American farmers confront a mental health crisis

The worst agricultural downturn since the 1980s is taking its toll on the emotional well-being of American farmers.

In Kentucky, Montana and Florida, operators at Farm Aid’s hotline have seen a doubling of contacts for everything from financial counseling to crisis assistance. In Wisconsin, Dale Meyer has started holding monthly forums in the basement of his Loganville church following the suicide of a fellow parishioner, a farmer who’d fallen on hard times. In Minnesota, rural counsellor Ted Matthews says he’s getting more and more calls.

Glutted grain markets have sparked a years-long price slump made worse by a trade war with top buyer China. As their revenues decline, farmers have piled on record debt -- to the tune of $427 billion. The industry’s debt-to-income ratio is the highest since the mid 1980s, when Willie Nelson, Neil Young and John Mellencamp organized the first Farm Aid concert.

So dire are conditions in farm country that Senator Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican, and Senator Tammy Baldwin, a Wisconsin Democrat, pushed for mental-health provisions to be included in the 2018 Farm Bill. The legislation allocated $50 million over five years to address the shortfall of such services in rural areas.

Few agricultural states have been hit harder than Baldwin’s Wisconsin, whose state license plates proclaim it as “America’s Dairyland.” Wisconsin lost almost 1,200 dairy farms between 2016 and 2018, government data show.

Smaller operators have been the most affected, she said by telephone. The mental-health provisions in the farm bill aren’t for a “free trip to the psychiatrist,” but rather about “community looking out for each other.”

There was a similar legislative effort in 2008 during the financial crisis, but the programme was never funded because prices recovered, said Jennifer Fahy, communications director for Farm Aid, which advocated for the measures.

Affecting everyone

Two-thirds of the calls to Farm Aid’s hotline originated from growers who have been farming for a decade or more. They were evenly distributed among fruit and vegetable producers, livestock, grain and oilseed and dairy, the data show.

In 2018, the number of calls rose 109 per cent to 1,034, increasing in the last five months of the year. In November, crisis assistance accounted for 78 per cent of contacts to the hotline.

“The peak of the crisis was in 1986,” said Allen Featherstone, an agricultural economist at Kansas State University in Manhattan. “It is the worst since then by far.”

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