Seventeen years after
Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, and Neil Young organized the first
Farm Aid in 1985, the massive annual music festival continues to
roll out artists to raise money and awareness for American farmers.
The most recent Farm Aid, held September 21 in Burgettstown,
Pennsylvania, added some fresh faces such as Kid Rock and Lee Ann
Womack, and it undoubtedly raised hundreds of thousands of dollars
more to go along with the $15 million that Farm Aid has already
granted to farm organizations and service agencies in 44 states.
But the question lingers: Why do we still need Farm Aid? Hasn't
the trio of Nelson, Mellencamp, and Young sufficiently raised
awareness over the last 17 years to save the American farmer once
and for all? Didn't Congress pass a multibillion-dollar Farm Bill
this year to assist struggling farmers? Hasn't enough been done
already?
In a word, no. Several members of The HSUS's Farm Animals and
Sustainable Agriculture section—Karen Graham, Robert Hadad, and
Susanne Abromaitis—recently arrived back from this year's Farm Aid,
and they have reasons by the bushel why the music festival needs to
keep on rocking.
The major reason is that small, sustainable family farms continue
to die out. Farm Aid organizers told the media this year that 20,000
family farms were foreclosed upon in 2001 alone, and that represents
a decline in the number of foreclosures. In their place have come
factory farms—large, industrial operations that have been known to
contaminate water supplies, cause animal suffering, and pollute the
areas in which they reside. As just one example, the number of small
hog farms (those with 999 hogs or less) has dropped from 227,740 in
1992 to 68,653 in 2001, even though the number of hogs raised
remains about the same. Confining a large number of animals to one
space can lead to the factory farming problems laid out above.
But these farms are seemingly rewarded by the federal government.
The 2002 Farm Bill bases its pay-outs on acreage. So it stands to
reason that large, multi-state factory farm corporations will get a
larger handout than a single family farm in Iowa. If the previous
Farm Bill is any indication, small farmers can not rely on federal
subsidies to save them. Even though Congress tried to prop up the
old Farm Bill with 30 subsequent bills, small farmers were still not
getting the support necessary to operate thriving organic farms. The
effects of this lack of support have been profound: Missouri, for
example, has lost 75% of its small hog farmers since 1974.
Farm Aid tries to even out the discrepancies, and it tries to
raise awareness among music fans to support sustainable farming
systems. As part of its mission, Farm Aid "brings together the
common interests of family farmers, consumers, and people who care
about the environment. Farm Aid's goal is to keep family farmers on
their land and to restore a strong family farm system of
agriculture."
"Unfortunately there is an ongoing need for the kind of help Farm
Aid provides," Mellencamp said in a Farm Aid statement. "We're still
doing Farm Aid concerts because it is still contributing."
Family Farmer Forum
The night before the concert, during a forum entitled "Challenges
and Choices: The Future of Our Food and Farms," an audience in
Pittsburgh listened to a line-up of speakers that included both
sustainable agriculture activists and organic farmers. The audience
got an earful of alarming news about family farmers: high suicide
rates, increased rates of childhood cancer, and a strikingly
disproportionate number of older farmers. One farmer described this
year's farm economy as the worst since 1986 and the third worst
since the 1930s when the United States was suffering through the
Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. Farmers' net income for the last
50 years has been flat.
The difficulties for organic farmers, everyone learned, were even
tougher: lack of access to markets, genetically modified grain
contaminating certified organic plants, and the costs of organic
certification without federal support. Meanwhile, the fat cats are
getting fatter: Multinational corporations are merging and being
accused of price manipulation. Moreover, the efforts of these large
agri-businesses to try to change the definition of "organic" to
accommodate their products has jeopardized the entire ethic of
organic farming.
One of the speakers, Fred Kirschenmann, the director of the
Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University,
raised points that many hadn't previously considered. He said that
industrial agriculture needs many things to continue to operate,
such as cheap fossil fuel, and because fuel costs more now and is
not renewable, the government will have to subsidize the industry
more to pay for it. What's more, Kirschenmann added, if the cleanup
costs for manure leaks and spills were incorporated into the price
of factory farmed meat, these companies would go out of business.
Consumers, in short, need to consider the real costs of their food,
not just the sticker price on the package.
