He was growing food but had to think twice about the cost of eating out more than once in a rare while. He worked 80 hours a week but couldn’t seem to save enough to ever take his kids to Disneyland. He worried about his family’s health not just from love of them, but also because any significant medical bills would spell financial ruin. He watched weather reports with an anxious obsession, his livelihood always hanging in the balance. He patched up his old machinery as best he could, which became more and more challenging with each passing season. He couldn’t afford a better used combine, let alone a new one.
He had seen the pictures of his great-grandfather harvesting these same fields with a team of horses. His farm had been in his family for four generations, and he increasingly felt the weight of perhaps being the one to lose it. Without a good harvest this year and at these commodity prices, he had no hope of making his land and operating loan payments.
He and his wife argued more and more about money. There just didn’t seem to be enough of it to give either the business or the family what it needed.
Except when he absolutely had to, he had pretty much quit going to town. Going to town meant running into people, meant lying and smiling and saying, “Fine,” when people asked, “How’ve you been? How much rain did you get after that last front went through.” He didn’t want to have to say, “Not good. Not enough.” He even quit going to church, not because he didn’t believe or didn’t know he needed God, but because it was just so painful to be around people who seemed to have their shit together. He was becoming more and more isolated, more and more alone, especially at night.
At night he tossed and turned in bed thinking, thinking, thinking. He didn’t seem able to turn off his mind as it ran from one thing beyond his control to another. In the morning, he could hardly force himself out of bed. On a few mornings lately, he didn’t, but lay there staring at the walls, feeling helpless and hopelss.
More and more his thoughts turned to suicide as a way to end his pain, just find some peace. Then he thought about how his death would not really take away the pain, just hand it off to his wife and children. They didn’t deserve that.
He didn’t know what else to do, so he just got back up, groaned, and got after another day’s work. The hardest work he would do all day would be climbing his personal mountain of despair and getting started.
Farmer anxiety and depression are nothing new, but the high rate of farmer suicide in this country and even worldwide is unprecedented. The Centers for Disease Control, CDC, reports in a study from 2016 that the suicide rate for people working in agriculture, including farmers, ranchers, farm laborers, fishers, and loggers, is higher than for any other occupation, and may even be underreported because of suicides masked as accidents. We hear about a high rate of suicide for military veterans; we are less likely to hear that the suicide rate for farmers is double that of veterans.
Most people close to agriculture already well understand the pressures that producers face daily. To name the two major pressures: low commodity prices and high production costs. In August, 2017, Tom Geisel, farmer and president of the Pawnee County Kansas Farmers Union produced a short video called, “Ten Things a Bushel of Wheat Will Not Buy”. At $3.67 a bushel, a bushel of wheat will not buy four rolls of toilet paper, a package of six English muffins, or even a loaf of bread, even though a bushel of wheat can be used to make 70 one-pound loaves of bread. Tom wrote, “The grain I produce is my ‘currency’, and it is less than one-fifth of what it should be priced.” As a matter of fact, since 2013 farm income has declined 15 per cent. (The Guardian, Dec. 6, 2017, “Why Are Farmers Killing Themselves in Record Numbers?”) “Think about trying to live today on the income you had 15 years ago.” That’s how agriculture expert Chris Hurt describes the plight facing U.S. farmers today. (CBS News Money Watch, June 29, 2018, “Farmers in America are Facing an Economic and Mental Health Crisis”)
Meanwhile, the cost of farming, including everything from equipment costs, to fuel, to herbicides and pesticides keeps increasing. The simple economic bottom line is this – income is below expense for many hard-working farmers and ranchers. Any business that earns less from its product than the cost to produce it is in trouble, And when that trouble seems to have no end in sight, one of the consequences will be chronic anxiety and depression, all too frequently leading to suicidal thoughts and actions.
Another key contributing factor is social isolation. Farmers and ranchers, especially of family-owned enterprises, tend to work alone. All day long. Day in day out. They live inside their own heads, listening all day and into the night to themselves, rarely if ever sharing those thoughts with anyone else. Like most men, these men tend to keep their deepest thoughts and feelings close to the chest, to themselves, never opening up about their daily struggles with despair. The success of their farms or ranches depends on them. If they don’t do the work, it won’t get done. The pride of success is theirs, but so is the shame of failure.
Finally, however, the risk of suicide increases not merely because of an increase of negative pressure, but also because of a decrease of positive coping skills. I listened to a man once as he spoke about the problems he was experiencing. The more he talked, the more agitated he became. He could not speak and remain seated, so he got up and paced the room as he spoke. Then, he did a very revealing thing. He began pushing against the walls as he talked. I doubt he was even aware of what he was doing, but he was telling me that he felt the walls of his life were closing in on him and pushing him into a corner. At that point, I realized how dangerous his predicament had become. He was feeling cornered, his coping skills overwhelmed, and cornered people are at a far greater risk of doing something extreme, like committing a suicide.
However, people daily live with crushing pressure and devastating loss without ending their lives. So what makes the difference for people, farmers and ranchers included? In a word, resilience.
Resilience is the capacity to bounce. As the old saying goes, “It’s not how hard you fall, but how high you bounce.” Resilience has to do with recovering, bouncing back, learning from the past in order to move forward.
Resilience or bouncing begins with knowing and accepting that we will fall. Falling is more normal than any of us like to admit. Face it, none of us would have ever learned to walk if we hadn’t fallen and gotten up and fallen and gotten up over and over. In fact, none of us would ever change or grow if we never fell and failed. If you want to see how common failure actually is, just look at another person, any person, even the person you think of as the most successful, even the person you go to church with. (If fact, church is where you will find the biggest failures. What else does it mean that Christians confess their sins, which are their failures to measure up to what is expected of them. And what is forgiveness except the promise of another chance and a future hope.) Just as we are in the “failure experience” with others, we can also end our social isolation and be in the “resilience and hope experience” together.
Once we accept that way of looking at things, we can also quit endlessly beating ourselves up for failure. We can separate failure from shame. Shame is a very personal sense that I am a failure because I failed. Shame is also a co-relative of fear, the fear that nothing will change, that I will continue to fail, and I will prove to everyone that I am a failure. However (and this is the critical mental step to take), when we separate failing from being a failure, we break the connection to the fear. Then, we are enabled to learn and grow from our failures. That’s resilience. Thomas Edison failed 10,000 times before finally inventing the incandescent light bulb, which became one of his civilization-changing successes. That’s resilience. Try, fail, learn, change, and try something different; try, fail, learn, change, and try again. Will resilience solve all my farm problems? Of course not. But resilience will keep you alive and engaged positively in your own life and family as you sort out what changes your challenges will require of you.
I am not a farmer nor rancher. Neither am I an expert in agriculture. I am a Christian and a pastor. I have pastored in farm country, both in North Dakota and Montana for about 40 years. I have also struggled mightily with myself trying to learn to be resilient. My faith has been critical to that effort.
I believe in a God who loves failures because that’s the only kind of people there are. Apart from love, the chief characteristic of this God is resilience. Imagine how resilient God has to be to create and lead people like us, who make mistakes and need to learn from them. I sometimes think I must be on the thousandth version of His plan for me. Oh, well, by the time I die, I’ll be on the ten thousandth version of His plan, unless, that is, His plan for me (and you) all along is that we simply trust Him day by day whatever happens, get up when we fall, learn, change, and grow, and never, never, never give up. God’s faithfulness throughout the Bible is the story of his never giving up on His hope for us. Jesus Himself is that hope embodied. I am, therefore, enabled never to give up only because I trust God for the end of the story, which is Easter, a resurrection. If death is the biggest fall of all, then the resurrection is the biggest bounce back of all. Talk about resilience!
Let me conclude with the following: no one needs to suffer despair alone. Please talk to someone. Call a trusted friend. Call a pastor or counselor. If you want anonymity, and are in crisis, call the Montana Suicide Prevention Lifeline, 24/7, at 1-800-273-TALK (1-800-273-8255) or text “MT” to 741 741.
You are worth it! Choose life.
