Farm Aid, at 40, Offers a Lifeline for Farmers Facing Their Worst Crisis in Decades

Forty years ago, Farm Aid may have been intended as a one-off. But in sticking with its commitment to the farm movement, the festival and the nonprofit that has grown from it—like its 92-year-old founder Willie Nelson—have become a cultural and civic institutions with an inspiring ability to respond to changing times as they celebrate small, young and independent farmers.

Underpinning this is the clear connection Farm Aid makes between the independence of spirit and neighborly care embodied in the American family farmer and the health of a democratic society that allows for the farm and labor movements to be heard.

Jennifer Fahy, Farm Aid’s co-executive director and communications director, made this point as she opened the festival’s press conference last Saturday morning. “We all do better when we all do better,” she said, invoking an adage from the late U.S. Senator from Minnesota Paul Wellstone.

In a statement released before the concert, Farm Aid explained that doing better means taking on the “handful of corporations [that] control our food from farm to fork, allowing them to manipulate the marketplace, pushing down the prices paid to family farmers and driving them out of business. The unbridled power of food companies also grants them increasing political influence over the rules that govern our food system, affecting both farmers and all of us who eat.”

Indeed, Farm Aid’s anniversary celebration was colored with the many echoes between the 1980s farm crisis and farmers’ current struggles. Today American farmers face the worst economic crisis in decades—from skyrocketing costs, high inflation, low prices, record bankruptcies, high suicide rates, corporate consolidation, ongoing climate shocks, a chaotic tariff policy that has shut off global markets, and the failure of Congress to pass a farm bill since 2018.

But against the backdrop of a national political climate riven with bitter divisions, Farm Aid artists and staff emphasized the democratic “all” referenced by Wellstone as the bulwark against a system that too often benefits the rich and the powerful. 

Farm Aid and the 1980s Farm Crisis

Farm Aid was founded to meet the urgency of the moment.

In 1985, Ronald Reagan had begun his second term as president. The country was recovering from one of the most severe economic crises since the Great Depression. In 1980, runaway inflation peaked from the decade prior. Interest rates went through the roof, reaching an all-time high in 1981 just under 20%, as the country was plunging into a recession.

For farmers, any hope for recovery was beyond the horizon. What came to be known as the 1980s farm crisis was a disaster for America’s family farmers and by extension the communities in which they lived.

Land values that had boomed during the 1970s fell, farmers, saddled with debt, faced high interest rates, surging inflation, declining crop prices and a shift toward global-scale commodity production that saw net farm income drop to its lowest point since 1910.

During the 1980s, more than 1,000 farmers who lost their farms to foreclosure committed suicide. By the end of the decade, an estimated 300,000 family farmers had defaulted on loans, and more than 250,000 farms went out of business. This put a huge stress on rural banks, with more banks failing in 1985 than in any year since the 1930s.

This was the state of affairs when Minnesota-native Bob Dylan made a shoutout to American farmers at the 1985 Live Aid concert. Willie Nelson was listening, and he had an idea of what to do.

After several calls with farmers and friends (including David Senter, who helped start the American Agriculture Movement), a few months later Nelson, along with John Mellencamp and Neil Young created Farm Aid. On September 22, 1985, the three artists, along with more than 50 performers, including some of the most renowned names in the music industry, transformed the University of Illinois’ Memorial Stadium into Farm Aid’s benefit concert. They performed in front of a rain-soaked crowd of more than 80,000 in what the Chicago Tribune called “the biggest country music concert in history.”

That first concert raised more than $7 million (the equivalent of $21 million today) for struggling family farmers. And it could have ended there.

The day after that first concert, 1-800-FARM-AID, the phone number organizers had set up to receive donations from viewers watching on television, began receiving calls—this time from farmers seeking help. Recognizing the ongoing need for support, the phone number has been operating ever since as a farm crisis hotline, now available in English and Spanish.

According to Farm Aid co-executive director and program director Shorlette Ammons, since 1985 Farm Aid has helped raise more than $87 million, which has gone directly to farmers or in support of Farm Aid’s year-round work. Today, the services provide include the organization’s hotline, disaster relief funds, a Distressed Borrowers Assistance Network that offers one-on-one support for farmers facing financial distress, as well as a plethora of resources for connecting farmers with direct markets, training for more sustainable practices and support for farmer-led grassroots campaigns. 

In the past, those campaigns have supported the food movement’s evolving priorities, from the Agricultural Credit Act of 1987, which helped save family farms from foreclosure by restructuring farm debt, to supporting farmer-led organic certification.

As Co-Executive Director Fahy recently told the New York Times, “Farmer after farmer who we’ve talked to while traveling across the state of Minnesota this summer has said ‘This is just like it was in the ’80s.’ ”

Ruth Ann Karty is someone who has seen this history first-hand. In 1984, she and her husband, Brian, were farming in Minnesota when their local bank failed. Luckily, they were able to contact Lou Anne Kling, a farm advocate at the Minnesota Department of Agriculture, a position that offers free support for farmers facing crisis. While Kling helped them find mediation with the bank, Karty saw many of her neighbors in a similarly difficult situation, so she became a Minnesota farm advocate herself, a job she has held for the past 39 years.

“Obviously, we went through a crisis in the ‘80s, and when everybody talks about the [farm] crisis, that’s what they think about,” Karty said. “I’ve been a farm advocate for a long time, and there’s never been an aspect of farming that hasn’t been in a crisis.”

The current crisis

Indeed, the pressures facing farmers—and rural communities—today are immense.

John Boyd, president of the National Black Farmers Association, told News Nation in a recent interview: “Fertilizer and seed and diesel fuel, all of these things have just about tripled in price. And I’m selling my commodity for the same thing I was in the ‘80s. I’ve never seen anything like this. And it’s all due to Trump’s tariffs.”

Net farm income is expected to increase for 2025 from historic lows, but experts like the Food and Agriculture Policy Research Institute at the University of Missouri expect the rally to be short lived, driven primarily by record cattle prices and large one-time government payments. Record crop yields this year, coupled with the uncertainty of tariffs and the fact that farming costs, from seeds to equipment to fertilizer, have outpaced inflation—continue to raise concerns about farmers’ economic future.

Compounding farmers’ economic woes is an unfolding farm labor crisis due to the Trump administration’s arrests and deportations of undocumented farm workers. A recent analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data showed that between March and July the U.S. agricultural workforce fell by 155,000, about 7%. For many farmers, this has meant that cows don’t get milked and crops don’t get picked, such as one Pennsylvania dairy farmer who told Politico that he was forced to sell off his 100 head of dairy cattle because he couldn’t find workers.

Of course, the crisis looks much different depending on how one views the agricultural economy.

While large commodity-oriented farms are reeling under the pressure of tariffs, costs and low crop prices, they also receive the largest share of federal aid through farm bill programs in addition to disaster payments and other supports. Federal subsidies, insurance programs and payment limits are tied to production, not need, and thus are highly concentrated in a few states with the largest farmers. A 2024 report from the Environmental Working Group’s Farm Subsidy Database found that over half of all payments from the four largest federal aid programs ($29.2 billion) went to farmers in six states: Texas, Kansas, North Dakota, California, Nebraska and South Dakota.

In July, the “Big Beautiful Bill” bypassed the traditional bipartisan farm bill process to inject $59 billion in new spending for such commodity “safety net” programs.

That has left farmers who don’t plant commodity row crops—especially small, young and independent family farmers—on their own.

This current crisis was top of mind for the crowds of farmers, rural organizers and environmental advocates at Farm Aid 40.

For Farm Aid founder Neil Young, it came down to the money.

At the Farm Aid press conference before the concert, Young called on Minnesota-based agriculture giant Cargill and other corporations and billionaires to make “huge, huge donations to Farm Aid so that we can support the people that brought the land to the place where it was where [Cargill et al.] could buy it and make a fortune.”

“You drive around this country, you see these great farms—out of the bus windows, we see them all the time. We see the old farmhouses, the old barns that are falling down. Then we see these long, white buildings,” Young said, referring to confinement structures used by Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). “That’s the new guys.”

In recent years, Young has refused to play at venues that source from factory farms and has enlisted Farm Aid’s network of farmers to help bring their food to those venues. 

Billionaires like Bill Gates, Young noted, have bought up farmland across the country as investments. “[T]hey’re living the good life,” he said. “They need to stand up and pay a conscience tax to the farmers of America.” (Later in the evening, Young kept up this consciousness-raising by opening with his newly penned “Big Crime,” whose chorus goes, “Got big crime in D.C. at the White House.”)

Young’s call for a conscience tax was picked up by Dave Matthews, who has served on the Farm Aid board for 24 years: “It seems like we could spread a little bit of the wealth to the people in this country who deserve it, and maybe take a little bit away from the people who are hoarding it.”

“I’m very happy to pay my taxes,” Matthews said. “I would love my taxes to go to school lunches and after school programs.” (This was a reference to the Local Food for Schools program that gave schools money to purchase fresh fruits, vegetables and meats from local farmers and was canceled by the Trump administration in March.) He continued:

I would love my taxes to keep family farmers on the land. To help … our planet stay healthy. … I’m not happy to have my taxes pay for tax breaks for billionaires … and be used to bomb children and be complicit in terrible violence and genocide.

Yet, amid the foreboding shadows of crisis and political discord, Farm Aid had a lot to celebrate.

A new breed of farmer

One of the day’s highlights was the focus on young farmers and their exploration of regenerative agriculture. These farmers show there is much to look forward to in the future of farming. (The same can be said for the featured young musicians, such as anti-establishment Arkansas troubadour Jesse Welles and the Houston-raised Madeline Edwards, whose standout Farm Aid performance came on the heels of a month-long stint with Willie Nelson on his recently concluded Outlaw Music Festival tour.)

One such farmer was Hannah Bernhardt, who runs Medicine Creek Farm in Finlayson, Minnesota. Bernhardt grew up on a farm during the 1980s farm crisis and learned how difficult it is to make a living as a farmer. What got her back into farming was seeing the “diversity of new farmers that are getting into agriculture because they are learning about regenerative agriculture.”

Bernhardt told the audience at the pre-concert press conference, farmers are increasingly coming to understand “the importance of soil health and taking care of the soil in order for the food that we are growing to be healthier.” With its focus on also ensuring clean water and air, Bernhardt reframed regenerative farming “a public service to everyone.”

Bernhardt says regenerative farming practices also gives power back to farmers. “We’re not having to spend so much money with corporations. We’re not at the beck and call, at the prices that they’re willing to give us when we can do things on our own and keep our land healthy without their inputs.”

Another farmer helping create alternative economies is Angela Dawson, the founder and CEO of 40-Acre Co-op in Willow River, Minnesota. The 40-Acre Co-op, founded in 2019, whose name is a reference to General William T. Sherman’s promise to give 40 acres to newly freed slaves after the Civil War, is the first national black farmer cooperative since the reconstruction era in the United States.

A few years ago, Dawson’s operation of organically raised hogs, chickens and goats, as well as a Community Supported Agriculture program, was going well enough. But when she went to her local U.S. Department of Agriculture extension office to get a loan, she was denied.

“They didn’t really understand our business plan because we weren’t row-cropping hundreds of acres of a monocrop,” she said.

That wasn’t all. When the local agent came to Dawson’s farm, she repeatedly asked her, “What brought you here? Why are you here? And what makes you think you can do this?” The first problem, Dawson said, “I was a woman.” The second: The agent admitted “she had never seen a Black farmer in this part of the state before.”

After filing a complaint with the USDA, which was eventually settled, Dawson decided her efforts couldn’t end there. She started organizing farmers like herself. “Cooperatives have kept farmers alive in a lot of ways,” Dawson said, providing greater stability through an economic model that allows for resource sharing and access to training, technical assistance and direct markets.

The agricultural is political

For a moment, Farm Aid’s milestone 40th anniversary concert seemed in jeopardy.

On September 8, Teamsters Local 320, which includes about 1,400 custodial, food service, maintenance and sanitation workers in the University of Minnesota system, went on strike after months of failed negotiations with the university. In a statement supporting the striking workers Farm Aid said, “The farm and labor movements are intertwined. Time and again farmers and workers have shown up for each other in solidarity.”

Farm Aid’s commitment was such that Willie Nelson contacted Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to inform him that Farm Aid would not have the concert at the university unless there was a settlement. On the fifth day of the strike, Nelson said in a statement: “I spoke with Governor Walz and I’m grateful that he understands what’s at stake for farmers and Farm Aid.”

So it was Walz who came onstage in the waning hours of September 20 to introduce Willie Nelson, the festival’s closing act. Walz described Nelson as “a man who truly embodies the American spirit,” praising the Texas bred anti-establishment outlaw country-rock singer as “fiercely independent, generous, kind, irreverent, decent and a bit of a hell-raiser.”

Walz was not the only Minnesota politician to make an appearance on Saturday. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, born in Plymouth, Minnesota, appeared earlier in the night to introduce Farm Aid board member Margo Price.

Fittingly, Price opened her set with the twangy and driving “Don’t Let the Bastards Get You Down,” which she performed on Jimmy Kimmel Live! the evening before ABC abruptly took the show off the air. (ABC brought Kimmel back on the air on September 23.)

Price grew up on a family farm in Illinois that was sold during in 1985—the year of the first Farm Aid. In 2021, she joined as a board member. “It’s so important for us to come together right now, at this time in America,” Price said earlier in the day. “We’re being divided, being distracted … They want us to be overwhelmed. They want us to be fighting with each other, so we don’t realize it’s the people in power that are making all of these things terrible. We have to use our voice while we still have it.”

Organizers festooned the stadium’s concourses with hay bales, bandanas and informational posters; the main stage screen displayed bucolic images of farm animals and Minnesota farmers between acts; attendees wore shirts with the words “Stop Factory Farms,” a spectrum of cowboy hats, plenty of flannel and at least one “Make America Great Again” hat.

Beyond its star-studded musical lineup, the festival included a five-day gathering beforehand with events highlighting lessons from the Farmer Labor Movement in the 1980s, Black food politics and a forum titled “Collective Power in the Countryside: A Conversation” with journalist Sarah Smarsh and former North Dakota Commissioner of Agriculture Sarah Vogel, moderated by Sonja Trom Eayrs, author of Dodge County, Inc. 

This year’s lineup was packed with longtime music icons as well as the rising stars of a new generation, featuring the festival’s iconic blend of country and rock: Willie Nelson and Family, Neil Young (with his new band the Chrome Hearts), Dave Matthews (with fellow Dave Matthews Band guitarist Tim Reynolds), Margo Price, Bob Dylan, Kenny Chesney, Billy Strings, Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats, Lukas Nelson, Trampled by Turtles, Wynonna Judd, Steve Earle, Waxahatchee, Eric Burton of Black Pumas, Jesse Welles, Madeline Edwards and the Wisdom Indian Dancers.

As they have throughout Farm Aid’s 40 years, musicians paid their own costs to help maximize the festival’s revenue. And for the first time in Farm Aid history, CNN broadcast the festival nationwide. 

When Nelson took the stage, flanked by his sons Lukas and Micah, he launched into classics like “On the Road Again” and “Whisky River.” Notable were the subversive meditations on mortality. One such song was the crowd favorite “Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die.” Nelson also performed Tom Waits’s “Last Leaf,” a song as elegiac as it is defiant, with the feeling of looking back on one’s life while in awe of life’s delicacy and endurance:

“I’ll be here through eternity/ If you wanna know how long / If they cut down this tree/ I’ll show up in a song.”