LAKE BENTON, Minn. – While the marks of the winter’s unusually heavy snowfall were still being felt but the warm sun was finally shining, farmers were out with their tractors from dawn till dusk in early May, planting corn and soybeans in the fields of southwest Minnesota, the many have had for generations.
The threat of losing these beloved family farms has become a constant concern, negatively impacting the mental health of many farmers and raising concerns about a renewed surge in suicides, as seen during the agricultural crisis of the 1980s. Much of the stress comes from being dependent on factors largely beyond their control – from increasingly unpredictable weather to rising equipment costs to global market volatility that can wipe out profits.
“You would be surprised how many people suffer from depression. Farmers are a group of people who keep problems to themselves, are proud and private,” said Bob Worth, a third-generation tiller who farms 2,100 acres of fertile, black soil near the hamlet of Lake Benton with his son.
“The more you talk about it, the more you realize it can be fixed,” added Worth, who credits his wife with saving his life in the 1980s when he was so depressed he couldn’t once stirred out of bed at harvest time. At least three neighbors and fellow farmers killed each other, Worth said.
States like Minnesota and South Dakota, a few miles west of Worths Farm, are increasingly aware of farmworkers’ mental health issues and are offering suicide prevention training for clergymen – who are an important and trusted presence in rural America.
In Pipestone, the larger town down the dirt road from Worths Farm — home to 4,200 people and a dozen churches — pastors from three Lutheran congregations are taking part in the four-week clergy suicide prevention program that Minnesota’s Departments of Agriculture and Health launched this spring.
“I want to learn to help. It could be anyone,” said Rev. Robert Moeller, recalling his first realization of the scourge of suicide among farmers when a customer in the feed industry where he worked before his ordination killed himself.
Moeller plans to introduce suicide prevention in his 5th-8th grade catechism classes at Our Savior’s Lutheran Church and is keen to learn how to support surviving family members and those who have attempted suicide without the stigma and shame that comes with it.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: This story includes a discussion of suicide. The National Suicide and Crisis Rescue Line can be reached by phone or text 988. There is also online chat at 988lifeline.org.
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While Americans are increasingly affected by stress and anxiety students To Service Membersthe dynamics are different on farmland – and so is the strength of the clergy’s role in rural communities where churches are important social gathering places.
“Every farming family I know has a relationship with a place of worship,” said Meg Moynihan, a southern Minnesota dairy farmer who, as senior adviser to the state’s Department of Agriculture, developed the clergy-focused training programs. “There’s a great sense of pride.”
The apparent satisfaction farmers feel with growing crops and raising livestock to feed the land – and beyond, as corn, for example, is also often sold to China – makes fear of not being able to continue a key factor for the mental stress.
“It’s not about losing a job or a position. There is a sense of threat to one’s identity and generational heritage over time,” said Sean Brotherson, professor and specialist in extended family studies at North Dakota State University. “People look at the farm as a family member – and as the longest living family member.”
The question, he said, was who would decide whether it was time to give up the farm.
With funding exhausted and feeling that they might not be able to repay more equity when they were middle-aged, Keith and Theresia Gillie began talking about getting a job outside of his northwest Minnesota homestead seek.
“I never realized that was his identity while we were quitting in the middle of farming,” said Gillie, who found her husband of more than 30 years dead on a gravel road. Six years later, with the help of two neighbors, she’s still growing wheat, soybeans, and sunflowers, and has spoken out about Keith’s suicide to get more farmers to speak out about her troubles.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the suicide rate among male farm workers is more than double the national average. Several issues are at play here, including increasing isolation and heightened family tensions during the pandemic, the difficulty in rural communities of finding in-person psychological counseling or accessing broadband for telehealth, and the disruption caused by climate change related unpredictable weather conditions, inflation and international trade disputes.
As the median age of farmers gets closer to 60, the pressure to pass a life-defining legacy to new generations is becoming a growing concern, said Monica McConkey, a rural mental health specialist hired by the Minnesota Department of Agriculture to provide free counseling became.
Todd Sanderson drove his tractor and planter, roughly $750,000 worth of machinery, and reflected on how farming has changed in the 42 seasons he’s been growing corn outside of Flandreau, South Dakota. The view of the sky is still the focus – Sanderson decided to plant the seeds in the first week of May, even though frost was still covering the tractor’s windscreen in the morning because sowing later meant poor yields.
Physical demands have diminished and the tech in his tractor looks more like a cockpit than a farming tool, but the uncertainty of producing enough to sustain the land only grows as capital investment increases. Sanderson, 61, hopes a nephew will eventually succeed him.
“It’s what keeps me up at night, the transition,” he said. “We’re pretty lonely out here on the farm. When your mind is headed in the wrong direction, it’s pretty easy to end up in a bad place. The more stressed I am, the calmer I become.”
Freeing farmers from this proud reluctance is a major challenge, even for clergy, said Rev. Alan Blankenfeld. He is the rural ministry liaison for the synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in South Dakota and Sanderson’s former pastor in Flandreau, where they started a suicide prevention program that includes Spanish information, since many dairy workers there are immigrants.
“As a pastor, you don’t always have to have something profound to say. Just drop by,” says Blankenfeld, who likes to visit farmers and ranchers so they don’t have to go to a church where their parked vehicle might be recognized by everyone in town and a rumor mill started. “They will share on their terms. Our job is not to advise, but we can accompany you.”
Back across the state line in Pipestone, Rev. Ann Zastrow of the First Lutheran Church, who is taking the online prevention course in Minnesota, hopes to gain her confidence to remind those struggling with mental health issues that ” God is still in the picture”.
Faith and struggle have long coexisted in many peasant families. The First Lutheran council leader, a retired pig farmer who now raises lambs from 500 ewes outside the city, said he remembered his mother asking him to get guns out of the house because she was worried about his father made.
“Stress, depression and suicide in a farmer are all part of it. “You just hope it’s not your part,” Craig Thies said as newborn lambs lurched around him. “I remember the look on my father’s face when they sold his cows. Realistically, they are like your children. But because of you someone is eating tonight.”
Seeing yourself as part of a crucial plan of creation strengthens farmers’ faith and involvement in church activities that have historically forged bonds in otherwise isolated homesteads.
This, in turn, makes the clergy potential lifesavers if given the right tools to help with compassion and without the moral judgment that many still fear suicide.
“One thing we struggle with within the church is that when we treat suicide as shameful, they don’t say they’re not okay,” said Rev. Kelly Ahola, a Lutheran pastor in the Red River Valley. where spring flooding can occur Devastation on farmland in Minnesota and North Dakota. “We have to say the words. We must learn to ask: Are you contemplating suicide? We also need to educate the community to know when and how to intervene.”
How to approach suicide from the pulpit and how to approach it theologically when many believe it to be a sin was one of the first questions raised in the four-week training course Minnesota is conducting. Most of the 80 ministers from across the state who enrolled there had committed suicide in the line of duty.
For one of them, Rev. Jillene Gallatin, the call for prevention is deeply personal. It was her pastor who drove her to the hospital when she attempted suicide at age 15, a year after her mother had committed suicide. And in her church she found comfort instead of the deafening silence and averted eyes elsewhere in her community.
“People need to tell their stories and struggles that aren’t as visible. That’s a gift we can give as a church, which is to be a safe place,” Gallatin said at the Shrine of Grace Lutheran Church in Waseca, about an hour south of Minneapolis.
Later that spring day, she visited a church member’s dairy farm. Two brothers, their wives, children and father run the farm that their German immigrant ancestors founded in the 1870s.
There was not a dry eye in the room as family members discussed the possibility of stopping milking, Jason Eldeen recalled.
But they persevered, making them the 1.3% of the US workforce with direct farm employment, according to a podcast he likes to listen to when he’s in the field — and US Department of Agriculture data for 2023 .
“How lucky we are to end up on the farm,” he said as some of the cows licked his and Gallatin’s hands in the spring sunshine.
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