Billboards in both English and Spanish that encourage mental health conversations are going up throughout Washington’s farming communities as part of suicide prevention and farm stress management outreach by Washington State University’s Skagit County Extension staff.
Don McMoran has felt the stress only farmers can.
The Washington State University Extension director in Skagit County grew up on a farm. Friends killed themselves. Family members pressured him to preserve the generational business.
But farmers don’t talk about those things.
“I was taught from a very young age to keep a stiff upper lip and not to complain and to solve your own problems,” McMoran said. Farmers face such a stigma that prevents them from seeking help.
To give farmers more places where they can talk about those things, McMoran and his staff steer several suicide prevention programs that include workshops, “kitchen table” economic counseling, billboards, Farm Aid hotline operators and partnerships with 13 Western states and four territories supported by more than $8 million in federal and state grants, as well as some private donations.
The effort is great, but so is the need.
A 2020 Centers for Disease Control study found farming was among the top 10 occupations for men who die by suicide, and it’s been getting worse. Last year, USA Today reported that more than 450 farmers from nine Midwestern states killed themselves between 2014 and 2018, while calls to the Farm Aid hotline doubled in the same period. The story blamed a combination of falling prices, increasing debt, extreme weather and export disruptions.
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