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Farming is one of the most stressful professions out there. There are many stressors on the farm, but the top stressor is money.
“That’s what I’ve seen in the field, and that’s what the data shows us too, is that financial stress is the number one stress,” says Dr. Remington Rice with Michigan State Extension. He leads the Managing Farm Stress program. “If you think about a dentist, perhaps, or accountant that has a salary, they know what they’re going to bring in at the end of the month. But for a farmer, they work all month long, and they don’t know what the paycheck is going to be.”
Rice says MSU Extension offers many resources to help deal with farm stress thanks to grant funding from the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development and USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
“One of the resources that we have is our counseling services. And so, until the end of the summer, at least, we can support it financially. We can pay in full for counseling services.”
Counseling comes in many different forms. One of them is teletherapy.
“So, you can call and chat with a counselor, and they can help you work through that thing that you’ve been avoiding talking about maybe or managing stress on the farm. Or a lot of farmers work with their families. And so, if you’re a multi-generational farmer and there are differences of opinion between generations, a counselor can help you with the communication between those differences of opinion.”
If you’re a leader of a trade association or council, Rice says adaptable workshops are available as a resource.
“We have workshops that are adaptable from 20 minutes up to an hour and a half full on workshops and they’re newly updated. We try to make them really engaging and interactive. It’s not just me lecturing for an hour at you. We really work with the audience and have some crowd work and there’s usually a lot of laughter happening. It’s not your normal health and safety session.”
Rice wants to ensure you that you’re not alone. For more information and to take advantage of these resources, visit extension.msu.edu/farmstress or call (231) 882-0026.