 at 2:30 pm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A Nova Scotia grown investment co-operative is coming to Queens County this month, to pitch investing in the local food economy. Farmworks provides loans to businesses that are part of the local food industry, and the funds are raised by the public buying shares in a diversified portfolio of local food businesses Those that invest […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[13,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1946","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-community-news","category-news-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qccrfm.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qccrfm.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qccrfm.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qccrfm.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qccrfm.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1946"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.qccrfm.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1946\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1947,"href":"https:\/\/www.qccrfm.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1946\/revisions\/1947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qccrfm.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qccrfm.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qccrfm.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}