Farm Aid, the musician-driven non-profit that has supported family farmers and a more sustainable, healthier food system since its founding in 1984 during a national farm crisis that brought devastation to America’s countryside.
I attended my first Farm Aid in 2015 when the organization came to my hometown of Chicago, and have been a regular since 2023, traveling to a different city venue each year. I find the event so inspiring, so immersive, such a gathering of like-minded people that I decided that as long as I am physically able, I will attend this event every year.
So I was in Virginia Beach, Virginia, the last full week of September, for the September 26 annual Festival and two days of pre-events.
The weather was cloudy, rainy, and unseasonably cool because of a nor’easter storm far offshore over the Atlantic. And if ever there was a year for a cloud of gloom over the big event, it was this one.
This is, in fact, a critical year, described by numerous speakers as the worst since the 1980s farm crisis, as longstanding issues — the high cost of land, climate change, the consolidation of farmland, the political and economic clout of big corporations — are layered upon by new burdens, such as the decline in exports resulting from trade wars, the soaring price of fertilizer and fuel because of the war in the Middle East. The backlash against the technology industry’s push to buy up farmland to build data centers was very much in evidence in the crowd that attended.
But the national community of small family farmers is determined and resilient, and Farm Aid — as it has for 41 years — was there to help. And the event’s “Homegrown Village” provided space for dozens of farm and food non-profits to connect with the estimated 20,000 attendees at Virginia Beach’s Veterans United Home Loans Amphitheater.
That throng got to put the troubles of the day aside for a joyous concert featuring 17 acts and lasting more than 11 hours, culminating in sets by the founders: the annual audience sing-along with John Mellencamp; another guitar-shredding gig by Neil Young; and a long set by Willie Nelson, still on the road again at age 93.
I’m back to covering the serious issues facing our nation’s farmers but buoyed by my day at the Farm Air Festival and its annual dose of hopium.
Bob Benenson is a career journalist who, after a 30-year career as a political journalist in Washington, D.C., moved to Chicago in 2011 and became an advocate for a healthier, more sustainable, more humane and fairer food system.
As publisher of his independent Local Food Forum website and communications lead for the Naturally Chicago non-profit, Bob has a uniquely broad perspective on the grassroots and business side of the better-for-people-and-the-planet
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