Local agriculture producers have been learning about issues related to stress and mental health on the farm during an Ag Knowledge Exchange event Friday, hosted by Farm Credit Canada (FCC).
The session, taking place at the Days Inn’s Taylorton Room, started at 10 a.m. and will wrap up around 3 p.m. Elaine Froese, a farm family coach who resides near Boissevain, Man., is the main speaker for the event.
The focus of her message is embracing change on the farm.
“I do a lot of farm management tool building for farm families, and this is just one of the pieces of building their toolbox,” said Froese.
Thanks to the work in mental health of the Do More Agriculture Foundation, Froese believes farmers are more accepting of her message.
She noted that on her family’s farm, they don’t work on Sundays, and when she spoke at an FCC workshop in Humboldt earlier this year, some in attendance had a hard time believing it was possible.
“My concern is really for the kind of awful, stressful harvest that we’ve had all over the Prairies this past fall, that there’s a lot of people who have an adrenaline crash now because they’ve pushed so hard for so long,” she said. “They need some recovery time. They need some renewal time.”
She’s also concerned about farm marriages, because the divorce rate among farmers is increasing.
“A lot of people are saying ‘We can’t keep this pace up anymore. We have to make some significant changes.’”
FCC Ag Knowledge Exchange events are a way to help producers improve their management skills, get information and insight from leading farm management experts and gain a deeper understanding of the business of agriculture.
Next week’s edition of the Mercury will have more on this story.
