Host Peter Coyote joins musician/activist Willie Nelson and panel of farmers, activists and agricultural experts to explore the plight of a dying breed: The Family Farmer.  Family farms in the US have foreclosed and vanished at the alarming rate of 500 per week as a corporate agricultural industry, which often wields monopolistic control over commodity prices, has been firmly established throughout the U.S. 

Millions of dollars in US government subsidies go to only ten percent of American farmers, while the remaining 90 percent  are left to fend for themselves. Increasingly, they�re giving up.  Unable to compete with falling commodity prices while their costs to raise a harvest far exceeds any possible return, they migrate by the millions to urban areas.  More distressingly, suicide rates among American farmers now stand at five times the national average. 

Program host Peter Coyote begins �Broken Heart/Land� with excerpts from an exclusive interview he conducted with country music icon and Farm Aid founder Willie Nelson:

�When five family farmers go under, one business in that community goes under.
 So it�s like the domino effect.  You lose all the farmers, and then go the schools and the hospitals, all the businesses in that town.   Everybody folds up.  You got a ghost town, every body moves out and goes on to the next big town and become a problem over there.� 

The problem is not just American, as surprisingly similar economic and political pressures are affecting small farmers throughout the world.  Europe and the US are now in conflict over GMO food and labeling, while cotton farmers in Mali and elsewhere in the developing world cannot compete with cotton prices from subsidized large-scale American farmers.  The Active Opposition explores some of the human and social costs of this transformation.

�Broken Heart/Land� asks if  the demise of the American family farm serves as a metaphor for the end of a healthy, rural society in America?   The program also examines the quality of the food on our tables, as well as the environmental consequences of large-scale factory farming, including nitrate poisoning from unmanageable quantities of manure runoff and animal waste. Guests on this Active Opposition not only identify some of the contributing factors to this problem, but offer a number of potential solutions.

Guests include:

ANURHADA MITTAL � Co-director of Food First 
GARY GRANT - North Carolina farmer and Director of Black Farmers Association.
MARK RITCHIE - President, The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
MONA LEE BROCK � Suicide hotline counselor
FRED KIRSCHENMANN � Iowa Farmer.  President of Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture.
Rhonda Perry � Missouri Farmer and Activist.

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