Willie Nelson’s ‘back to the land’ message for America

The 75-year-old ‘outlaw’ country singer looks to some home-grown solutions to help President Obama fix the economic crisis

FIRST POSTED FEBRUARY 24, 2009

Willie Nelson has some advice for President Obama on how to fix the mess America has got itself into, and, just like the lyrics the grizzled old 'outlaw' country singer has been penning for half a century, it is nice and simple.

"Put a million farmers back on the land," he says. "Everybody needs to eat, and I’ve always seen growing food as the base of a good economy. Do something useful."

Well, yes. But there is more to Nelson’s plan than that, and it is worth remembering that the 75-year-old with the cascading wrinkles, and a braid of silvery hair reaching to the small of his back, once studied agriculture at Baylor University in his home state of Texas.

If we grow our own fuel, we don’t need to run around the world starting wars

"We can grow food," he goes on, "but we can also grow fuel." Ah. Now the Willie Nelson rescue plan is deepening.

"And if we grow our own fuel, we don’t need to go running around the world starting wars, do we?"

At least there is no way that Nelson can be accused of failing to practise what he preaches. He has arrived in the heart of Manhattan in a full-sized coach, decorated with murals of weary Indian warriors slumped over their ponies at the end of the trail, and with impenetrable black windows for privacy. It is his tour-mobile, and it racks up 135,000 miles a year on an exclusive diet of bio-diesel.

Not only is Nelson the founder and leading light of Farm Aid and a devoted environmentalist, but he has put a lot of his own money into a bio-diesel production company with pumps in service stations all over the South West.

Singer Willie Nelson fills up his bus with Bio Willie Diesel Fuel in San Diego

The old-timer, on the road with a guitar called Trigger and a songbook going back to the 1950s when he wrote Crazy for the legendary Patsy Cline, is sounding positively futuristic. And he’s from Texas?

"Me and Dubya Bush; I know," he says with an East Texas drawl. "But anything and everything can come out of Texas. It's about being an individual, to the Texas way of thinking. To me, it means doing it absolutely my own way."

The bio-diesel leaves a smell of old chip-pan oil lingering around the engine at the back of the bus. It is parked, with permission from the Mayor's office because Nelson is a star who prefers to avoid hotels, by the stage door to Jazz at Lincoln Center in the shimmering glass towers of the Time Warner skyscraper, where he is to play classic blues with modern jazz maestro Wynton Marsalis and his

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The trouble with Willie's 'green message' is that bio-diesel has been exposed as a pipe dream for some time now by people who can think past slogans. To grow enough bio-fuel to replace all fossil fuel used in cars and trucks would take more land than is currently used for growing food. So it's eat or drive, a simple enough choice. Of course, for affluent rock stars in their tour bus bubbles, it might well appear an attractive option, but I would expect more joined up thinking from someone as mature as Willie, especially as he was apparently trained in agriculture way back when. No, Willie isn't going to save America and the Earth, he might feel good about himself though. We've seen rock stars get involved in world affairs before, they are usually ill-informed, presumptuous and simplistic and invariably more about the ego than anything else; Geldoff and Bono are good examples. They should stick to what they know and leave important matters to those capable of thinking a bit more deeply.

Posted by Peter Simmons at 10:57am on February 24, 2009

I think Willies' point about returning people to the fields is a good one - provided it was the entire political and financial ruling class (Ron Paul excepted) that were the first to be turned into useful farm workers.

Posted by Alan Pond at 1:46pm on February 24, 2009

Bio-diesel from "conventional" crops such as soy or sunflower would take a lot of land, but it's possible to get a yield from algae that is 100 times higher than sunflower or 200 times soy, as well as not needing prime agricultural land.

Posted by Bob Harle at 3:03pm on February 24, 2009

BobH - to emphasise your point on algae, it grows best on sewage sludge in settling ponds and, given that the modern world is fulla s**t, that's an apparently unlimited resource. Once the algae is harvested the remaining sludge can be further digested ANaerobically (without oxygen) to produce methane, another highly portable transport fuel. What remains after the tertiary phase is an almost perfect, odourless fertiliser and soil booster, desperately needed after decades of hammering their midwest plains with (oil based) fertilisers. I applaud AlanP's suggestion that the politico/financial class be the first sent back to the land (for re-education...?). An old anti war idea in the 20thC was that the first soldiers sent to war should be the oldest citizens & pollies most keen on negotiating with hi-ex. As well as removing the main casus belli it would certainly ameliorate, if not totally cure, such fevered phantasies as world domination & gun boat diplomacy.

Posted by allan kessing at 11:34pm on July 11, 2009