America’s farmers got here to Washington, D.C., greater than 40 years in the past to avoid wasting their farms. On Tuesday (March 7), a brand new era of farmers, ranchers, farmworkers and activists got here to the nation’s capital to avoid wasting the planet.

John Mellencamp, co-founder of Farm Support, sang Tuesday for these gathered earlier than they marched up Pennsylvania Avenue to the U.S. Capitol constructing, calling for Congress to take motion on local weather change within the forthcoming Farm Invoice.

“Right here’s all I can say – hold slugging,” mentioned Mellencamp, recalling how he and Willie Nelson and Neil Younger shaped Farm Support in 1985 to help household farmers — a dedication they’ve sustained for 4 many years, joined by Farm Support board members Dave Matthews and Margo Worth.

“We’ve been slugging since 1985 and let’s hold slugging,” mentioned Mellencamp. “Let’s attempt to enhance the standard of the meals that we eat, the air that we breathe and the folks that we’re.”

Taking the stage noon at Freedom Park, Mellencamp appeared on the crowd earlier than him and remarked: “The faces are a lot youthful than they was. And I feel that’s nice that there are youthful individuals attempting to enhance the planet and the meals that we eat. So it’s as much as you guys to paved the way.”

With that, Mellencamp performed a spare, acoustic rendition of “Rain on the Scarecrow,” his harrowing 1985 tune in regards to the farm foreclosures disaster that led to the creation of Farm Support.

Rain on the scarecrow / blood on the plow 
This land fed a nation / this land made me proud
And son, I’m simply sorry there’s no legacy for you now

Farm Support’s personal legacy is the rising consciousness, because the mid-Nineteen Eighties, of the significance of a nationwide system of agriculture that values household farmers, good meals, soil and water, and robust communities.

In recent times, there additionally has been an growing consciousness that industrial agriculture practiced on giant company farms is contributing to the local weather disaster. In a report in August 2021, the Nationwide Sources Protection Council said that industrial agriculture is a “important supply” of carbon within the ambiance. 

The farmers and activists in D.C. championed what is called regenerative farming, agriculture strategies that may maintain carbon within the soil, improve biodiversity and assist mitigate local weather change.

Farm Support, with its annual live shows every September, would be the highest-profile group drawing consideration to the state of American agriculture — and Willie Nelson is definitely the nation’s best-known champion of household farmers. However this week’s gathering dramatically demonstrated that the breadth and scope of the nation’s farm motion transcends Farm Support.

The Rally for Resistance: Farmers for Local weather Motion was organized underneath the umbrella of the Nationwide Sustainable Agriculture Coalition and concerned some 2 dozen activist organizations and greater than 30 delegations of farmers from throughout the nation who converged on Washington to make their voices heard.

On Wednesday, contributors within the rally are slated to foyer particular person lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

Plans for this rally have been revealed on the Farm Support competition in Raleigh, N.C., in September and completely reported by Billboard. The spark for the gathering is the present debate over the contents of the Farm Invoice, the multi-part, multibillion-dollar laws that’s handed by Congress about each 5 years and has a large affect on how the nation’s meals is grown. The newest Farm Invoice was handed in 2018 and expires this yr.

In September, Farm Support joined greater than 150 organizations in co-signing a letter asking President Biden “to weigh in on the subsequent Farm Invoice and demand that Congress construct even additional on the administration’s actions to this point to scale back financial inequality; bridge the nation’s racial divides; finish starvation; confront the local weather disaster; enhance diet and meals security; and defend and help farmers, staff, and communities,” wrote Farm Support communications director Jennifer Fahy.

The night earlier than Mellencamp’s efficiency, supporters gathered at Luther Place Memorial Church on Logan Circle, a web site of social activism because it was inbuilt 1873. Philip Barker, a Black farmer and longtime activist from North Carolina, summed up the main target of the times of motion: farmer-led local weather options, racial justice within the Farm Invoice, and “communities over companies.”

Classes in the course of the rally started with land acknowledgements, statements recognizing that the land upon which the nation’s capital was constructed was taken from indigenous individuals. Different audio system addressed the actual hardships that BIPOC farmers have skilled by way of many years of U.S. farm coverage. And nonetheless others referred to as for immigration reform as a solution to tackle the persistent scarcity of labor on America’s farms. All through, the voices and crowd chants in Spanish testified to the altering demographics of the nation’s farms.

This gathering in Washington had specific resonance for David Senter, founding father of the American Agriculture Motion. In 1979, Senter was one of many organizers of the Tractorcade protest that drew 1000’s of farmers to the capital. They traveled by tractor, touring throughout the U.S. at 15 miles an hour — ”we got here in on each East/West interstate, 100 miles a day,” remembers Senter — to foyer Congress for a brand new Farm Invoice to extend crop costs and to have higher affect in agriculture coverage. (One farmer at Tuesday’s rally returned with the tractor he’d pushed to D.C. in 1979).

Senter then returned to Washington in 1987 to accompany Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp when the 2 artists testified earlier than the Senate Agriculture Committee in regards to the household farm foreclosures disaster. 

Senter was one of many featured audio system Tuesday on the rally in Freedom Park. Since his earlier journeys, have the stakes develop into greater? “We proceed to lose household farmers and the farms develop into bigger and bigger,” replied Senter. “However we have now to determine how you can make place for the subsequent era of farmers, the younger farmers that wish to develop meals for this nation and the world, in order that they’ll survive.

That “completely does” embrace addressing the local weather situation, mentioned Senter. “As a result of we dwell in an excessive local weather scenario. I imply, you could have floods, tornadoes, wildfires, droughts. It’s simply unbelievable the local weather extremes we’re experiencing and, after all, farmers, they cope with that day-after-day, attempting to provide meals. So it’s crucial that we get entangled with that.”

When Willie Nelson and his fellow artists shaped Farm Support in 1985, he recruited Carolyn Mugar to run the group. “The earliest Farm Support information are all stained with spaghetti sauce since I did that work at my kitchen desk,” she recalled Tuesday. Then she set off throughout the nation, talking to farmers at their kitchen tables. (Mugar was acknowledged for her work on Billboard’s Ladies in Music record in 2020, the thirty fifth anniversary of Farm Support).

“What within the Farm Invoice can individuals get behind? Actually, the very backside line of all the things is farm viability,” mentioned Mugar. “A farmer can’t actually even begin stepping into regenerative agriculture [to address climate change] if that farm shouldn’t be financially viable.

“And that implies that we’ve actually obtained to have a look at how farming ought to be happening on this nation. And do we actually wish to proceed company concentrated farming, the place the land is poisonous and ruined, into the longer term? Or can we wish to help farmers who’re attempting to maintain, preserve and construct the soil?”

In coping with the nation’s lawmakers, mentioned Mugar, “we’ve obtained to get smarter about what we demand.”