It isn’t every day that listening to a music report provides blog-fodder. A podcast on music from National Public Radio in the US produced an item on a singer called Adrienne Young, apparently “a darling of the folk-bluegrass-country set”. What’s different about her is her very public commitment to small-scale (and organic) farming, community-supported agriculture, and agricultural biodiversity. She grew up in a fruit & veg farming family, has worked on farms, and invites local farmers to speak at her shows. The music’s OK too.
There are a couple other musicians with an agricultural bent. Willie Nelson has his Farm Aid, although that has always struck me as a handout to small farm families who haven’t managed to cultivate subsides. Ali Farka Touré, who died a little more than a year ago, was famously a farmer. And the CGIAR centres once had Hootie and the Blowfish as ambassadors to yoof. (What do you mean you’ve never heard of either entity?)
There must be others, and there must be ways that music could be used to convey the message of agricultural biodiversity. Enlighten us, please.
The recent paper showing that climate change threatens the wild relatives of crops received quite a bit of attention yesterday, being as how it was