How a Bob Dylan moment 40 years ago sparked decades of pop philanthropy

By Bill Weir, CNN Chief Climate Correspondent

It was 1985, and improvised empathy was cool.

News reports of families starving to death in drought-stricken Ethiopia were enough to move the lead singer of the Boomtown Rats to assemble a British supergroup to help save them.

Bob Geldof, Band Aid and “Do They Know It’s Christmas” helped inspire Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson to rally even more star power into USA for Africa, raise hundreds of millions with “We Are The World,” and create momentum for a bicontinental mega-concert called Live Aid.

And when the Philadelphia stage hit late prime time, Bob Dylan unwittingly gave this wave of pop philanthropy another push.

“I hope that some of the money that’s raised for the people in Africa,” Dylan said, flanked by Keith Richards and Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones. “Maybe they can just take a little bit of it, one or two million, and use it, say, to pay the mortgages on some of the farms that the farmers here owe to the banks.”

Crop prices were crashing in ‘85, with bank foreclosures wiping out family farms at alarming rates and pushing farmer suicides to record levels and when Dylan gave a shoutout to those who grow the food that ends famines, it hit Willie Nelson “like a ton of bricks.”

The cotton-picker-turned-country superstar was watching Live Aid from his bus, and before long he was on the phone with Neil Young and John Cougar Mellencamp, two more singer-songwriters with rural roots and voices of conscience.

Willie reached out to the governor of Illinois to secure the college football stadium in Champaign, and just ten weeks after Dylan’s comment at Live Aid hes was doing an electric version of “Maggie’s Farm” with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

The parade of music hall of famers at Farm Aid 1 raised the modern equivalent of $20 million that day and teed up 40 years of mission-driven music festivals inclusive enough for both patriots and protest bands.

Over 500 acts have played Farm Aid over the generations, in a tent big enough for everyone from George Jones to Rick James. “Pretend your left hand is that old, wrinkled motherf***** Ronald Reagan’s face,” the “Superfreak” said during a chaotic set in 1986 “And take your right hand and slap the f*** out of it.”

The politics around farming are even more contentious than they were in the days of Reagan, with age-old problems remaining and new ones getting worse.

“Since 1985, some challenges have remained for family farmers, including the unknowns of weather, the ups and downs of markets and policies that help the big guys more than the little ones,” the 92-year-old Willie Nelson blogged before Farm Aid 40. “Some challenges have gotten harder, like access to farmland, the impacts of climate change and the increasing concentration of power held by corporations. But you and I know people have power too and when we come together, we CAN win!”

With a divided Congress making no progress on a comprehensive Farm Bill, Farm Aid is throwing its weight behind the Agriculture Resilience Act, championed by congresswoman and organic farmer Chellie Pingree.

“Today climate change isn’t such a popular item with this president,” the Maine Democrat said on a farm visit south of Portland. “But on the other hand, keeping farms viable should be. Would make it more viable to be on the land? How to reduce your energy costs? What kind of research do you need to deal with the weeks and weeks we’ve had of drought this year?”

She said extreme weather, trade wars and DOGE decisions to gut USDA support staff has some rural Republicans frustrated with the second Trump term.

“I’m working with some New York Republicans who are mad because the administration took away $3 billion that was going directly to farmers to buy their food for school lunches and food banks. It gave farmers guaranteed contracts often in a time of year where they’re not selling as much.”

“You go back to the early 80s, the problem with farmers then is they were told to get big or get out,” Maine farmer Seth Kroeck said. “And they needed to borrow massive amounts of money to get there. And then the markets fell apart. Now we’re in a different situation in that there are a lot of small farmers who are just really trying to scrape along and make the whole thing work.”

As a grower of berries, lettuce and other fresh staples, he says he enjoys none of the support given to large-scale growers of commodity crops. “If you’re a corn, soybean, cotton farmer there’s a lot of funding out there. If you’re in ‘specialty crops,’ which is just the vegetables on people’s tables every single day, there really isn’t a lot of help out there.”

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