Farm AID's Founder: Willie Nelson

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"Well, the Farm and Ranch Congress was good," he says. "They got together in St. Louis and came up with a Farm Bill, and Senator Harkin has now introduced it, and that's good, too. Other than that, we're trying to get the word out that the problem still exists. Farmers are still going out of business every day. They still need money, they still need advice, they still need legal help and more than anything they still need more pay for their product."

And that is probably as succinct and complete a definition of Farm Aid and its goals as you're going to find. Specifically, the job of Willie's nonbureaucratic little core organization—himself, his secretary Jody Fisher in Texas, Director Mugar in Massachusetts, two other full-timers and two part-timers—is to work with all sorts of volunteers (concert talent bookers, midwestern ministers, sympathetic attorneys, kitchen-familiar farmers' wives) to give food and money to those in immediate need, to provide them with legal and other support services, to encourage and set up farmer-to-farmer self-help networks and to sponsor concerted political action.

"I know that every quarter of that money has gone to benefit the family farmer..."

In practice, this means identifying and working with existing nonpolitical organizations (primarily church groups) that set up food pantries and otherwise act as local distributors of emergency aid; helping farmers run educational/financial/legal seminars; establishing counseling groups to combat the potentially life-threatening depression and guilt many of them experience; running the Family Farm Defense Fund, which provides both attorneys to those who don't have them and specialized advice to attorneys who are already engaged in farm defense litigation, bankruptcy proceedings and farm sales; sponsoring such events as the ground breaking Farmers and Ranchers Congress; and encouraging farmers to use their votes to elect and support politicians willing to address the primary issues of the family farm crisis-namely, the domestic price structuring and marketing of family farm products and the intimately related issue of subsidized foreign food imports. Farm Aid has also given a scholarship grant to the Future Farmers of America Foundation, specifying that recipients must be financially needy candidates from small-farm families, and has supported one south Texas group of minority farmers in their direct farm produce marketing initiative.

At his ease in languid concentration at the dining/working/communications table of Honeysuckle Rose, Willie allows a few words on some of these subjects.

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