A Day For The Farmers
Artists Urge Thousands Of Concertgoers To Support Small Farms
Neil Young, Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp opened Farm Aid’s 2018 concert in Hartford Saturday with emo- tional appeals for public support for family farmers and condemnations of corporate and industrial agriculture.
“The corporate farms suck!” Young told several hundred fans and reporters at a morning presentation at Xfinity Theatre. “They are poisoning you … and you can stop this if you stand up.”
Mellencamp urged everyone attending the event to get involved in the
upcoming elections. “You got to get out and vote,” he said during an angry talk often laced with profanity. He pleaded with people to make sure “your voices are heard and not corporate America’s voices.”
“Family farmers are the keepers of the soil and the land,” the 85-year-old Nelson told the crowd. “We should all be concerned about where our food comes from … I would hope most of it comes from family farmers.”
Concert goers from all over the Northeast began lining up early Saturday morning, hours before the gates would open.
Brent Flint and his friends drove from Almira, N.Y., on Friday, camping in Bristol so they could be first in line at the Hartford concert. “We’ve been here since 9:30,” said Flint, who said he is a huge fan of the work Farm Aid does for farmers across the U.S.
Katrina Magee and Ted Spanos came from Preston for the chance to see some of their favorite musical stars and to support this state’s farming community.
“I’ve been a Neil Young fan all of my life,” Magee said, laughing as she lamented that Young and Nelson were expected to close out the concert late Saturday night.
“We usually go to bed early, but we’re gonna be up late tonight,” Magee said.
The morning presentation included videos of several Connecticut farmers, many of whom were invited on stage to meet Nelson, Young, Mellencamp and other musicians who were contributing their talents to the fundraising concert.
Joe Greenbacker, whose family was forced to sell their dairy herd earlier this year, was one of those on stage. He described the “kind of emotional decision to sell … the cows,” but added one advantage for him was “no more getting up at two in the morning to milk cows.”
Other Connecticut farms, including ones still running their dairy operations and urban farmers from Bridgeport and Hartford, were also featured on stage and in the videos shot by Farm Aid staff to help publicize the plight of some farmers and the hopes of others.
This is the first time the charity concert series has come to Connecticut and organizers hope it will raise more than $1.5 million for programs and grants to benefit family farmers across the U.S.
Farm Aid staff hope the concert will highlight both the problems facing small farmers and some of the opportunities and good news involving agriculture in Connecticut.
The number of small farmers in Connecticut has been increasing in recent years, rising by about 20 percent between 2007 and 2015, according to federal census reports.
In Hartford, for example, the nonprofit group KNOX Inc. has helped city residents start 26 community gardens and urban farms on vacant lots. KNOX officials estimate those gardens are now raising 200 tons of produce a year in the city.
At the same time, many Connecticut farmers are struggling with high transportation and production costs.
This state’s dairy farmers have been hit particularly hard in recent years by extremely low milk prices. There are now barely 100 dairy farms left in Connecticut and several have recently decided to sell their herds because of ongoing financial pressures.
In June, the Greenbacker family decided it could no longer continue to operate its dairy operation on its Durham farm and reluctantly sold more than 200 milk cows and calves.
Connecticut agriculture officials are also worried by ongoing solar and suburban development that continues to erode this state’s diminishing supply of prime farmland.
The sheer size and complexity of Farm Aid’s Hartford concert and festival stunned Alexis Martin, one of the urban farmers filmed for the event and invited to take the stage with the artists.
“I knew it was going to be big,” said Martin, a farmer with Bridgeport’s Green Village Initiative, “but this is not what I imagined at all. I didn’t know it was going to be a massive event like this!”
Thousands of concertgoers wandered through the winding lanes of booths featuring locally grown vegetables, local beers, fresh fish, veggie corn dogs, Farm Aid posters, T-shirts and other artist memorabilia. In one corner, Headcount.org had a voter registration tent.
In the festival’s “Homegrown Village,” people sat on hay bales listening to experts lecture about the differences between traditional crop seeds and genetically modified organism (GMO) seeds.
The music began shortly after 1 p.m., with Nelson coming out to sing the Lord’s Prayer, and continued throughout the afternoon and into the evening as artists took turns on the big stage.
Here and there in the audience, grayhaired hippies in tie-dyed T-shirts got out of their seats to dance to the country guitars, while younger fans swayed and shouted their approval of their favorite performers.
“This is our favorite day of the year,” said Melissa Caballero, who came with her sister, Nicole, from East Meadow, N.Y., to attend the event.
“This is our fifth Farm Aid,” Nicole Caballero said with a grin. “The artists bring you in, but then you learn so much.”
Eileen Hochberg, a former executive director of the Northeast Organic Farming Association, was lounging in the upper grass field of Xfinity Theatre with her partner, Michael Baker.
She said a lot of the younger farmers now coming into organic agriculture in this state “need a community” to help them get started, and that Farm Aid is helping to create that sense of belonging.
“Having Farm Aid come to Connecticut is significant,” Hochberg said. “This does feel like it’s putting Connecticut agriculture on the map.”