News. Nelson, Mellencamp rock at Farm Aid (farmers, United States, supplies)

[JD59]

MILWAUKEE, Oct. 3 (UPI) -- The 25th anniversary of Farm Aid in Wisconsin brought out 35,000 music lovers and those who say they wanted to support family farming and eat good food.

Saturday's gathering at Miller Park reunited Willie Nelson, Neil Young and John Mellencamp, who helped form the first Farm Aid benefit concert in 1985 designed to raise awareness and money for family farms across the United States, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported Sunday.

Nelson, Mellencamp rock at Farm Aid - UPI.com

[MissingAll4Seasons]

I went to a Farm Aid concert a while back, I think it was the 10th annual(?). Good food, good music, good folks, and a pretty darned good cause

[MoNative34]

I'd really be interested in seeing where all these proceeds end up. The "family farmers" they describe on their website have zero in common with family farmers in my area. I'd say they're creating more misconception than "awareness".

[marmac]

Originally Posted by monative34

i'd really be interested in seeing where all these proceeds end up. The "family farmers" they describe on their website have zero in common with family farmers in my area. I'd say they're creating more misconception than "awareness".

bingo !

[MissingAll4Seasons]

I've known many farmers all over the country that have enough in common with the folks you see on the Farm Aid site that I can't say they're bunk. They list out where the money goes, better than the Gov't programs do in some cases. I do know one farmer who personally got relief money directly from Farm Aid, as well as them sending some volunteer WOOFers to come help her rebuild after a hurricane, and later their legal defense fund helped her keep her farm since the municipal authorities tried to use her reconstruction to "ungrandfather" her farm from some of the more recent pro-big-agri-biz regulations in her area.

I suspect that farms and farmers, just like everything and everyone else, are different from place to place and individual to individual. No two farms or farmers are the same, and what's important to one family or farm may not be important to another. It doesn't make what they say, do or feel any less important, a misconception or outright bunk.

I know a lot of smaller "family" farms that are really just cogs in the industrial food machine... it may be "their" farm, but they have almost no control and no market other than what the big agri-biz industries. They're still farmers and what they do is still very important and a lot of hard work, but for a lot of folks being a cog in the industrial machine is not their definition of having your own family farm.

Farm Aid will help the industrial-unit farmers, too; but those farmers have much more aid available to them from other government and industry sources because they are "playing by the rules" and doing what they're being told to do. Farm Aid, and similar charities and organizations, are really more geared to help small and family farmers who want to retain their independence on their family farm without succumbing to overwhelming federal and corporate regulation and market control.

If you're a farmer who supplies a product within one of the industrial markets, where your product is pretty much only able to be sold to a few select distributor/buyers with a laundry list of rules and regulations and shoulds and oughts... and you're perfectly HAPPY with this arrangement, by all means continue to do so, supermarkets around the country definitely need you. But if someone is a farmer who wants to stay small, be able to do business the way previous generations of his family did, especially locally without government and corporate interference where it's inappropriate, life with Big Brother is getting harder and harder to manage.