Farming is a tough business and yet Canadian farmers are feeding the world.
I have never seen anyone work harder than a farmer; no days off, hours spent on the tractor or in the barn alone, and no guarantee that that hard work is going to pay off come harvest or market day.
We are the proud home to 34,523 farms in Saskatchewan, according to the 2016 Census of Agriculture, with 271,935 farm operators on agricultural operations and an average farm having 820 acres of farm land.
Farms are getting bigger, neighbours are growing further apart, and producers are finally starting to talk about their mental health concerns.
I am very thankful that Gronlid farmer and Women in Ag co-founder, Kim Keller, started to discuss these stresses and mental health problems surrounding all farmers, first on social media and then at the Agricultural Producers Association of Saskatchewan Midterm Meeting before the Carbon Summit in July.
She got the same responses there as on Twitter: we are finally discussing what producers, both old and young, are going through.
On Twitter, this conversation reached beyond Saskatchewan with producers and agriculture industry members reaching out from across North America to join the conversation.
What Keller has done with has opened up the conversation. The more people who admit to having problems, the more comfortable other people are of joining the conversation.
This was the reason Leslie and Matt Kelly who farm near Watrous jumped at the chance to talk about their own mental health issues and difficulties they faced dealing with these issues.
I also spoke with Trewett Chaplin from Craik, and I was very grateful and humbled that he took the time and effort to speak so openly about his mental health problems.
Not everyone understands the pressure that producers, the people who put food on all of our tables, are under or the help that they need.
Vice President of the Agricultural Producers Association of Saskatchewan, Norm Hall, made an interesting observation. The longer a producer has lived in one area, the more likely it is that they have known someone who has either had mental health struggles or have committed suicide.
In the last fiscal year 227 calls were made to the Farm Stress Line and 305 calls in the fiscal year prior to that. This July alone, 59 calls were made to the line, according to Mobile Crisis Executive Director John McFaddyen, and those calls are coming from across the province.
For those who think they are alone, they obviously are not.
Another amazing thing about Keller’s Twitter conversation was the number of producers who said, if you are having problems, I am here to listen.
We are creating an army of producers who have got each others backs and that is what this industry needs.
To everyone who is joining this conversation, from producers with mental health concerns to producers who offered to listen, thank you. To everyone who is hesitant to join the conversation, you are not alone in your struggles.
All of this needs to be acknowledged but we need to focus on the future. We need to make sure producers know that there is help.
See ‘Producers opening up after mental health discussion on social media’ in this week’s Ag in Action special in the East Central Trader.
