Meet Rick Larson

Rick Larson, 51, was a nature lover—and determined entrepreneur—early. Growing up in the outer suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, during the 1970s, Larson was drawn to the beech and maple woods near his home. Every autumn, he shuffled through the leaves dropped by the golden sugar maples. Come spring, those same trees offered another bonus: sap for making syrup.

Making maple syrup is an ambitious kind of family fun: 40 gallons of sap generate one gallon of syrup. Still, one spring, armed with patience and second-hand buckets from a nearby sugar farm, Larson and his family decided to try. He recalls hopefully lugging buckets heavy with sap home in a wagon; pouring the sap into pots and pans on the stove, and watching it boil down to sweet syrup—while steaming up the kitchen so completely that the wallpaper began to peel. Undeterred, Larson built a cinderblock “boiling off” site in the backyard, complete with a salvaged and rusted chimney to continue making, and even selling, maple syrup – until one insufficiently purified bottle exploded in a neighbor’s pantry. About making syrup, Larson says simply: “You gotta want it.”

Larson knows about “wanting it.” Over and over, throughout his career, he has brought a deep commitment to people and places. He started out as a community organizer in North Carolina, and then, after studying economic development in business school, he helped rural students become entrepreneurs and, later, he invested venture capital in clean technology. Across the years and jobs, he has worked to connect people who make rural goods— food, fiber, fuel, medicine—with customers.

And that’s what he still does today, with The Conservation Fund’s Natural Capital Investment Fund (NCIF). NCIF funds new and growing businesses in the Southeast that use natural resources sustainably. Based in North Carolina, Larson frequently is on the road. On any given day, he could be meeting in a bank board room, touring a farmer’s field or donning a hard hat to visit a growing factory.

Recently, for example, Larson worked with a range of financing sources to arrange financing for a small company, Carolina Wood Pellets, that turns sawdust waste into wood pellets to cleanly fuel residential stoves and commercial boilers. NCIF provided a $250,000 investment and extensive market research to help Carolina Wood Pellets attract more than $2.5 million from other funders. The company’s plant in Franklin, North Carolina, will employ 20 to 30 local workers and generate a renewable form of energy from the wood waste of area mills.

Larson sees growing opportunity for rural communities to rethink how they survive, and even prosper, by sustainably using their natural resources to generate goods people need. “In a time of globalization, land, forests and talented rural folks are assets that cannot be imported,” he says. “You can’t buy a locally produced tomato in Mexico. You can’t run ecotourism enterprises in southwest Virginia from China. You can’t generate electrical power here by installing solar panels overseas. At NCIF, our opportunity is to help local rural businesses provide unique goods and services to the markets around them. I feel so fortunate to work on this every day.”

At home, Larson and his family buy locally made goods whenever they can. Still, the mild Southern winters force him to buy his favorite maple syrup from up North. But maybe that’s not such a bad thing.