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 2008 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 2008
  Total expenditures $34,717,647
  Program expenditures $27,398,074 -- or 79% of total expenditures
• Farm Aid performance 2008
  Total expenditures $1,633,165
  Program expenditures $1,397,152 -- or 86% of total expenditures
• Net assets:
  Farm Aid maintains a surplus of both restricted and unrestricted assets. In 2008, temporarily restricted net assets consisted of $406,534, which represents a fund for agriculture scholarships established by the Younkers Department store in 1985.
• Farm Aid's 2008 unrestricted assets were $581,995.

The following Farm Aid programs accomplished our mission in 2009:

PROMOTING FOOD FROM FAMILY FARMS
Farm Aid 2009 Presented by Horizon Organic 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 the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater in St. Louis, Missouri, on October 4, 2009. A crowd of more than 20,000 enjoyed performances by Willie Nelson, Neil Young, John Mellencamp and Dave Matthews with Tim Reynolds. Other artists included Wilco, Jason Mraz, Jamey Johnson, Gretchen Wilson, Phosphorescent, Billy Joe Shaver, Will Dailey, Ernie Isley and the Jam Band, The Blackwood Quartet, Lukas Nelson and Promise of the Real, and Ryan Bingham and the Dead Horses. All of the artists donated their time and travel expenses.

On October 4 at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater:

• Farm Aid served local, organic and family-farm foods at our HOMEGROWN concessions and backstage. The offerings included fresh fruit from local Missouri farms, fresh sausages and ham steaks from a Missouri family farm co-op, caramel apples, organic pizzas, apple cider and other delicious items.
• We built Farm Aid’s HOMEGROWN Village, which offered hands-on interactive experiences with soil, water, local growing, bio-energy, and family farmers.
• Our annual food drive held at the concert with the St. Louis Area Food Bank collected nearly 5,000 pounds of food from concertgoers and from the backstage caterers, which was distributed to shelters across Missouri.
• We implemented our third recycling and composting program at the concert. The compost waste was transported to Route 66 Organics in Pacific, MO, where it will be turned into compost to sustain future crops.

Farm Aid program and fundraising staff created a number of pre-concert events and activities in Missouri to engage the public and entice the media to tell the Good Food story and promote the annual concert and the work of Farm Aid. These events included a St Louis-area restaurant campaign called Fresh from the Family Farm, which enabled chefs to showcase local, family farm food with a portion of the proceeds benefiting the mission of Farm Aid; a HOMEGROWN Urban Country Fair at St. Louis’ Tower Grove Farmers’ Market; a Farm Aid farmer cook-off at the Taste of St. Louis festival; and a public forum on the challenges and opportunities in family farm agriculture. Each of these events contributed to the public awareness of the importance of family farm agriculture in creating 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 Midwest.

In 2009, Farm Aid continued to grow www.HOMEGROWN.org, Farm Aid’s online community for growers, doers, cooks, and makers to extend a welcome to a new generation to support family farms. In addition to the HOMEGROWN Village and HOMEGROWN Concessions efforts at the Farm Aid concert, HOMEGROWN.org participated in several cultural events in 2009, including a hands-on educational booth at Bonnaroo, the HOMEGROWN Village at Maker Faire Bay Area in California, and the HOMEGROWN Urban Country Fair at Tower Grove Farmers Market in St. Louis.

Media Impact
Farm Aid 2009 generated wide media coverage across the country. Coverage in the St. Louis Post Dispatch, USA Today, Rolling Stone, 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.

As a successful fundraiser, the concert generated several major donations, as well as individual gifts. Corporate sponsors included Horizon Organic, SILK Soymilk, DIRECTV, Organic Valley Family of Farms, Anvil, EternaGreen and Wind Capital Group.

The concert was broadcast live on DIRECTV’s The 101 Network, with repeats during the following week. DIRECTV will also run four one-hour specials featuring the music and the message of Farm Aid in 2010. Additionally, the concert was broadcast live on Willie’s Place on Sirius | XM satellite radio across the country.

Online
Farm Aid's website continued to educate, engage and mobilize visitors online in 2009. The website was a primary tool for communicating with constituents, collecting donations, selling merchandise, allowing users to engage in online advocacy with petitions and letter-writing campaigns, and organizing events. We set several records in 2009 on www.farmaid.org, including:

• 37,786 unique visitors on concert-day (44% higher than last year’s concert-day traffic)
• 26,066 views of the webcast on concert-day (with a total of 36,087 between 10/04 and 10/11, when it played for free on the website)
• Between 10/04 and 10/11, when the concert aired on DIRECTV, the website brought in more than $92,000 in donations and merchandise sales. Farm Aid’s first text-to-donate campaign raised another $12,165.

Farm Aid’s E-Newsletter kept the Farm Aid community informed and inspired with monthly columns that profile America’s family farmers and address questions about food and farming. Farm Aid grew its e-mail list by focusing on timely and relevant topics and offering tools to take action--for instance, by signing a petition demanding the USDA assist struggling dairy farmers, providing comments on the dangers of genetically-engineered food, and working to stop loans to build and expand factory farms. Altogether, Farm Aid was able to register nearly 22,000 new contacts for our email list in 2009.

Farm Fresh Pics, Farm Aid’s photo contest to celebrate family farmers, allowed visitors to enter their favorite photos for a chance to win Farm Aid tickets. The site raised over $14,500 and attracted nearly 56,000 unique visitors with over 600 photos uploaded to honor family farmers.

Farm Aid also cultivated thousands of new users, educated and engaged people through its social media endeavors on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and YouTube.

GROWING THE GOOD FOOD MOVEMENT
During 2009, 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 $72,000 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’s Hotline Coordinator refers farmers to an extensive network of family farm organizations across the country. This network was grown to 460 organizations during 2009. 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. In all, there were nearly 1,000 calls and emails to the Farm Aid hotline in 2009, a record high over the 24 years that the hotline has been in existence.

In 2009, Farm Aid continued to grow the Farmer Resource Network (FRN), an online tool that farmers can access at www.farmaid.org/ideas. The FRN is an interactive database of the nearly 500 organizations Farm Aid works with to provide direct assistance to farmers. The FRN connects farmers to ideas for producing, processing and marketing food from family farms, specifically targeting conventional farmers interested in transitioning to sustainable production methods. In addition, the FRN seeks to increase the capacity of American farmers to meet consumer demand for fresh, family farm produced food. In 2009, 1,282 farmers utilized the Farmer Resource Network.

In 2009, thanks to a restricted donation, Farm Aid supported drought relief efforts in Texas and programs to help farmers and ranchers manage their land in ways that mitigate drought. Farm Aid also provided emergency cash assistance to a number of farmers hit by other weather disasters. Farm Aid issued grants to Help Farmers Thrive in the amount of $219,800, including $67,100 in disaster relief.

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, Farm Aid stands up for the most resourceful, heroic Americans—the family farmers who work the land.

Farm Aid spent considerable time and effort in 2009 working on specific issues affecting family farmers in the economic downturn of 2009, specifically availability and accessibility of credit, farm foreclosure protection, and the dairy crisis. Farm Aid staff visited with USDA officials and participated in phone calls with the Obama Administration and the media to call attention to these matters. Farm Aid’s online advocacy efforts resulted in more than 13,000 petitions being delivered by Farm Aid to the Secretary of Agriculture.

In 2009, 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 $212,000. Additional funds supported agriculture scholarships for college students in the amount of approximately $25,000.

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