Dear John,

We are very excited to welcome two new people to our small but mighty team!

Shorlette Ammons–a farm and food equity advocate–is our Program Director. In this role she'll connect with farmers and grassroots organizations and direct programmatic activities, which include grantmaking, advocacy, and direct services to farmers.

Michael Stewart Foley–a historian, writer and activist–is our Cultural Impact Director. He'll work to engage and mobilize a larger community to create change in our farm and food system, deepen our democracy, and work toward a thriving rural America.

Each year we visit farms across the festival region with a film crew to capture the inspiring stories and voices of family farmers. These videos are then shared on the Farm Aid festival stage, in the festival broadcasts, and on our website and social media channels.

This year, we’re highlighting farmers’ climate stories–both how farmers are affected by climate change and how they are affecting climate change through the ways they farm. These film shoots are a way for us to connect to local farmers and build new relationships. The stories all are unique but there’s a common thread: a strong desire to steward the land and provide for their communities. Last year, we met a minutes-old dairy calf; met urban residents who rely on their local community farm for fresh, healthy food; and heard from African immigrant farmers who fled violence and now farm here in the U.S.; among many others.

This video playlist contains the stories of the farmers we visited across the Northeast last summer for Farm Aid 2021. We focused our camera on a diverse set of farmers across the states of Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont and Maine. Some of them are new farmers, some of them are established farmers; but all of these farmers share a love of growing and raising food for their communities, a duty to steward the land, water and climate, and a desire to share their knowledge with a new generation of farmers.