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Pre-Concert News Conference Featured Inspiration and Fire
The news conference held last Saturday morning (September 21) before the gates opened for the Farm Aid Festival in Saratoga Springs, New York was a can't-miss. As I knew from attending previous festivals, the session would feature passionate and occasionally profane statements from the music icons at Farm Aid's core, along with inspirational stories from regional "farmer heroes" selected by the Farm Aid team.
The following are my takeaways from the hour-long event.
Music legend and Farm Aid Co-Founder Willie Nelson, age 91, played a set of more than an hour to end the day's mega-concert, but he took just a few seconds to welcome attendees at the opening conference: "I'm glad to be here, glad to see my buddies, and glad y'all are here too."
Farm Aid Executive Director Carolyn Mugar, who has headed the organization since its launch 39 years ago, thanked all the attendees, including farmers "who left their work on the farm to be with us today" for "a display of our collective power to transform our food system." She followed by saluting the musicians in the concert lineup who weren't on stage, calling them out and asking them to stand if they were in the audience.
Two other Farm Aid leaders — Communications Director Jennifer Fahy and Shorlette Ammons — took turns spelling out the challenges faced by family farmers that Farm Aid exists to help address.
Jennifer Fahy
Jennifer noted that the host state of New York still has nearly 31,000 farms, but that this number is down 10 percent since 2017.
The reasons for that are due to rising production and labor costs, consolidation and abnormal weather patterns that are exacerbated by climate change.
At the same time, eaters are also struggling. Food insecurity is rising, and across New York State, approximately one in four families experience food insecurity in historically underserved neighborhoods, which are often those that are home to low-income families and people of color. There are a few ways to access healthy food now and, with all these challenges, New York is fertile ground for innovation.
Farmers and advocates and activists are finding ways to meet the need of local, healthy, climate-friendly food for everybody, but there's still a lot of work to do here and all across the country. Right now, a handful of corporations control our food, including what's available at the grocery store and how much it costs. This is market manipulation 101, pushing down the prices paid to family farmers, ultimately dropping them out of business. This is bad for farms, bad for rural communities, bad for local economies, bad for public health, and bad on the soil, water and climate conditions needed to create sustainable food production.
Shorlette Ammons
Farm Aid's vision is one of a transformed America where family farmers and eaters are active participants in building their collective power to create a thriving farm and food system that benefits everybody. We've met farmers all over New York who know that they're standing between their communities and the heavy hand of corporate power. They represent a powerful movement of farmers and food justice activists on the front lines...
They are all different ages, all different levels of coming into agriculture. They are Black, Indigenous and People of Color farmers. They are LGBTQ+ farmers, and they are female farmers. Every community needs these farmers [who] are leading the way in creating a more democratic and equitable farm equity system that can sustain all of us.
The remainder of the news conference alternated between statements by the musician Board members and videos and on-stage interviews with the featured farmers. The following are takeaways from the performing artists, in the order that they spoke; the farmers will be highlighted in a follow-up article.
Margo Price
While the other musician Board members of the Farm Aid organization — Willie Nelson, Neil Young, John Mellencamp and Dave Matthews — have been stars for decades, Margo Price released her first country album in 2016. But that album's title, "Midwest Farmers' Daughter," just hints at the family history that binds her to Farm Aid.
Farm Aid was launched in 1985 to support family farmers who were being devastated by an economic crisis — a result of the "go big or go home" philosophy that had taken root in national agriculture policy — that caused many to lose their farms or hold on by their fingernails. A year later, when Margo Price was three years old, her grandparents lost their farm in Aledo in western Illinois; Margo says this was "devastating" to the family and that "no one was ever the same after that."
These memories first made Margo a social activist and then, in 2021, the newest member of the Farm Aid Board.
This is my eighth year at Farm Aid, and every year I feel incredibly inspired when I come and get to hear stories... to see folks continue to persevere through all sorts of problems.
I do relate to those struggles, not only because I saw firsthand how the loss of my family farm affected everyone around me, but also because I think farming is a lot like the music business, in the fact that it's just really not sustainable. For a lot of folks anymore, corporate monopolies are destroying small businesses all over America, and it gets harder and harder. I think both of these occupations are really risky, because it takes the perfect environment to make it grow.
We're just up against a lot, the control of seeds, land and water. It threatens small-scale farmers and it exploits workers... Every year, we come together and face these challenges. Where you spend your dollar matters a lot, so shop at the local farmers markets. And, most importantly, vote.
John Mellencamp
By the early 1980s, John Mellencamp had not only achieved superstar status; the native of Seymour in southern Indiana had established himself as a clarion of small-town, working class Midwesterners with hits such as "Jack and Diane" and "Pink Houses."
In 1985, he turned his attentions to the plight of family farmers who were losing their land, livelihood and legacy to low prices for their products, astronomical interest rates and a corporate-driven conventional food system rising to dominance with the philosophy of "go big or go home."
His album Scarecrow — which included "Small Town," one of his most enduring hits — spelled out the era's farm crisis in searing fashion in the song Rain on the Scarecrow.
So it was virtually a natural progression that John joined with fellow artists Willie Nelson and Neil Young in September 1985 to present the first Farm Aid fundraising concert in Champaign, Illinois. He remains devoted to the fight to protect family farmers, build a healthier and more sustainable food system, and combat corporate greed, and his talk at the Farm Aid 2024 news conference showed he has not lost his angry edge.
His initial comments were addressed to American Indian farmer Angela Ferguson, whose Onondaga Nation Farm near Syracuse was featured at the event.
Angela, we [white people] came here and we took the f***ing land... And I have to say, I am so proud of what you are doing.
He then addressed the audience:
Get out and make some noise. if you don't, corporate America will someday take everything.
My sister is a farmer, and because of chemicals and shit from the '70s she's had both her breasts removed. Her daughter has both her breasts removed. Wonder how that happened? Because of the chemicals that they were putting on, and didn't know any better. They were just kids, and now today, we know better. And it's people like Angela who are setting the tone for us white people again.
So let's hear it. If you want a better world, it starts with you.
Neil Young
Neil Young had exhibited a political streak early in his career, crystallized in his 1970 Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song "Ohio," a scathing protest of the Vietnam-era killings of four young people by National Guardsmen at Kent State University. He also emerged as an environmental activist.
In July 1985, during the Live Aid concert to raise money for hunger relief in Africa, Bob Dylan called for a concert event to aid U.S family farmers who were being ruined or were at risk of failing during a burgeoning farming economic crisis. With that as the prompt, Neil collaborated with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp to pull together the first Farm Aid concert in Champaign, Illinois that September.
None of them expected Farm Aid to become a longterm project, but the economics of agriculture, and the continued corporatization and concentration of farmland in fewer hands, continue to challenge the viability of family farms — even though consumer demand for healthier food produced as locally and sustainably as possible has grown dramatically since 1985.
Neil was the only news conference participant to stand up to deliver his remarks.
I want to stand because I want to stand for all of us, and I want to stand for you, and I just want to say that we love you and we you're no different from us. We're all here for the American farmer, and you are American farmers. And we're together.
We have to look at it together for the future, because that's where our power really is, is in all of us, and showing that we love the American Farm. I'm standing here for my brothers and sisters and for all farming and for the 39 years of Farm Aid that we've had so far. I'm remembering the red T-shirts, Stop Factory Farms, we started seeing those things 35 years ago. And we need to do that.
When you see them along a highway, industrial-looking buildings full of animals with fans on the sides of them, that's what we're against. That's not American farming. That's corporate factory farming.
The American farmer is fighting for your life and for the life of the earth. And what's killing the earth here is climate. This is not a natural thing that's happening, and you're causing it. We all together are causing that. We really have to believe that we can do something...
We can help ourselves and these American farmers who are here with us and out there by acting together to stop what we're doing that is damaging the earth, where these people grow our food. It's very basic, and everyone shares it. There's nobody who doesn't have a chance to help in some small way. So every day we wake up, we have an opportunity to be more together, to even work together... We have an opportunity to do something alongside our neighbors who are thinking the same way. We have an opportunity to talk to them and ask them what they're doing, if they're doing anything to help America, to help the world and to help the American farmer.
Dave Matthews
Dave Matthews first emerged as a music star in 1991, when he started The Dave Matthews Band. Imbued by his Quaker upbringing and life experiences to support progressive causes, Dave played his first Farm Aid concert in 1995, and in 2001 joined Willie Nelson, Neil Young and John Mellencamp — who founded Farm Aid in 1985 — as the first new musician member of the organization's Board of Directors.
He believes that the industrialization of agriculture has been destroying the independent small businesses that are family farms, and expresses the need for agriculture to make changes that address the critical dangers presented by global climate change. He advocates for regenerative agriculture.
I'm sure you'll hear what I'm saying that farming the earth is a radical political angle. We have a society that's lost its mind.
What I'm hearing is connection, a real connection, and that connection is to the earth, to our mother, and to truth. And the enemy of that connection is greed.
The enemies of that connection, they have all the technology to save the planet if we work together. We have we know how to do it. We know how to raise meat. We know how to raise vegetables in balance with nature. We know how to do it. We have the technology. We have the wisdom. But the thing that stops us is greed, and it's corporate farms. It's corporate agriculture.
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