Farm Aid, the annual concert program raising money to support America's family farms, is celebrating its 40th year of great music and benevolence and one advocacy group, the Missouri Rural Crisis Center, has worked with the concert series every step of the way.
The center supports the state's independent family farms and rural communities with programs to help ensure fair markets, support the environment, and preserve the rural lifestyle.
Rhonda Perry, program director for the center, said her group was started with a grant from Farm Aid.
"Farm Aid has very thoughtfully, over the years, ensured that the event wasn't just a concert, but was an event that has ways for people to engage and take action right there at the concert," Perry explained.
She recalled Farm Aid cut a $10,000-dollar check to help the center get up and running in the mid-1980s. Every year since, the group has gone to the Farm Aid concert and sold Missouri pork products to concertgoers. Funds from the effort provide support and marketing assistance to hog farmers.
It led to the Patchwork Family Farms project, a co-op created by the crisis center to help Missouri hog farms find fair markets for their products, protect the environment and create jobs for rural community members.
"We started a specific project that was about making sure that farmers could get paid a fair price for their high-quality product," Perry recounted. "They raised their hogs under standards of being sustainable, environmentally sound, and humane."
Perry stressed it is important to support independent agriculture and the rural lifestyle.
"When we lose family farmers, we also lose the fabric that holds rural communities together," Perry emphasized. "We lose the social aspect. We lose the participation in schools and churches and the very infrastructure that keeps us together."
The Missouri News Service, a partner with KRCU Public Radio, originally published this story.
