Farm Aid Part 2
Farm Aid Part 2. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.
26 years ago Willie Nelson created the Farm Aid concert to help farmers in trouble all across the U.S. 26 years later they are still doing concerts all across the country to raise money and awareness for the struggling farmers and ranchers. Jennifer Fahy is the Communications Director for Farm Aid who says that over the years as agriculture changes, so does Farm Aid.
FAHY: We’re in the middle of this thing we call the good food movement right now which is sort of the most hopeful movement in the 26 years that we’ve been at and we’ve got new people coming out every day, we’ve got new farmers, new eaters and people who are just waking up to the excitement of good food from family farms and want to make those connections and want to do all they can to support the movement.
In 2008 Farm Aid introduced a new website called HomeGrown.org.
FAHY: It was a result of seeing these folks coming to the good food movement. People who also wanted to go beyond knowing their farmer but also to maybe become farmers themselves or even if they were living in Manhattan to start growing their own food on a rooftop garden. So HomeGrown.org is an online community of folks who are growing their own food; they have urban goats and they’re making their own cheese; they’re doing canning. You name it, they’re doing it.
She says they have reached out to many different partners.
FAHY: Mother Earth News is now a partner of ours and we’ve been working with them to spread the word and of course with some of their farmers and their authors who are writing books on keeping chickens and urban homesteading and that sort of thing.
Even with the changes that have occurred in the last 26 years Fahy says Farm Aid has remained true to their mission.
FAHY: And that’s to keep family farmers on the land and to put new ones on the land as well. You know I think there is just this understanding that we’re not going to be able to do that without all the folks who are eating. So this is all about market opportunity for farmers. There are people who want to buy directly from farmers; who want to even go so far maybe as purchasing something like flour from a wheat commodity crop that they know came from an actual farmer that they can know. And that’s huge and that’s something that didn’t exist in 1985 so that’s a market advance that we now have and that farmers are being rewarded for.
And of course Farm Aid is also about some really great music. This years 26th Annual Farm Aid concert will be help August 20th in Kansas City, Kansas.
That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.
