Willy Nelson started a concert series to help farmers during the 1980s farm crisis. Now Farm Aid is helping farmers face similar economic challenges.
David Senter said he remembers when singer-songwriter Willie Nelson called him in 1985 and told him that the agricultural economy in the United States had left family farmers behind inThe trouble was that it did no one any good that the two of them were the ones talking about it.
in East Troy, Wisconsin. That's where Senter, a former farmer turned advocate turned unofficial farm movement historian, was heading when he spoke to NBC News.Led by Nelson, the festival began with the help of musicians such as Neil Young and John Mellencamp — both board members — as well as acts including B.B. King, Paul Simon, Elton John and others over the ensuing years.
“I think we’re going to lose as big a percentage of farmers as we did in the 1980s, but it will be far fewer individuals because we have far fewer farmers.”“Right now, we have low [commodity] prices, we have an ongoing trade war that has taken so many markets away from farmers and we have a failed policy in place,” Senter, who was the first director of Farm Aid, said.
“Farming is not just a livelihood — it’s a way of life,” Alicia Harvey, the advocacy and farmer services director at Farm Aid, said. “They sit with this shame and burden of being the ones to lose the land that’s been in their family for generations, and there is such a blame and shame in that.” Back in the 1980s, Nelson brought farmers to Washington, D.C., to testify on Capitol Hill about their hardship and pressure Congress to change farm policies. While that brought a lot of attention and organization to the issue, Lutkewitte and many others are now worried some of that has dissipated.
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