Saratoga Springs hosts 2024 Farm Aid festival

SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. (NEWS10) - The 2024 Farm Aid festival is being held in Saratoga Springs at the Saratoga Preforming Arts Center. The sold-out event is showcasing family farmers and advocating to fight commercial corporations. The festival began in 1985 and has returned to New York State for the first time in more than a decade.

The festival kicked off with board members, Willie Nelson, Neil Young, John Mellencamp, Dave Matthews, and Margo Price, along with some of the state family farmers sharing the goal of Farm Aid with a press conference on stage.

"I am standing here for my brothers and sisters and for all of Farm Aid," Neil Young said. "For 39 years of Farm Aid that we have had so far. When you see them along the highway, the industrial-looking buildings full of animals with fans on the sides of them. that's what we're against. That's not American farming, that corporate factory farming."

Some attendees, like Lucas Dashnaw from Keeseville, waited in line for over an hour this morning to see some of the board members perform.

"I am looking forward to Lucas Nelson, that one's of the biggest ones, I have been wanting to see him for a while, Dashnaw said. "I have seen Willie Nelson before; he was awesome."

While others like Keith Wyman, who came all the way from Vermont, attended the festival to just support the cause.

"It's bringing a spotlight on the plight of family farms, we are losing them left and right to corporate farms, and things like that, Wyman said. "With no farms, no food. The small niche farms are what is going to fill in for the mass-produced stuff."

Family farmers were celebrated at the festival, and some longtime farmers, like Martin-Fuentes-Europa, a farmer at Breezy Hill Orchard and Cider Mill, are thankful to be supported by Farm Aid.

"We have ups and downs with mother nature," Fuentes-Europa said. "Some years we have a lot of food, and some years we have very little, but we manage to keep up."