.png)
At Farm Aid 2025, Neil Young Calls for Big Ag to Pay "Conscience Tax"
- Bob Benenson
- Sep 22
- 3 min read
Music Legend Challenges Those Who Benefit from Family Farmers' Losses
Neil Young — who co-founded the Farm Aid organization 40 years ago with fellow stars Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp — has been a vocal activist throughout his legendary six-decade music career. He has never held back his views on political and social issues.
And at the 2025 Farm Aid festival and concert, held Saturday (September 20) in Minneapolis, Young issued a broadside against Big Ag, calling for companies and billionaires to pay a "conscience tax" for family farmers who have been damaged or devastated by the rise of corporate control and consolidation in rural America.
The following is Neil Young's statement, made at the press event that preceded the nearly 13-hour concert at University of Minnesota's Huntington Bank Stadium:
We think that they should support the families and the human beings that lived for decades and decades on the farms that they now own as part of their investment portfolio. And I really think that that's important for Cargill and all the other names down the list to make huge, huge donations to Farm Aid so that we can support the people that brought the land to the place where it was, where they could buy it and make a fortune.
There's one thing that really strikes me about this day and that I would like to say is that we need money, okay, so that we can give it to the farmers, so we can support the farmers, and we need to get it from these big corporations and billionaires that have taken all the farms.
We really need that help. And I don't care where it comes from, how dirty they are, whatever they did. It doesn't matter. I just want the money so we can give it to the people who made America what it is now, the farmers. The way it started, it was so beautiful and you could see it.
You drive around this country, you see these great farms out of the bus windows. We see them all the time. We see the old farm houses, the old barns that are falling down. Then we see these long white buildings [Young was referring to Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs, often described as factory farms]. That's the new guys here. They are billionaires, and they got all the new stuff, and they're not paying anybody for what we did to get this started.
So I'm saying to them, we want your money. You should stand up and donate to Farm Aid so that we can give it to the human beings, Americans who made this happen, who made it so that there was something to use.
That's really all I think about when I think about Farm Aid. I know you all have the details and everybody has ideas, and it's great to hear them, and they're fantastic.
But we need your money. We need your money. And all you billionaires... They bought hundreds and thousands of acres of farmland in the country as investments, and they're living the good life. They need to stand up and pay a conscience tax to the farmers of America.
I wish I had something else to say that would be a brighter thing. There's nothing to talk about that's bright that I can think of right now in Washington, but we really could use that help from Washington, from wherever it comes from. I don't care, so long as when we get the money, we don't owe them anything. I just want the money. That's my message.
Young, performing with his band Chrome Hearts, expressed himself further during his set late into the concert, opening with Big Crime, a new song that from its first lyric — "No more great again. Got big crime in D.C. at the White House" — accuses the current presidential administration of fascistic behavior.
The band segued right into a fierce, guitar-shredding rendition of Keep On Rockin' in the Free World, Young's protest song from 1989, and later revived Southern Man, a 1970 song about race relations in the South that stirred controversy at the time.
Comments