With traces of winter’s unusually heavy snow still lingering but a warm sun finally shining, farmers were out dawn to dusk in early May on their tractors, planting corn and soybeans across southwestern Minnesota fields many have owned for generations.
The threat of losing these beloved family farms has become a constant worry, affecting many farmers’ mental health and raising concerns of another uptick in suicides like during the 1980s farm crisis. Much of the stress stems from being dependent on factors largely outside their control – from the increasingly unpredictable weather to growing costs of equipment to global market swings that can wipe out profits.
“You’d be surprised how many people are suffering with depression. Farmers have been a group of people who keep problems to themselves, proud and private,” said Bob Worth, a third-generation crop farmer who with his son works 2,100 acres of rich, black soil near the hamlet of Lake Benton.
“The more you talk about this, the more you realize it can be fixed,” added Worth, who credits his wife with saving his life in the 1980s when he got so depressed that he wouldn’t budge from bed even for the harvest. At least three neighbors and fellow farmers killed themselves, Worth said.
Increasingly aware of agricultural workers’ struggles with mental health, states such as Minnesota and South Dakota, a few miles west of Worth’s farm, are offering suicide prevention training to clergy – who are a crucial, trusted presence in rural America.
In Pipestone, the bigger town down the dirt road from Worth’s farm – with 4,200 residents and a dozen churches – pastors from three Lutheran parishes are taking the four-week suicide prevention program for clergy that Minnesota’s departments of agriculture and health launched this spring.
“I want to learn to help. This could be anybody,” said the Rev. Robert Moeller, recalling his first realization of the scourge of suicide among farmers, when a customer in the feed business he worked at before being ordained killed himself.
Moeller plans to introduce suicide prevention in his 5th through 8th grade catechism class at Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church, and is eager to learn about supporting surviving family members and those who attempted suicide without the stigma and shame often attached to it.
While rising levels of stress and anxiety are affecting Americans from students to service members, the dynamics are different in the farmland – and so is the strength of the clergy’s role in rural communities, where churches are essential social gathering points.
“Every farm family I know has a relationship with a house of worship,” said Meg Moynihan, a dairy farmer in southern Minnesota who’s been developing the clergy-focused training programs as a senior advisor to the state’s agriculture department. “There’s a huge sense of pride.”
The evident satisfaction that farmers take in growing crops and raising livestock to feed the country – and beyond, as corn for example is also often sold to China – makes the fear of being unable to keep going a key factor in mental health distress.
Source: centralillinoisproud.com
Photo Credit: Illinois Helpline
Categories: Illinois, Business, South Dakota, Business