Just over half of all U.S. farms report having a female producer and thousands more have women working in other roles.
Those women are the focus of a new paper from the University of Georgia published in the Journal of Rural Mental Health.
Researchers visited six rural South Georgia counties, conducting focus groups with women from farming families, and found an underlying pattern: Many women on farms, though proud of their life, feel lonely and stretched thin.
“They really talked about there being fewer and fewer people farming,” said lead study author and social worker Anna Scheyett. “So there was less opportunity to get together. And I think also farming has just become more intense.”
In some ways, it has. Input costs for farmers reached some record highs during the pandemic. Though financial outlooks have gotten better, federal agencies expect net income to farm operations will be around $6 billion less this year than last, with some commodities doing better than others. Many farmers are expected to see labor costs go up too, according to an annual survey by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Even women not dealing directly with expense-related stressors or those with more formal roles on the farm are affected by all this, said Scheyett. The women surveyed told her they feel responsible to manage work and life, which can be extra difficult to do in an agri-centric family.
“That boundary that you can put up, the kind of keeps you from going crazy at work that most of us do, you don’t really have that in farming,” Scheyett said. “Your employees are sometimes your children or your spouse, and your home is your work site.”
Making conflict management that much harder. And while some families may turn to a therapist for help, that’s not always accessible, or accepted, in a rural community. Even harder is finding a therapist that understands the stressors presented.
“Just because you live in a rural area doesn’t mean you understand agriculture,” Scheyett said, an anecdote based on the experiences of some of the women she surveyed.
A quantitative look by researchers at Mercer University identifies some consequences of these gaps.
The new analysis of over 1,400 survey responses collected in 2022 shows a higher proportion of female farmers reported experiencing sadness or depression five to 12 times a year. They were also slightly more likely to report thinking about suicide at least once a month.
Overall farmers rank much higher compared to employees in other sectors for stress, said Anne Montgomery, the lead author of the study.
“They make sure that we have food on the table, literally,” Montgomery said. “So yeah, it’s a huge problem.”
Looking for solutions
Last year, a variety of partners, led by Mercer’s Rural Health Innovation Center, launched the Georgia Agricultural Wellness Alliance, naming a Georgia-based farmer turned academic as its director. Its development came as a direct response to findings from Montgomery’s statewide survey, which Mercer hopes to replicate on a national scale.
At the same time the University of Georgia has continued to work with its extension agents in every county to raise mental health awareness. That includes creating a resource booklet, but also sometimes looks like giving people stickers with the national suicide hotline number, 988.
“And they’ll all put them on their dashboards and we can just have them everywhere,” said Scheyett.
Long-term, what women in farming families need in their communities are places to connect, both Scheyett and Montgomery agree.
“Providing that network for women so they can talk to each other and kind of share that burden — I think that’s incredibly important,” Montgomery said.
UGA will host its next Farm Stress summit in March.
