Farm Aid is returning to Saratoga Springs this year, and with it a celebration of local farmers.
The first Farm Aid benefit was in 1985, organized by Neil Young, Willie Nelson, and John Mellencamp. The concert came to Saratoga Springs for the first time in 2013, drawing more than 25,000.
Now, the celebration is coming back on September 21. Brooke McConnell is the executive director of Pitney Meadows Community Farm, a mile down the road from Saratoga Performing Arts Center.
“Yeah, we are so excited to have Farm Aid return to Saratoga for a second time. We have so much respect for Farm Aid’s decades of work to promote and support small family farms across America. And upstate New York obviously has so many small and family farms here and we’re just really excited to get that recognition and have them come to the area again,” said McConnell.
McConnell attended Farm Aid in 2013, but that was well before she became involved with the local farm. She says event staff have been hard at work communicating with many local farms.
“You know, we are just really excited for the Farm Aid team to get here physically with the whole line up for the community. And not just that the concert will be amazing, but all the work that we know they will do one the ground here for and with local farmers including skill shares and education workshops and other gatherings,” said McConnell.
Farm Aid Cultural Impact Director Michael Foley says the all-star concert lineup is only part of the draw.
“The Homegrown Village is almost like a one-day state fair that takes place in the concert venue. So, your ticket not only gets you the music but also this hands-on experience. And you get to meet a lot of farmers from the region who come and exhibit stuff, who teach you how to do things in the skills tent like, I don’t know, make cheese or something like that. There’s often farm animals that people can come and see which are usually quite popular,” said Foley.
Another festival feature at Farm Aid is that all food at the venue is sourced from regional family farms.
“Our culinary director is working on putting together a menu so that all the food that concert-goers eat, it’s going to be pretty much the best food you can get at any concert in America because it’s all coming from local farms, produced in a way that the farmer gets a fair price and produced at an ecological standard that’s not exploitative of the natural resources,” said Foley.
Farm Aid has evolved over the years. In its initial years, it aimed to curb the so-called “farm crisis” by raising money and support to help shape legislation that would keep farmers on their land.
In the 90s, Farm Aid turned its focus to fighting factory farms, which were outpacing locally owned farms across the country with the added cost of environmental harm.
Foley says Farm Aid has now focuses on supporter farmers who are at the front line in the fight against climate change.“Recent festivals have highlighted the kind of work that farmers do, particularly in regenerative agriculture. Regenerating the soil in a way that helps to draw carbon out of the atmosphere and sequester it in the soil and helps to minimize the greenhouse gas effect that’s heating the planet,” said Foley.
Farm Aid communications director Jennifer Fahy says climate change will continue to be a focus of Farm Aid but:“We’ve been talking about corporate power in our food system for decades. I think we’re finally seeing some real progress looking at some movement in some anti-trust areas to really think about, you know, should we have so much corporate power invested just a few giant company that are really controlling our food system? Probably not. So. We’re beginning to see those conversations move from the tech sector, where it has been much more active, into the agriculture sector, which is really important,” said Fahy.
According to the United States Department of Agriculture’s 2022 census, while 98% of farms in New York remained family-owned, the overall number of farms fell by nearly 3,000.