“We are 21 years old today,” musical icon and Farm Aid president, Willie Nelson, said to rousing applause from several hundred family farmers, food and farming advocates, journalists, and sponsors gathered in a standing-room only tent shortly before the start of Farm Aid’s 2006 concert. “We are now an adult, and legal”, he added, with a laugh and more cheers from the audience.
      When Farm Aid got its start, back in 1985, national newspapers carried daily stories of farm foreclosures and the financial and emotional depression that was ripping the heartland apart. African famine was also in the news, and the Live Aid concert brought artists from around the world together in a first-of-its-kind, multi-act charitable concert to raise funds for famine relief. Bob Dylan came on stage at Live Aid, and said, ‘its too bad some of the money being raised couldn’t go to help America’s struggling family farmers.’
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“Eyeing underwater wood is not new. In the 1980s, divers began salvaging logs that sank when trees were floated from forest to mill, but these logs were just a small fraction of the underwater wood supply: Scientists estimate that there are 200 to 300 million trees still standing on the beds of reservoirs around the world. When loggers first harvested these trees in the late 1990s, they simply plucked the tree—roots and all—from the bottom of shallow reservoirs, but this stirred up sediment that was often laden with heavy metals from centuries-past, up-river mining and industry. Divers developed underwater chainsaws to help harvest some of these trees, but they were limited to working in relatively shallow depths, and the work was extremely dangerous.

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