Both Senator Amy Klobuchar and Representative Angie Craig said they stood with family farmers as they introduced musicians at the concert.
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Both Senator Amy Klobuchar and Representative Angie Craig said they stood with family farmers as they introduced musicians at the concert.
September 22, 2025
September 22, 2025 – The two top Democrats on the Senate and House Agriculture committees took the stage at Farm Aid’s 40th-anniversary concert in Minneapolis on Saturday, where they criticized the Trump administration’s agriculture policies and said they were standing up for small, family farms.
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“Our farmers, our small farmers, have had a gut punch,” Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) said before she introduced the musician and Farm Aid board member Margo Price, whose family lost their Illinois farm during the 1980s farm crisis. “Farm Aid and all of you stand up for them.”
Started in 1985 by Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, and Neil Young as a benefit to help farms facing bankruptcy, the concert now funds a non-profit organization that supports various farmer initiatives. At an all-day forum the organization hosted the day before the concert, farmers and advocacy groups from across the country pointed over and over again to the need to address corporate consolidation in agriculture and the broader food system.
On her way to the stage to introduce Wynonna Judd, Representative Angie Craig (D-Minnesota) responded to Civil Eats’ questions about whether she and her colleagues in Washington, D.C., were working on the issue. “I’m an advocate for small family farms in this country,” she said. “Anything we can do to level the playing field for those folks is exactly right.” Craig pointed more specifically to other challenges she said farms are facing, including access to credit, high input costs, low commodity prices, and especially the impacts of the Trump administration’s tariffs, which have hurt the market for crops like soybeans.
To address these and many other challenges, farm advocates at the forum also discussed pushing lawmakers to pass a farm bill, which is now two years overdue.
Craig criticized Republicans’ decision to include some agriculture provisions and cut Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funding in their One Big Beautiful Bill instead of working on a full, bipartisan farm bill, but said she’s still engaging with the process.
“They’re calling it a ‘skinny’ farm bill, and basically they raided the nutrition title to pay for some crop insurance and reference prices that should have been done in a farm bill,” she said. “I’m at the table. I’m negotiating. But the truth is that none of this is going to be fast enough to offset the tariffs that the Trump administration has put forward.”
Farm Aid was among nearly 600 organizations that sent Craig, Klobuchar, and the Republican leadership in both chambers a letter Monday referring to the “inescapable shadow” of legislative changes made in the One Big Beautiful Bill now hampering the farm bill process.
“Every successful farm bill coalition has been built on the foundation of bipartisanship, and the next farm bill will be no different,” the groups wrote. “Achieving this shared vision begins, but does not end, by addressing the harms of budget reconciliation.”
The groups then said they would only support a farm bill that “provides adequate and accessible SNAP benefits to families and individuals; makes our food safer, healthier, and more affordable; that supports good, family-sustaining jobs for food workers; and that supports family farmers and their communities.”
In addition to the two federal lawmakers, Minnesota governor and former Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz also appeared at Farm Aid to introduce Willie Nelson. “Thank you for showing up for your neighbors,” he said to the crowd, “for those agriculture producers across this country who feed, fuel, and clothe not just us in our nation, but the world.” (Link to this post.)
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