Farm Aid Concert Wrap-up

This year’s concert marked several milestones for Farm Aid. Here are just the highlights:

· Farm Aid is 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.

· 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 then distributed to shelters in all five New York boroughs.

· This year marked the 3rd year of our annual restaurant campaign with 24 participating restaurants.

· 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.

· We set several records on our web site, attracting record traffic to the webcast and blog , where we had backstage updates going all weekend. If you haven’t watched the webcast yet, it is now available in our FarmYard.

· This year’s concert attracted unprecedented press coverage including a great article in the New York Times and numerous positive music and food reviews!

· This year’s concert featured Farm Aid’s first HOMEGROWN Village, which offered hands-on interactive experiences with family farmers and sustainable family-farm practices.