4 Reasons Why Willie Nelson’s Farm Aid Matters More Than Ever: ‘A Real Crisis Happening Right Now’

When Willie Nelson and friends take the Farm Aid festival stage in Virginia Beach, Va. Saturday (Sept. 26), they’ll be singing out at a time when the nation’s family farmers are facing unprecedented challenges. 

Rising farm bankruptcies, cuts at federal farm agencies, skyrocketing fuel and fertilizer costs, the intimidation of their immigrant labor force, a growing demand for land by data centers — all have combined in a storm the recalls the farm crisis four decades ago, which led Nelson, Neil Young and John Mellencamp to first launch Farm Aid to support family farmers. 

“You’re looking at a real crisis happening right now. the same way it was in the early ’80s when I was a child,” says Heath Cutrell, 51, a fourth-generation farmer, based in Chesapeake, Va., who grows corn, soybean and wheat on some 7,000 acres.  

Farm Aid remains music’s longest-running concert for a cause. Forty-one years after the first Farm Aid took place in 1985, the festival and its artist leaders still have the backs of those farmers, with Dave Matthews, Margo Price and Nathaniel Rateliff now joining Nelson, Young and Mellencamp on the organization’s board. Since that first Farm Aid, the organization has raised $90 million to promote a strong and resilient family farm system of agriculture.  

At the Veterans United Home Loans Amphitheater, Farm Aid’s guiding artists— with Young joined by his band the Chrome Hearts, and Matthews performing with longtime accompanist Tim Reynolds—will lead a lineup including Turnpike Troubadours, Lukas Nelson, Ty Myers, Mike Campbell & The Dirty Knobs, Jesse Welles, Sierra Ferrell, Mon Rovîa, I’m With Her, Amythyst Kiah, Lily Meola and Chris Pierce. In an acknowledgment of the history of all American farm land, the Wisdom Indian Dancers will open the show. 

“I’m very grateful for those guys walking that walk and talking that talk for and standing there and fighting this battle,” says Cutrell. 

The Farm Aid festival will live stream at farmaid.org and via Nugs beginning with the press event at 11:30 ET. SiriusXM will carry the full show beginning at noon on Willie’s Roadhouse (channel 61) andDave Matthews Band Radio (channel 30) and via SiriusXM radio and on the SXM app. For a second year, CNN will broadcast from the festival from 7 p.m. ET. 

More than 40 food and farm groups will participate in the HOMEGROWN Village while activists and farmers will discuss agricultural challenges and solutions at the FarmYard Stage Tent. Cutrell is among those who will participate. 

Here are four reasons why Farm Aid this year matters more than ever.  

• Exhausting All Options 

  Last year, 315 family farmers made the agonizing decision, typically after exhausting all options, to file for Chapter 12 bankruptcy protection. That provision of federal bankruptcy law allows farmers to restructure their debt and continue farming. The number of bankruptcy filings in 2025 overall is modest. But it represents a 46 percent increase in filings over the previous year, according to a report from the American Farm Bureau Federation — and it is the second straight year of rising farm bankruptcies. 

  “And they’re rising more quickly so far in the first six months of the year,” says Jennifer Fahy, who is co-executive director of Farm Aid with Shorlette Ammons. 

  At the Farm Aid festival two years ago, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and its Farm Service Agency announced the creation of the Distressed Borrowers Assistance Network. The aim was to bring farm support groups together with farmers to provide personalized technical assistance in navigating complex financial challenges. 

  Two days before this year’s concert, Farm Aid’s Mary Oxendine and Nora Miller are facilitating training sessions for groups involved with the network and the farmers they serve. 

  “We’re really trying to meet farmers where they are, [wherever on the] spectrum of financial distress they might be, to make sure that they’re able to stay on the land and continue to farm for a very long time and have that long-term financial stability,” says Oxendine. 

  But an additional challenge farm support groups face is the severe cutbacks at the USDA, which has lost some 27 percent of its staff — some 24,000 employees — in the 14 months after the Distressed Borrowers Assistance Network was created, according to federal data. 

  “We’re seeing that Farm Service Agency offices in the various counties, some of them don’t exist anymore,” says Fahy. “Others have been cut so much that there’s one person in the office one day a week.”

• “Which Way Do You Turn?”

  Earlier this month, when Heath Cutrell went to buy diesel fuel which he uses in his tractor-trailer truck, his pickup truck, “two combines and as many as six tractors running during harvest,” his outraged reaction made the local news. “When they gave me the price, I had a stroke,” Cutrell told a Norfolk, Va. television reporter.

  The price of diesel fuel had reached “was over $6 a gallon,” Cutrell told Billboard. “And now you’re looking at fertilizer prices at record highs.” 

  The cause?  

  The United States war against Iran, which began in February, has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz to oil shipments, causing the price of oil to spike on global markets. The domino effect has some farmers paying thousands more in fuel and fertilizer costs every month.  

  When tariffs imposed by the Trump Administration increased farmer costs, the government responded with increased aid through the 2025 budget reconciliation act, the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill. And farmers of crops like corn, soy and wheat receive subsidies from the federal government to offset price drops in the market for those crops. 

  But individual farmers cannot set the price for their crops when their costs rise. “I mean, the government decides what our crops are worth and we don’t get to pass the buck on, but [the higher costs of] everything that we buy is being passed right down to us. 

  “Which way do you turn anymore?”

• “A Real Chilling Impact”

  The actions early this year of thousands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection officers deployed to the Minneapolis-St. Paul area drew headlines. But in rural areas where farms depend on immigrant labor, the impact has been just as disturbing.

  The advocacy group Farmworker Justice estimates that 70 percent of farmworkers are immigrants. Of that group, it is estimated that 40 percent are undocumented. (Notably, among undocumented immigrants who harvest the nation’s food, more than 20 percent have children who are U.S. citizens, according to one federal study). 

  In the Hampton Roads metropolitan area of Virginia, which includes the site of this year’s Farm Aid festival, an analysis by WHRO Public Media of numbers from the Deportation Data Project showed that there were 16 times more ICE arrests in the region in 2025 than in 2024. 

  “Labor has always been one of the major concerns for agriculture,” says Farm Aid’s Jennifer Fahy. “And right now, the approach this administration has taken has caused that to be an even bigger challenge. People who are here legally are still being investigated or worse.  

  “There’s a real chilling impact,” she says. “And if there’s a word that maybe ICE is in a community, then often the people don’t show up for work that day. And if the crops are not harvested, they may not be usable the next day.”

• “Thoughtful Stewardship”

  Farm Aid is coming Saturday to a state with a dubious distinction; Virginia has more data centers than anywhere else in the nation, with facilities concentrated in the northern section of the state, including the so-called “Data Center Alley” in Loudoun County.

  Yet in southeast Virginia, Cutrell says, “one of my close friends, somebody I’ve looked up to my whole life, is in the middle of selling a 4,000-acre block. What do you think is coming there? Now, it’s his land. He can do what he wants. He’s 91 years old and he’s made a phenomenal career in agriculture.” 

  But farmers fear the loss of affordable land to grow food and the impact such centers can have on electricity rates and local water supplies. “I also think about the public health impact on farmers and their families,” says Farm Aid’s Miller. “How well can you run your farm if you don’t have safe, healthy drinking water? It impacts not [only] farmers as farmers, but farmers as people and their whole families.” 

  Fahy likens the fight in farm communities against data centers today to the battles in the 90s against concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), which critics dubbed factory farms. The same promise of jobs and local economic benefits made to communities then are heard now by data center developers. “We know how to refute these claims,” says Fahy. 

  In July, Willie Nelson spoke out about plans for a data center near his hometown of Abbott, Texas. His reaction conveyed his devotion to farming communities and the Farm Aid cause after more than four decades. 

  “I still have a home there with farmed land where I can still see stars at night. And now our community, like many others, needs to fight against data centers invading our land,” he wrote across his social media accounts. “The last thing we need is a loud, water-thieving, light polluting, data center anywhere near our town — or any others for that matter. 

  “The strength of rural America has never come from big industrial footprints. It comes from generations of people, open spaces, local businesses, and a connection to the land. All of America deserves thoughtful stewardship that doesn’t steal farmland — where our essential shared-food is grown — and small family farmers’ livelihoods, and not data centers that only destroy the environment around them. Whoever controls food and water, controls the masses. Let’s not allow our own demise or give up control over necessary resources in the U.S. and especially in Abbott.”