Why Willie Nelson’s Farm Aid May Be the Nation’s Most Crucial Music Festival Right Now

It has been one hell of a summer.

Fires sweeping across thousands of acres of dry Canadian wilderness sent apocalyptic clouds of smoke across East Coast cities. Hurricane Idalia, powered by rising ocean temperatures, raged across the Southeast causing widespread flooding and an estimated $12 billion to $20 billion in damage. Heatwaves sent temperatures soaring above 110 degrees from Portland to Puerto Rico. Drivers in Phoenix were burned by the seat belt buckles of cars left in the sun.

The climate crisis is real. 

“Our planet has just endured a season of simmering — the hottest summer on record. Climate breakdown has begun,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said in a statement Sept. 6, marking the release of the latest data from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service by the World Meteorological Organization.

For more than three decades, one music event has been singularly focused on a piece of American life that holds at least part of the answer to this crisis — family farming. For that reason, Willie Nelson’s Farm Aid may well be the nation’s most important music festival right now.

“Climate change is the most important issue we face today,” says Dave Matthews, who is a member of the board — along with Nelson, John Mellencamp, Neil Young, and Margo Price — of Farm Aid, which Nelson launched in 1985, to help keep family farmers on their land. Since it began, through its annual benefit concerts, Farm Aid has raised more than $64 million to support programs that help family farmers.

Now in its 38th year, Farm Aid takes place Sept 23 at Ruoff Music Center in Noblesville, Indiana—Mellencamp’s home state — with the organization’s guiding artists joined by the Grateful Dead’s Bobby Weir & the Wolf Bros. featuring the Wolfpack, Lukas Nelson, Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats, Allison Russell, The String Cheese Incident and Particle Kid. Also on the bill: Clayton Anderson, The Black Opry featuring Lori Rayne, Tylar Bryant and Kyshona, the Jim Irsay Band, featuring Ann Wilson of Heart, Native Pride Productions and the Wisdom Indian Dancers.

“Farm Aid’s mission raises awareness around the importance of a national system of agriculture that values family farmers, good food, soil and water, and strong communities,” continues Matthews. “The mission is important because the industrial agriculture practiced on large corporate farms is contributing to the climate crisis. We need to continue to focus on solutions and agriculture methods that help mitigate climate change.”

Billboard first reported on the link between Farm Aid’s support of family farmers and the fight against climate change in 2011. “We started out to save the family farmer. Now it looks like the family farmer is going to save us,” Nelson said at the time.

In a comment he shared recently with Billboard, Nelson said: “We all eat and we all live on this one planet together. If your food is grown by corporate farmers with unhealthy practices, that’s what you’re putting into your body. Along with the fact that it had to travel several thousand miles to get to you, when local farmers mostly have better farming practices and a better carbon footprint.”

Carbon is the key to understanding how Farm Aid’s support for family farms is helping to address the climate crisis. Carbon dioxide (CO2) accounts for nearly 80 percent of the greenhouse gasses that trap heat in the atmosphere, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The dramatic rise in CO2 levels in the atmosphere is the cause of the climate crisis. But carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere —or “sequestered”— when it is absorbed by plants as part of the biological carbon cycle, the EPA notes.

And that’s where farming enters the equation — but not just any kind of farming. 

In recent years, there has been an increasing awareness that industrial agriculture practiced on large corporate farms is contributing to the climate crisis. In an August 2021 report, the National Resources Defense Council stated that industrial agriculture is a “significant source” of carbon in the atmosphere.

“Industrial agriculture is a large contributor to [greenhouse gas] emissions around the world,” writes Jennifer Fahy, communication director of Farm Aid, in a blog entry titled “Farmers and Climate Change: Myths vs Facts,” that was posted on the organization’s website in July.

“But family farmers have tremendous capacity to not just decrease emissions, but to actually sequester carbon dioxide in the soil with climate-resilient agricultural practices like organic production, cover crops, rotational grazing, agroforestry and more. These and other innovations mean family farmers and ranchers are leaders at the forefront of climate mitigation,” writes Fahy.

The farming techniques that Fahy describes are, in fact, deeply rooted in the nation’s history. “These methods originally come from Indigenous, Black, Brown and People of Color traditions that pre-date industrial agriculture, which is characterized by large-scale monoculture, intensive use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers, and concentrated animal feeding operations,” she writes. 

Farm Aid’s advocacy is not only for family farms, but also racial and social justice and the broader communities fed by good food.

“Even as the people practicing these methods have endured genocide, land theft and loss, racism and discrimination, and the pressures of industrial agriculture, they have kept these traditions alive. Regenerative agriculture is not new; it’s been on the margins of our dominant industrial agriculture system. It’s time for it to come to the fore,” Fahy writes.

Farm Aid is one of many advocacy organizations that have called on the federal government to support regenerative farming to combat climate change, through funding in the Farm Bill. A multi-part, multibillion-dollar piece of legislation that is passed by Congress about every five years, the Farm Bill has a massive influence on how the nation’s food is grown. The most recent Farm Bill was passed in 2018 and expires this year.

In September 2022, Farm Aid joined more than 150 organizations in co-signing a letter asking President Biden “to weigh in on the next Farm Bill and demand that Congress build even further on the administration’s actions to date to reduce economic inequality; bridge the nation’s racial divides; end hunger; confront the climate crisis; improve nutrition and food safety; and protect and support farmers, workers, and communities,” wrote Fahy at that time.

In March, representing Farm Aid, Mellencamp went to Washington, D.C. to support and sing at The Rally for Resistance: Farmers for Climate Action. The event was organized under the umbrella of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition and involved some two dozen activist organizations and more than 30 delegations of farmers from across the country who converged on Washington to make their voices heard.

“We’ve been slugging since 1985 and let’s keep slugging,” Mellencamp told the crowd. “Let’s try to improve the quality of the food that we eat, the air that we breathe and the people that we are.”

Farm Aid’s organizers say this year’s Indiana festival will highlight the work of family farmers to address climate change through regenerative, organic and sustainable farming practices. It will showcase these climate champions on the Farm Aid stage and throughout the event. As farmers and farm and food advocates converge from across the country for the annual festival, Farm Aid will host additional pre-festival events to spotlight their work.

This year also will see the return to the Farm Aid stage of Neil Young, who did not attend in 2021 or 2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. (The 2020 event was presented online.)

In previous years, Young has spoken on stage about the ability of family farms to sequester carbon in the soil. “We need soil, with carbon in it, good strong soil,” he told the crowd during Farm Aid in Hartford in 2018. And he called on the audience to make deliberate choices when buying their food: “So what are you going to do the next time you see a farmer’s market?” he called out. “Say hello to a farmer. Buy something! Buy something good — something that’s good to the earth.”

Margo Price has echoed Young’s view that consumers must make choices to support sustainable agriculture — to save the farmers who will help save the planet. “The climate crisis and the food crisis are unfortunately, one and the same,” says Price. “Everybody’s gotta eat, and every time you spend a dollar, you are casting a vote. 

“We are on the brink of living in an oligarchy, where three billionaires own more wealth than the rest of America.,” she continues. “Politicians’ greed is unquenchable and they don’t seem to care about the world we are leaving behind for future generations… We are facing uncertain times ahead, and it’s more important than ever for organizations like Farm Aid to educate the public, nurture agriculture, and preserve the precious few family farms that we have left.”