Annual Report

Farm Aid's role always has been to serve as the public defender of America's family farms. Willie Nelson, with colleagues Neil Young and John Mellencamp, founded Farm Aid to use their voices and the support of the American people to raise awareness and funds to strengthen family farm agriculture.

• Read the American Insititute of Philanthropy's rating of Farm Aid and other charities.
• View Farm Aid's 2007 IRS form 990, including the Attachment to 990 and Schedule A by clicking here.
• Farm Aid is 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization as defined by the IRS.
• The IRS requires that the organization benefit the general public for the purpose for which it was established. Charity watchdogs have established standards to measure the efficiency of how non-profits perform.
• Overall Farm Aid performance 1985 to 2007
  Total expenditures $32,037,919
  Program expenditures $26,000,922 -- or 81% of total expenditures
• Farm Aid performance 2007
  Total expenditures $1,680,160
  Program expenditures $1,382,571 -- or 86% of total expenditures
• Net assets:
  Farm Aid maintains a surplus of both restricted and unrestricted assets.
  In 2007, temporarily restricted net assets consisted of $552,398, which represents a fund for agriculture scholarships established by the Younkers Department store in 1985.
• Farm Aid's 2007 unrestricted assets were $449,177.

Farm Aid’s mission is to keep family farmers on the land. Our goal is to bring together family farmers, citizens and consumers to build a strong and resilient family farm-centered agricultural system. Family farmers ensure healthful food, protect natural resources, and strengthen local economies.

The following Farm Aid programs accomplished this mission:

Promoting Food from Family Farms

Farm Aid 2007: A HOMEGROWN Festival was Farm Aid’s primary tool to promote family farmers as our best resource for good food with a variety of activities and events. The concert was held at Randall’s Island in New York City on September 9, 2007. A crowd of more than 26,000 enjoyed performances by Willie Nelson, Neil Young, John Mellencamp and Dave Matthews with Tim Reynolds. Other artists included Gregg Allman, The Allman Brothers Band, Matisyahu, Counting Crows, Guster, The Derek Trucks Band, Warren Haynes, Billy Joe Shaver, Montgomery Gentry, Supersuckers, Pauline Reese, Danielle Evin, The Ditty Bops, Jimmy Sturr, Paula Nelson, 40 Points, and Jesse Lenat. All of these artists donated their time and travel expenses. The concert was also webcast the next week to a virtual audience across the world.

Farm Aid program and fundraising staff created a number of pre-concert events and activities in New York to engage the public and entice the media to tell the Good Food story and promote the annual concert.

This year, these activities reached a new level of intensity as we conducted several days of farm tours during our Upstate-Downstate Caravan, brought key political leaders and food activists together in New York to talk about moving food policy forward in the city, engaged twenty-four NYC restaurants in a promotion to support family farmed food, and brought our Good Food message straight to the public through our Homegrown Fair in Union Square. Each of these events contributed to the public awareness of the importance of family farm agriculture in helping create a food system that is environmentally sound, economically strong and healthful for everyone. Each also enabled Farm Aid to create strong new connections with farm and food activists throughout the state of New York, an opportunity that will pay on-going dividends as we push the Good Food agenda forward.  

On September 9, 2007 at Randall’s Island:

• Farm Aid became the first major music event to serve local, organic and family-farm foods at our concessions and backstage. More than 80 percent of all ingredients were local, organic and/or sourced from family farms.
• We built Farm Aid’s first HOMEGROWN Village, which offered hands-on interactive experiences with family farmers and sustainable family-farm practices.
• Our annual food drive held at the concert with help from City Harvest collected 2,000 pounds of canned food. City Harvest collected an additional 5,000 pounds of food from backstage caterers, which was distributed to shelters in all five New York boroughs.
• We implemented our first recycling and composting program at the concert. We recycled four tons of materials and composted over 700 pounds of food and utensil waste. The compost waste was transported to McEnroe Organic Farm in Millerton, N.Y. where it will be turned into compost to sustain future crops.

This year’s concert served to launch HOMEGROWN as a campaign of Farm Aid through the HOMEGROWN Village, HOMEGROWN food at concessions, buttons that read “In Farmers We Trust”, “Home Sweet Apple”, and “Resurrect The Potluck”, an “In Dirt We Trust” T-shirt, and the name of the event itself: A HOMEGROWN Festival. Farm Aid has refined the focus and message of the campaign, and has begun designing the community-based web site that will serve as the hub for all HOMEGROWN activities.

Media Impact
Farm Aid 2007: A HOMEGROWN Festival generated wide media coverage across the country. Coverage on CNN, CNBC, NPR and in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Washington Post, and Associated Press, for example, not only promoted the entertainment value of the concert, but also the show’s message about connecting people everywhere with fresh, healthful food from family farms. The press event on June 11, led by Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, to announce the September 9 concert generated more than 200 media hits with impressions of more than 61,000,000. The Farm Aid 2007: A HOMEGROWN Festival concert event generated more than 350 media hits with impressions of more than 100,000,000.

The concert generated several major donations, as well as individual gifts. Corporate sponsors included Silk Soymilk, Horizon Organic, Whole Foods Market, Fields Family Foundation, Chipotle, Organic Valley Family of Farms, and others.

The concert was broadcast live on XM Satellite Radio and also premiered as a two-hour high definition TV special on November 25, 2007, on HDNet. The TV special featured both the music and the message of Farm Aid.

Online
Farm Aid's website continued to educate, engage and mobilize visitors online in 2007. The website was a primary tool for communicating with constituents, collecting donations, selling merchandise and organizing events. We set several records on our website, including:

• 46,400 total hits on our website on the day of show;
• 15,388 viewers to the webcast, which was broadcast in the weeks following the show;
• 5,969 unique visitors to our blog, which posted updates throughout the concert weekend.

Growing the Good Food Movement

During 2007, Farm Aid and its partners continued to implement innovative strategies that bolster what Farm Aid calls the Good Food Movement – the growing number of Americans reaching for and demanding family farm-identified, local, organic or humanely-raised food.

Farm Aid made grants in the amount of $143,500 to organizations across the country that are building connections between farmers and consumers, creating new markets for family farmed food.

Helping Farmers Thrive

Through 1-800-FARM-AID and www.farmaid.org, Farm Aid staff refers farmers to an extensive network of family farm organizations across the country. This network was grown to 360 organizations, an increase of 55 percent this year. The referrals support farmers seeking to make transitions to more sustainable and profitable farming practices, and also provide immediate and effective support services to farm families in crisis. Nearly 460 farmers in distress contacted the Farm Aid office via the hotline or the Farm Aid Help web page.

In 2007, Farm Aid researched and continued to expand its Farm Resource Directory to provide more resources to farmers to develop new markets and farming practices, to access emergency services, and to connect farmers to available resources in their state or area of interest. Roughly 244 farmers seeking information on new farm resources contacted Farm Aid this year. In addition, Farm Aid began designing a multi-year marketing and communications campaign aimed at encouraging and supporting conventional farmers interested in transitioning to sustainable production methods on their farm. A secondary goal of this campaign is to increase the capacity of American farmers to meet consumer demand for fresh, family farm produced food.

Farm Aid also continued to respond to ongoing needs of farmers hit by weather disasters. In 2007, Farm Aid supported a hay relief effort for Oklahoma cattle ranchers hit by extreme blizzard conditions, and provided emergency cash assistance to a number of farmers hit by drought. In all, there were 704 calls and emails to the Farm Aid hotline in 2007, a record high over the 22 years that the hotline has been in existence.

Taking Action to Change the System

Farm Aid works with and provides grants to local, regional and national organizations to promote fair farm policies and grassroots organizing campaigns. Farm Aid partners with family farm organizations fighting factory farming and industrial agriculture, while building opportunity for family farmers who produce our food, fiber, and energy. By strengthening the voices of family farmers themselves, Farm Aid stands up for the most resourceful, heroic Americans—the family farmers who work the land.

In 2007, Farm Aid granted to family farm groups working to keep family farmers on their land and strengthening local and sustainable agriculture. The total for these farm action and policy grants was $152,865. Additional funds supported agriculture scholarships for college students in the amount of approximately $30,000.