Look Inside John Mellencamp’s Farm Aid Road Case

In this post, you will learn more about Farm Aid co-founder John Mellencamp’s forty years of work on behalf of family farmers, and you’ll find more details on each of the items displayed in the road case – which is now available for viewing in the Live Nation VIP Experience at each stop on John’s current tour.

The Roots of the “Scarecrow” Album in Seymour, Indiana

John Mellencamp grew up in Seymour, Indiana, a rural community in the southern part of the state, less than an hour north of Louisville, Kentucky, and about the same distance to the southeast from Bloomington, where he later attended Indiana University.

By the 1980s, as John has famously said, he could look out his window and see that the small rural towns around where he grew up were dying. Farmers were being driven off the land in a foreclosure crisis that showed no signs of ending, and as farmers disappeared, so did the Main Street businesses that supported them. Schools, hospitals, nursing homes followed, often leaving behind little more than gas stations and mini-marts.

In 1985, John released his sixth album, called Scarecrow.  He was already a bona fide rock star, with earlier hits like “Hurts So Good,” “Jack and Diane,” “Pink Houses,” and others reaching the top of the charts.  But the Scarecrow album, with its title track “Rain on the Scarecrow,” expanded the social commentary heard on “Pink Houses” significantly.

Inside the road case exhibit, you’ll find several artifacts related to Scarecrow, including a copy of the album itself, the Future Farmers of America (FFA) jacket he wore for the album and in part of the “Rain on the Scarecrow” video, as well as the contact sheet and photo of John wearing the FFA Jacket, taken by Marc Hauser.

 

Farm Aid I, September 22, 1985

Not long after Scarecrow came out in July 1985, more than 1 billion people worldwide tuned in to watch the Live Aid concert, broadcast from stadiums in London and Philadelphia.  The benefit show had been organized to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia.  When Bob Dylan performed from the stage in Philly, though, he asked if maybe some of the money raised could be kept to help American farmers pay off their loans.  The implication was that we needed American farmers to keep feeding the world.

Willie Nelson heard about Dylan’s comment and began working to organize the first Farm Aid concert in Champaign, Illinois. One of the first people he called was John Mellencamp, largely because Scarecrow had just come out, and Willie heard that it spoke to the issue of farm foreclosures.

John eagerly accepted the invitation to join Willie and Neil Young in organizing the first Farm Aid concert, which raised $7 million that was distributed to local and regional farm organizations so that they could directly aid farmers in financial distress.

Chillicothe, Missouri on May 7, 1986

As we recently recounted in a special two-part episode of Against the Grain: the Farm Aid Podcast, John traveled to Chillicothe, Missouri to support farmers engaged in a protest against the Farmers Home Administration (FmHA) office there. In the midst of what turned out to be a 145 day blockade of the FmHA offices, organized primarily by Roger Allison and the Missouri Rural Crisis Center, John spoke in solidarity and performed for 10,000 people from the back of a flatbed truck. Like a previous appearance by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, John’s participation in the protest brought national news media attention to the farm crisis at a critical moment.

Farm Aid II, July 4, 1986

Originally, Willie, John, and Neil hoped that the first Farm Aid concert would raise enough money and enough awareness to convince the Congress to step in with legislation to end the farm crisis. But as the blockade in Chillicothe showed, there was no let up.  As a result, the founders made plans for another benefit, this time set to take the place of Willie’s annual 4th of July picnic, held at Manor Downs, outside of Austin, Texas.

Testifying before the United States Senate, June 1987

On June 18, 1987, John and Willie traveled to Washington DC to testify before a US Senate subcommittee on agricultural production. They were guests of Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, in whose office a couple of these exhibit photos were taken. Both Willie and John reported to the senators that farmer calls for help had not slowed down, but increased, leaving them wondering what the Congress was doing to help family farmers. John has often told the story, noting the lack of interest of certain senators, while one asked if they had brought their guitars and would play a song – as if Willie and John were there to entertain! Frustrated, John said to the press afterwards, “If these people worked for me, they’d work a short time.”

Farm Aid IV, the Hoosier Dome, Indianapolis, April, 1990

In April of 1990, Farm Aid played in John’s home state of Indiana for the first time. It was the quickest Farm Aid to sell out, with 45,000 tickets purchased in under two hours. The range of artists who performed was astonishing — everyone from country stars Dwight Yoakam and Garth Brooks, to blues giants Bonnie Raitt and Taj Mahal, to rock stars Iggy Pop and Guns & Roses. A few days before the show, John encountered Elton John at the hospital bedside of teenage AIDS activist Ryan White and invited him to perform at Farm Aid IV.  Elton dedicated a moving version of “Candle in the Wind” to Ryan, who passed hours later.

 

Farm Aid 10th Anniversary, Louisville, KY, 1995

By the time Farm Aid played its 10th anniversary show at Cardinal Stadium in Louisville, Kentucky, just an hour from where John grew up, his association with the cause of family farmers was well-established and widely-known. To honor that contribution – as well as Willie’s and Neil’s — Ed Logsdon, Kentucky’s Commissioner of Agriculture, conferred on the three Farm Aid founders the title of Honorary Commissioner of Agriculture.

In the aftermath of 9/11: Farm Aid 2001

When terrorists attacked multiple sites of American power on September 11, 2001, it looked like plans for Farm Aid 2001 might have to be canceled.  Scheduled to take place just 18 days later, on September 29, 2001, in John’s home state of Indiana, it was natural to weigh calling it off or at least postponing it. But John, in particular, made a case for holding the concert on schedule, as planned, because it was something the nation needed in the wake of such horror. The show was reframed as “A Concert for America” (the same subtitle as Farm Aid I), but with an emphasis on farmers’ service to their communities and their nation, in good times and bad. “Strong Farmers for a Strong Nation,” read the t-shirts, and the show was quickly distributed on DVD.

Farm Aid 20, 25, 30, and 40

With every major anniversary, Farm Aid’s endurance and persistence on behalf of family farmers has breaks its own record for concerts for a cause. But John and the other board artists have repeatedly said that they wish they did not have to keep raising money for this cause – that it would be better to solve the problem and make Farm Aid’s existence unnecessary. In 2005, Farm Aid marked its 20th anniversary at Tinley Park in Chicago; in 2010, the 25th anniversary show took place at Miller Park in Milwaukee; the 30th anniversary show brought Farm Aid back to Chicago, to Northerly Island, in 2015, and last year, Farm Aid celebrated its 40th anniversary at Huntington Bank Stadium in Minneapolis.

Still doing the Work:

Anniversaries are nice, but the work still needs to get done. During the press event at Farm Aid 2016, in Bristow, Virginia, John recounted how people will sometimes ask him “Farm Aid? You guys still doing that? And I think, “You still eating?”

Farm Aid On the Road and Black Lives Matter

In the last ten years, John has continued to stand for justice with and for farmers and others, carrying on the work that he and people like the Rev. Jesse Jackson did in linking farm issues with civil rights. In 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Farm Aid put on a fully remote show, and John filmed his performance in front of his Airstream trailer. This was only a few months after the police murder of George Floyd; consequently, John made a point of playing his Black Lives Matter-themed song, “Easy Target,” to an audience of folks wearing BLM t-shirts – at the end of which he kneeled and raised his fist in the air.

Farmers for Climate Action

Not unlike when John showed up for farmers in Chillicothe in 1986, he made a point of joining farmers in Washington DC for the 2023 Farmers for Climate Action: Rally for Resilience.  Organized by a coalition of farm, food, and social justice organizations (and led by the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition), the protest brought together hundreds of farmers to rally, visit with their elected representatives, and demand a Farm Bill that privileges family farmers and their communities over the corporations that dominate our food systems. We’re still waiting for that Farm Bill. John performed on an outdoor stage at the rally, on a blustery March day, accompanied by his longtime guitarist, Andy York, and concluded with a message of encouragement: “We’ve been slugging since 1985.  Let’s keep slugging and let’s try to improve the quality of the food that we eat, the air that we breathe, and the people that we are.”

John and Farm Aid Today

Farmers today once again find themselves in crisis. Forty-one years after John, Willie and Neil founded Farm Aid, farmers are still waiting for Congressional action that favors family farmers over the corporate giants that dominate our food system. They need a fair price for what they produce, access to land, credit and reliable markets, and investments in climate smart agriculture. But in the last year alone, they’ve seen arbitrary funding cuts, the closing of foreign and domestic markets, and rising costs thanks to tariffs and war. Meanwhile, the last Farm Bill expired in 2023, and Congress shows no sign of passing a new Farm Bill, let alone one that supports family farmers.

And so, John and Farm Aid continue the work, raising money and awareness with festivals in recent years in Indiana, New York, Minnesota and, this year, in Virginia. The Farm Aid Board of directors has expanded to include Dave Matthews (2001), Margo Price (2021), and Nathaniel Rateliff (2026).

Please join John in Virginia Beach on September 26, 2026 for another Farm Aid festival and be on the lookout for an upcoming opportunity to win the signed Gibson Hummingbird guitar on display in the road case exhibit.