Farmers & Ranchers Mental Health - Easing the Burden

May is Mental Health Awareness Month.

Agriculture as an industry has the fourth-highest suicide rate of any industry, and 60% of farmers and ranchers meet the medically accepted symptoms for depression.

Anna Lickley is a longtime rancher in the Blackfoot area. She also works for the Idaho State Department of Agriculture, managing the Farm and Ranch Center, among other things, and tries to help provide resources to change those dire statistics in Idaho.

Verbatim:

Growing food, the agricultural lifestyle, you know, it's always been stressful.

Whether it's the weather or the markets or input costs, there's a way to still have those factors pressing in on the operation but not have it be a burden to our brain to the point where we can't function.

My name is Anna Lickely.

My family's been ranching in this area since 1904, and my husband also is from a generational family ranch, and so we moved here a few years ago,

And it's a family affair, getting all the work done.

I also work for the State Department of Agriculture and manage the Farm and Ranch Center.

The Farm and Ranch Center was started back in 2020, and it came from a lot of input from industry that there's more to be done in helping people get started in agriculture, transition out of agriculture. You know, generational transition is always so difficult for farm families and some help with farmer mental health as well.

You know, calving season, harvest season, these are all times when things can be stressful. And farmers can have symptoms of severe stress, but those feelings should pass.

They shouldn't last all year. And when they do, when worrisome and anxious feelings are lasting all year long for our farmers, that's when it's time to rethink how we handle and manage hardships in farming.

I think it's why we're to a place now that agriculture as an industry has the fourth highest suicide rate of any other industry.

And 60% of farmers and ranchers meet the medically accepted symptoms for depression.

And in the past 20 years, the suicide rate in rural America has gone up by 46%.

So we're really at a time that something has to change. And I think a lot of people know that.

I think really the first thing that we need to do is just change our perception of what's normal.

When I was a kid growing up in agriculture on a multi-generational farm, you know, I saw the stress that was happening around me in my parents and grandparents, but we never talked about it. The answer was always just to bow your neck and get back to work.

And I think there's more that we can do, to talk to one another about the things that are bothering us.

So every farmer and rancher needs somebody that they can turn to, to talk about the stuff that's eating at you, you know, the stuff that's getting to you that you just can't quite put behind you.

It doesn't have to be to a counselor, you know, it can be to a friend. And so I think it's so important that we reach out to our neighbors and we check on one another to see how we're doing, because that's how we begin kind of lifting the load, lifting the burden off of our shoulders of the stresses of of farming and ranching.

The good thing about the farmer mental health conversation is it's, because it's reached such a fever pitch, there's a lot of really good information out there and resources.

 All of those resources are coalesced on the Farm and Ranch Center website at farm.idaho.gov.  And we've really tried to get the resources that will resonate most with our agricultural community.

You deserve to feel happy while you're farming. And so if something's not working, change it. You know, make a change.

If you don't know how to change it, then ask people what they've done on their own place. 

You know, a counselor, honestly, is a really good place to go to try to think through the stuff that's bothering you and gain a new perspective about how to address those issues.

When we've learned our coping skills from generations before us, from maybe the things that we see in the world, and those coping skills aren't serving us well, we need to learn a new way. And that's where a counselor can really be beneficial.

Seek the advice of somebody who is a specialist in that field.  

Another resource that we have with the Farm and Ranch Center is just a continuing list and community of counselors across the state that we have worked with to provide counseling to farmers and ranchers. A number of those counselors have been through an ag culture training that we've hosted that specifically instructs them on how to work with farmers and ranchers. Even if someone is calling to ask for their neighbor, they can call the farm and ranch center and ask for some counselors in their area, and we would be able to point them in the right direction.

Farm stress is a notoriously hard thing to work on. It's very private and personal to the individual. And so the most that we can do with the Farm and Ranch Center is create awareness, provide resources, and then also, you know, try to move the pendulum forward ever so slightly. And so this fall in November, we're bringing a training called Buck the Trend to Idaho, and it's specifically designed for farmers and ranchers. It's a two-day training and the ideal candidate for the training is a farmer or rancher who has looked around their operation or the industry as a whole and thought something's got to change and I want that change to start with me. So space is limited. We have information about that training on our website, but we think it can be something that is a catalyst to more programming, more awareness, and better resources for farmers and ranchers.