Most are looking for answers. They are looking for ways to survive in a changing agricultural environment—no matter what its cause, wondering what those solutions to the current system might look like.
Increased cost of living—up 14% over the last 4 years— has hit farmers hard. Although family farms account for 97 percent of farms in the United States, the largest 10 percent of farms produce 75 percent of the country’s agricultural output, meaning large-scale operations have an overpowering influence on farm policy. It is the 90 percent of farmers who own smaller operations that are most threatened by climate change and the current farm crisis.
U.S. farmers are saddled with near-record debt, declaring bankruptcy at rising rates and selling off their farms amid an uncertain future clouded by climate change and whipsawed by tariffs and bailouts. Farmers are among the most likely to die by suicide, compared with other occupations, according to a January study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The study also found that suicide rates overall had increased by 40% in less than two decades.
In These Times, March 2020 by Jim Goodman
JFK, as it turns out, was wrong when he noted 60 years ago that the word “crisis” is a combination of the Chinese brush strokes meaning danger and opportunity. While he was linguistically incorrect, we get what he was saying. A crisis situation can be the impetus for change, an opportunity for society to figure out better ways to move forward.
Today, the largest crisis in the minds of farmers is the overarching threat of an increasingly variable and changing climate. With the added pressures of stark economic inequality and the increased cost of living—up 14% over the last 4 years—the economy is decidedly not “ the greatest economy in the history of our country.”
Most any farmer or rancher would nod in the affirmative if asked whether this is a clear and growing crisis in agriculture. They see unprecedented adverse weather as undeniable evidence of a changing climate, which is a contributing factor to the current farm crisis. While this is not a universally accepted idea among farmers, none can deny, however, that prices are historically unfair with 2019 farm income predicted to be below the average.
Farmers and ranchers know the weather, in the past year at least, has been awful, and while many are unwilling to admit that we are dealing with a changing climate, not just bad weather, most are looking for answers. They are looking for ways to survive in a changing agricultural environment—no matter what its cause, wondering what those solutions to the current system might look like.
In all my 40 years of farming, farmers have been told we need to work harder, get bigger and embrace all the new technology. Whether that means moving ever larger numbers of livestock into confinement, using genetically modified seed and its complement of pesticides and fertilizers, or buying machinery sometimes costing more than the value of my farm—no matter, buying the technology is our only option. In the end we are supposed to be thankful we can be a part of the global marketplace, even if it is controlled by multinational corporations and investment banks that determine the cost of everything we buy and the price of everything we sell.
So, what might a different system look like? Could we have…
- A system that allowed farmers of any size to be profitable?
- A system that satisfied the farmer’s need for fair prices and a dignified life?
- A system that produced quality food as determined by a partnership between those who grow food and those who eat it?
- A system where everyone could afford good food, produced in a manner that might actually benefit the environment?
Could we establish a framework that depended less on global markets, more on local production and healthy diets rather than continuing the trend of going all in a “western diet” and pressuring the rest of the world to follow? Certainly, the medical community and the environmental community would support these changes, but agribusiness and farmers, perhaps not so much.
Clearly those controlling the current food system are opposed to any changes that would cut their profits by a shift away from processed foods, grain fed animal products, large scale intensive crop mono-cultures and a global food chain or a shift to any sort of low input sustainable agriculture. Although family farms account for 97 percent of farms in the United States, the largest 10 percent of farms produce 75 percent of the country’s agricultural output, meaning large-scale operations have an overpowering influence on farming policy. Those entities that profit from the current destructive and fragile food system use their lobbying efforts and campaign funding to maintain their existence. One wonders if those in positions of political power dismiss the Green New Deal as a platform for change because they really believe it is unnecessary, that it is truly untenable, or, because they are unconcerned about environmental disaster, opposed to an economy that works for everyone, or are just unwilling to kill their golden goose.
Farmers are lured onto the bandwagon of a global food supply with the mantra that “we need to feed the world,” despite the fact that the world would rather, and could, feed itself. Supposedly, producing more at a lower price and expanding export markets is the answer to our low farm prices. This will be achieved only by breaking down trade barriers and, in effect, forcing importing countries to eat what we sell them—like it or not. Canadian dairy farmers fear that enactment of the new NAFTA (aka USMCA) will “knock the bottom out of their market.” Canada could not absorb our surplus even if their dairy economy were destroyed.
Seriously, this picture is wrong, and in these times of low farm prices, devastating floods, massive soil loss, wildfires and people demanding an ethical, healthy diet, the time could be ripe to end our system of industrial farming and replace it with agroecology.
We need to look at the problem through several lenses, first the farm price issue. The solution to low farm prices is farm justice—farmers getting paid a fair price for producing an ethical product. Just as during the Great Depression of the 1930s, we need supply management, parity pricing (coupling farm prices to production costs) and farmer owned, government insured grain reserves. In the process of returning to sensible farm programs, we can end controversial tax-payer subsidies that supposedly help bolster low farm prices.
As we have seen in real time, export markets and government subsidies do not make farmers profitable. Placing too much dependence on one foreign buyer as we did in the case of the soy export market to China is a seriously flawed strategy. Similarly, placing too much emphasis on growing corn and soy as the basis for production agriculture is a ticking time bomb for growers and the environment. Multinational grain companies profitably ride the market on the backs of farmers, whether they are in the United States, South America, or anywhere else in the world—buying low and selling high.
Secondly, the question of whether livestock can be part of an ethical or environmentally sound food system is a knotty issue. The fact that large numbers of livestock in the United States are currently raised in confinement situations is a major part of the problem. Livestock production must be matched to a consumer diet with a much lower protein content. This would mean raising vastly lower numbers of ruminants (cattle, sheep, etc.) on pasture and forage and again, lower numbers of pigs and poultry on pasture supplemented with crop waste and grain unsuitable for the human food chain.
Manure lagoons, such as this one in North Carolina, hold back the sewage from concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), except during heavy rains when they overflow their banks and contaminate local waterways.
Still, one must also remember that livestock are a vital part of integrated agroecological farming systems in the Global South. Generations of farmers, especially organic farmers, know the value of humanely raised livestock as part of a sound crop rotation, one that maintains permanent grasslands, sequesters carbon in the soil and feeds people locally.
Logic would dictate that, yes, farmers need to grow less corn, soy and livestock, and it must be of higher quality, and it will then bring them a higher price. Some cropland can go back to grass and native prairie, forest and growing fruits and vegetables. In the end, the Ogallala aquifer could survive and the Gulf dead zone could return to a productive fishery.
The current agricultural model places value only on volume of production, not nutritional quality of the food produced, human health, rural communities or the environment. Commodity crop production for export and ethanol production feeds only the bottom line of corporations and Wall Street investors. It pits farmer against farmer worldwide in a desperate race to the bottom and only exacerbates the economic disparity, which, when it comes down to it, is the real driver of poverty, poor health and environmental destruction. For producers and farm workers to earn a fair wage and have the means to support rural communities, everyone, no matter what they do, must also earn a fair wage and have the means to support family farmers, ranchers and fishermen by paying a fair price for food. The time for change is here.
Midwest Farmers Face a Suicide Crisis
By Katie Wedell, Lucille Sherman and Sky Chadde, USA TODAY Network. March 15, 2020 | EDUCATE!
One by one, the three men from the same close-knit community took their own lives. Their deaths spanned a two-year stretch starting in mid-2015 and shook the village of Georgetown, Ohio, about 40 miles southeast of Cincinnati. All of the men were in their 50s and 60s. All were farmers.
Heather Utter, whose husband’s cousin was the third to die by suicide, worries that her father could be next. The longtime dairy farmer, who for years struggled to keep his operation afloat, sold the last of his cows in January amid his declining health and dwindling finances. The decision crushed him.
“He’s done nothing but milk cows all his life,” said Utter, whose father declined to be interviewed.
“It was a big decision, a sad decision. But at what point do you say enough is enough?”
American farmers produce nearly all of the country’s food and contribute some $133 billion annually to the gross domestic product.
But U.S. farmers are saddled with near-record debt, declaring bankruptcy at rising rates and selling off their farms amid an uncertain future clouded by climate change and whipsawed by tariffs and bailouts.
For some, the burden is too much.
Farmers are among the most likely to die by suicide, compared with other occupations, according to a January study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The study also found that suicide rates overall had increased by 40% in less than two decades.
The problem has plagued agricultural communities across the nation, but perhaps nowhere more so than the Midwest, where extreme weather and falling prices have bludgeoned dairy and crop producers in recent years.
More than 450 farmers killed themselves across nine Midwestern states from 2014 to 2018, according to data collected by the USA TODAY Network and the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting. The real total is likely to be higher because not every state provided suicide data for every year and some redacted portions of the data.
The deaths coincide with the near-doubling of calls to a crisis hotline operated by Farm Aid, a nonprofit agency whose mission is to help farmers keep their land. More than a thousand people dialed the number in 2018 alone, said spokeswoman Jennifer Fahy.
No One Economic Crisis Takes Full Blame. Instead, A Cascade Of Events Has Plagued Farmers In Recent Years:
- Key commodity prices have plummeted by about 50% since 2012.
- Farm debt jumped by about a third since 2007, to levels last seen in the 1980s.
- Bad weather prevented farmers from planting nearly 20 million acres in 2019 alone.
- U.S. soybean exports to China dropped 75 percent from 2017 to 2018 amid festering trade tensions.
Even the $28 billion in federal aid provided by the Trump administration over two years wasn’t enough to erase the fallout from the trade war with China, many farmers said.
It’s not the first time that Washington’s efforts to help farmers have fallen short.
In 2008, Congress approved the Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network Act to provide behavioral health programs to agricultural workers via grants to states.
But it appropriated no money for the legislation until last year — more than one decade and hundreds of suicides later.
Some of the first four pilot programs awarded funding still have not seen any money.
“Farmers, ranchers and agriculture workers are experiencing severe stress and high rates of suicide,” said U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisconsin, who sponsored the bipartisan bill to fund the initiative. “Unfortunately, Washington has been slow to recognize the challenges that farmers are facing.”
Reporters spoke to more than two dozen farmers, mental health professionals and other experts across the Midwest who said the problem needs attention now.
How To Get Help
- The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is a hotline for individuals in crisis or for those looking to help someone else.
- To speak with a certified listener, call 1-800-273-8255.
- The Crisis Text Line is a texting service for emotional crisis support. Text HELLO to 741741. It is free, available 24/7, and confidential.
Devastating economic events on their own do not cause suicides, experts said, but can be the last straw for a person already suffering from depression or under long-term stress.
“We like to identify something as the cause,” said Ted Matthews, a psychologist who works exclusively with farm families in Minnesota. “Right now, they talk about commodity prices being the cause, and it’s definitely a cause, but it is not the only one by any stretch.”
Case in point: After her family shuttered the dairy farm, Utter said, it relieved the immediate pressures — including those on her sister and brother-in-law, who helped milk her father’s cows daily despite their own full-time jobs.
But it created a different kind of stress for her father, said Utter, who serves as the Ohio Farm Bureau’s director for a four-county region including Georgetown.
It’s one felt by many farmers.
“When your farm doesn’t succeed or you have to sell off some property, not only are you letting you and your family down, you’re letting your family legacy down,” said Ty Higgins, spokesman for the Ohio Farm Bureau.
“‘My great-grandpa started this farm, and now I’m the one that’s causing it to cease?’ Boy that’s a tough thought. But a lot of farmers are going through that right now.”
‘It’s A Problem Now’
Farmers have been among the most at-risk populations for years.
More than 900 farmers died by suicide in five upper Midwest states during the 1980s farm crisis, the National Farm Medicine Center, found. During that crisis, mental-health counseling and suicide hotlines sprang up across the country. But after the crisis passed, the programs dried up.
The deaths subsided somewhat in the years that followed, but University of Iowa researchers found that farmers and other agricultural workers still had the highest suicide rate among all occupations from 1992 to 2010, the years they examined in a 2017 study.
Farmers and ranchers had a suicide rate that was, on average, 3.5 times that of the general population, the study found.
There are similarities between the 1980s farm crisis and the situation plaguing farmers today, said Brandi Janssen, a University of Iowa professor and director of Iowa’s Center for Agricultural Safety and Health. But the thinking around mental health has changed.
“I think it’s become more obvious to people,” she said. “Whether the rates or the numbers are higher or lower (compared with the 1980s), sometimes I don’t know if that matters. We know it’s a problem now.”
Federal, state and local governments must provide funding to help struggling farmers, said Janssen, but she cautioned that it will take more than just mental-health counseling and hotlines.
“It’s a lot more complicated than that,” she said. “It’s related to larger structures in the ag economy and climate and isolating work and rural areas that are being depopulated.”
Part of the problem, experts say, is that farmers are a tough bunch to reach – both geographically and emotionally.
Most live in rural areas far from mental health professionals. Urban counties in the United States average 10 psychiatrists per 100,000 people, but rural counties have only three per that many people, a 2018 University of Michigan study found.
Source: County Health Rankings & Roadmaps
CARLIE PROCELL/USA TODAY NETWORK
Even when help is available, stigma prevents many in the largely male-dominated profession of farming from reaching out.
“In general, when men feel stressed, they pull back,” Matthews said.
Counselors have advised farmers to alleviate stress by finding a different job — something many find impossible to contemplate, said Fahy, the spokesperson for Farm Aid, which runs the crisis hotline whose calls jumped by 92% between 2013 and 2018.
“It’s essential,” Fahy said, “that farmers are talking to people that understand the unique aspects of agriculture.”
‘My Heart Hurts So Bad’
Keith Gillie rarely slept or ate in the spring of 2017.
He was stressed about the family farm in Minnesota, which he and his wife, Theresia, bought from his grandfather in the 1980s. After pouring their lives into the operation, they found they couldn’t turn a profit anymore.
The couple talked about selling the farm and their equipment.
On the last Friday in April, Theresia reached out to her marketing manager and a loan officer to come up with a plan. But before she could finalize the details, Keith had taken his own life. He died by suicide the next day. He was 53.
“The day Keith died, part of me died, too,” she said. “Sometimes my heart hurts so bad that my whole body aches.”
Theresia ultimately sold the farm equipment but kept the property. She now operates the farm alone. And she speaks publicly about suicide. The Kittson County commissioner and former president of the Minnesota Soybean Growers Association has one goal in sharing her own experiences:
“I want growers to understand you’re not alone in this boat,” she said. “There’s others that are really struggling, too. And we’re going to find an avenue through this.”
At least 75 farmers died by suicide across six Midwestern states that same year, 2017, the USA TODAY Network’s data analysis shows.
An additional 76 farmers took their lives in 2018: Eighteen in Missouri. Eighteen in Kansas. Fifteen in Wisconsin. Thirteen in Illinois. Twelve in North Dakota.
But the trend started years earlier.
Keith Henneman of Grant County, Wisconsin, took his own life at age 29 after losing heifers to Johne’s disease in the mid-2000s.
Larry Ruhland killed himself on the Minnesota farm he operated with his wife, Barbara, in 2006 as they were working to renegotiate their contract to raise heifers for a local dairy.
“I didn’t put it together because I didn’t even think of the fact that Larry was under as much stress as he was under,” Barbara Ruhland said.
Matthews, the Minnesota farm psychologist, helped Ruhland through the turmoil after her husband’s suicide, and again when she lost a son to an aneurysm in 2014.
Too often, he said, he gets calls after the fact.
“It truly saddens me,” he said. “The person has committed suicide, and now I’m working with that family.”
It’s why training more people to spot the red flags of suicidal thinking is a crucial part of his mission. That includes anyone who interacts with farmers regularly: the ag management workers who set production goals, the auction folks who arrange the equipment sale, the bankers who deny the loan.
“That banker is at the kitchen table,” Ruhland said. “Those people are on the frontlines every day.”
Matthews, the Minnesota farm psychologist, helped Ruhland through the turmoil after her husband’s suicide, and again when she lost a son to an aneurysm in 2014.
Too often, he said, he gets calls after the fact.
“It truly saddens me,” he said. “The person has committed suicide, and now I’m working with that family.”
It’s why training more people to spot the red flags of suicidal thinking is a crucial part of his mission. That includes anyone who interacts with farmers regularly: the ag management workers who set production goals, the auction folks who arrange the equipment sale, the bankers who deny the loan.
“That banker is at the kitchen table,” Ruhland said. “Those people are on the frontlines every day.”
“Farmers feel that they’re most helped by someone who understands them,” said Wisconsin state Rep. Joan Ballweg, a Republican from Markesan, chairwoman of the suicide prevention task force. “I’d like to see something that is dedicated (to farmers), like the national hotline number has a function for veterans.”
In Ohio, the state Department of Agriculture launched a campaign last year called “Got Your Back” to reduce stigma and encourage farmers to ask for help.They hand out cards with the Ohio State University Extension crisis line as well as the National Suicide Hotline and online resources.
“We want farmers to know that they are so much more valuable than their next crop,” said Higgins with the Ohio Farm Bureau.
Some programs host outreach efforts at events such as Nebraska’s Husker Harvest Days.
“Farmers are a tough bunch and they have thick skin and they don’t want to be seen pulling up to the counselor’s office,” said Susan Harris-Broomfield, the rural health, wellness and safety director at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Extension. “That’s not their jam. However, we have one of the largest farm and ranch shows in the nation.”
She handed out wallet-sized cards with a help-line number and other resources — similar to those distributed in Ohio.
“We were actually surprised at how many of these, especially men – farmer men – were absolutely open to taking it and they thanked us for what we were doing,” Harris-Broomfield said.
Her biggest tip: Make the conversation about stress instead of mental health. Neither their booth sign nor a survey they handed out mentions mental health.
“Stress is something we can all relate to,” she said.
Stress mixes with grief in Georgetown, Ohio, where Heather Utter’s father is adjusting to life after farming, and her father-in-law farms 1,500 acres — a combination of the land he grew up on and the adjacent property that his cousin had tended until his death.
“If you don’t farm, you just don’t understand it,” Charlie Utter said of the stress and despair to which so many local farmers have succumbed. “There’s just so many ups and downs and variables you can’t control. It wears on you.”
Charlie Utter said he regrets not talking to his cousin sooner; he knew something was bothering him in the days before his death. Family members need to watch one another closely, he said.
“If you see somebody is down, go talk to them, and don’t put it off,” he said. “If people were more educated, it couldn’t hurt. One person might catch something.”
This story is a collaboration between the USA TODAY Network and the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting. The Center is an independent, nonprofit newsroom based in Illinois offering investigative and enterprise coverage of agribusiness, Big Ag and related issues. Gannett is funding a fellowship at the center for expanded coverage of agribusiness and its impact on communities.
