Signs of Sustainability: Farmer Stress, Suicide and Support

Mental health is an overlooked challenge farmers face nationwide. There are a multitude of issues that contribute to farmer stress, anxiety, loneliness and depression. Farmland loss and land access challenges, rising production costs, plummeting farm incomes and unpredictable climate and weather are a few well-known issues.

Racism and patriarchy are far too common in the agriculture industry and are ever present on farms of all sizes. They intensify levels of stress and fear for farmers of color, women and LGBTQAI+ farmers. More recently, the pandemic caused heightened stressors for many small and organic family farmers. For a population already facing difficulties securing adequate and affordable health insurance, it’s not a surprise that suicide rates amongst farmers and ranchers are well above the national average. Therapists and counselors are booked with waitlists, and it can be nearly impossible for people of color to find an available BIPOC therapist.

Mental health treatment and therapy still hold a stigma and help is usually sought too late. Ironically, COVID-19 actually helped raise awareness about the daily challenges farmers face. The news showed farmers dumping unpurchased milk. The scarcity of meat and other supply-chain issues drew federal and state attention. 

“We’re seeing the conversation shifting a little,” Outreach Director with FarmNet Kate Downes said. “People are starting to talk more about mental and physical health together and about suicide, hopefully lessening the stigma around these topics.”

A Center for Disease Control report from 2016 suggested that suicide by farmers, foresters, and fishermen was nearly five times that of the general population. 

“The work is dangerous, it requires long hours and hard manual work and is usually unpredictable because of weather, market prices, and productivity,” Downes said. “In most industries, you get to choose your price – not in dairy or farming in general. Farmers are operating under so much daily stress. When somebody is under stress, they are likely to make poor decisions, intentionally or unintentionally.”

In the last few years, there has also been a rise in agencies and programs designed to support farmer mental health. An increase in resources like the Farmer Stress Assistance Network (FRSAN) is seeing more people call about mental health and family counseling. Service providers like Black Farmer Fund, Cooperative Extension offices, Northeast Organic Farming Association, the Farm Bureau, Farm First, National Young Farmers Coalition, Farm Service Agency and Farm Credit East, are all active in supporting mental health assistance.

In New York State, FarmNet provides mental health services including stress management talks with service providers, and educational programming about farm business development and succession planning. They have family and financial consultants available who work with clients through a transition.

NY FarmNet started a free Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) training open to the public.

“It enables us to compensate service providers such as CCE, farm bureau, ag mediation, National Young Farmer Coalition, and Black Farmers United to become trained facilitators in MHFA”, Downes said. “It helps create a baseline language for discussing farmer mental health. We’re not teaching trainees to be counselors per se, but training them to be able to talk about it and encourage others to talk about it. Silence about the topic is one of the disease’s greatest threats”.

The long-time trend and approach to mental health support are to individualize the challenges people face. In the Northeast, Cultivemos, a collaborative group of organizations including National Young Farmer Coalition (Young Farmers), Northeast Farmers of Color, Migrant Clinicians Network, Farm First, Farm Aid and University of Maine Cooperative Extension wants to “shift the system, rather than the person,” says Jac Wypler, Farmer Mental Health Director at Young Farmers.

“For example, ‘Hey farmer, take a walk, take deep breaths’ makes the stress personal rather than recognizing the systemic nature of our society and system that is not holistic and supportive of well-being,” Wylper said. “It’s critical to work on solutions that are community and system-focused.” 

Cultivemos aims to improve behavioral health awareness, literacy, access, and outcomes for farmers, ranchers, and farmworkers by developing a service provider network that can assist and meet the unique needs of BIPOC growers, farmworkers and young farmers because these are the groups disproportionately harmed by the structural root causes.

Limitations

Most service providers work with farm owners and not farmworkers (from migrant workers to farm employees who do not own a farm). Service providers rarely have bilingual support on their staff, continuing an all-too-common language justice issue in agriculture.

Given 80% of psychologists, 63% of counselors and 59% of social workers are white, according to Data USA, it’s not surprising that cultural competency levels are mixed. This creates a significant barrier to supporting farmers and farmworkers from marginalized groups – the groups who experience the largest hurdles in farming.

In Vermont, Farm First is trying to incorporate important elements like implicit bias and other race-related topics into their peer network training. There are programs in many states specifically for Black, Indigenous and Latine farmers; the Black Farmer Fund (Northeast), the Vermont Relief Collective (VT) and the Cornell Farmworker Program (NY) are three. 

Another organization, Not Our Farm, has developed amazing action-oriented resources for farm owners to better support farmworker rights. More advocacy is needed at the state level to shift funding into the hands of the most marginalized farmer groups and to bridge the gap between mental health professionals, doctors, and outside resources.

The farmer mental health crisis has always been serious. Today, in the context of the many other crises we are experiencing – constant downward pressure from cheap food policies, climate chaos, inequality and violence and the disinvestment in the economies of rural towns and counties – accessible and quality mental health support that values the individual is more important than ever and is a critical baseline step that is far easier than addressing the systemic causes of these stressors.

Elizabeth Gabriel runs Wellspring Forest Farm in Trumansburg with her family on the unceded land of the Gayogo̱hónǫʼ Indigenous people. She also works as an equity and nonprofit development consultant and is the editor of The Natural Farmer, a Northeast Organic Farming Association publication, where the full version of this article will be published in February 2023: thenaturalfarmer.org.