Impact Investing

This is a term that I heard last week while listening to Mike Hirst (MD of Bendigo Adelaide Bank Ltd) speak at a Northern Mallee Leaders function in Mildura.  The term describes investing where receiving a monetary return is only a portion of the outcome, the investment needs to deliver on some of society’s values as well, such as stronger communities or healthier environment etc.  This is a new term for an attitude that some businesses such as Bendigo Bank have been taking for a long time, it is also the attitude that our business takes.

We see making a monetary profit as only a portion of the story, in order to truly profit we see the need to improve the health of our landscape, improve our skills, take holidays and provide adequate challenges for us and our business to improve, to name a few.  While some may say that being able to invest in all the extras such as us is a luxury, we really only see money as “fuel for our life values”, so we don’t work, we live a profitable life.

We take this attitude from when we were right in the middle of the drought, we were making no money, in fact we had sold a lot of our stock for about $30/hd (we later bought stock in for >$100 and profited) in order to look after our land, our state of mind and our lifestyle.  We made some tough decisions in order to stay in business so we decided that in the re-design of our business back to profitability we can never forget the wonderful way of life that we have or the responsibility to look after the landscape for the future.

How do you view your investment in farming?