In 2021, NPR predicted that climate change could drive an increase in farmer suicides in the American Midwest.
Across the West, drought conditions are the worst they've been in nearly two decades. The dry weather is hitting farmers and ranchers particularly hard, who need water for their crops and livestock. But it's not just their bottom line that's being threatened. The effect of drought and climate change on agriculture workers' mental health is increasingly concerning health care providers.
Farming has always been a lifestyle fraught with risk and danger. My grandfather (born 1898) and grandmother (born 1903) started farming in northeast Iowa in the early 1920s. Their 80-acre spread was planted with corn, timothy, and soybeans. Grandpa raised chickens, cows, and pigs for eggs, milk, and meat for the family and for sale. Even in those halcyon days (well, if you leave out the Great Depression) farming could be a dicey proposition.
Grandpa had to stay sweet with the bankers, get loans, and service his debt. A stretch of unseasonal dry or wet could drive yields down and make for a lean winter, and trouble with the bank. Grandpa watched yields and prices like a hawk in order to make incredibly consequential decisions about when to harvest and sell to get the most possible per bushel. He was forever reading the sky for clues about rain and running handfuls of soil through his massive, calloused fingers to get a literal “feel” for the health of his fields.
As each scientific advancement came up the driveway in the form of a seed salesman with a new hybrid variety of corn, Grandpa would put his money on modern, engineered plants like Copper Cross and Pioneer Hi-Bred Corn, which greatly improved yields.
He was lucky enough to retire in the early 1980s, nanoseconds before the farm crisis really kicked in, and we inherited the house and 3 acres of land. The rest was sold to a benevolent neighbor who farmed a huge acreage and became a trusted family friend.
It’s an almost perfect story of the beauty and tranquil joy of a rustic yeoman farmer and his stalwart family in the American Midwest at the beginning of The American Century. Working the land – feeling the majestic roll of the seasons – and raising children in a patch of Midwest American Heaven, where they could fish, swim in the quarry, play baseball, and yes, go off to college, paid for by Dad.
While some farmers lived that life, and still do, many more do not.
These days the story for small-to-midsize family farmers is very, very different. In addition to grappling with often indifferent government policies, high interest rates, and depressed prices, family farmers both here and abroad are staring down the barrel of climate change.
From the NPR piece above:
Farmers and agriculture workers have the second highest rate of suicides in the county where… farms, according to a state suicide prevention group called Celebrating Healthy Communities. And, when that group looked at drought and suicide data together, they found the two spike in tandem. That tracks with research from Australia and India linking climate change to significantly higher suicide risk for farmers.
In India, the situation is particularly dire.
More than 10,000 farmers and agricultural workers died by suicide in 2020, the latest year that data is available.
The researchers compared rainfall patterns in the years, 2014-15 and 2020-21.
It found that in case of a 5 per cent deficit in average rainfall, 810 farmers died by suicide in a year.
But based on statistical modelling, the researchers predict that if there was a 25 per cent deficit in rainfall, then the number of farmers dying by suicide in a year would increase to 1,188 individuals.
“Climate change is making agriculture an extremely risky, potentially dangerous and loss-making endeavour for farmers, and it’s increasing their risk of suicide,” said Ritu Bharadwaj, a principal researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), which conducted the research.
In the United States:
Farmers and ranchers are nearly two times more likely to die by suicide… compared to other occupations, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
And as I am sure many readers here can recite by heart, due to the climate changes occurring in the American Midwest:
Extreme heat, heavy downpours, and flooding will affect infrastructure, health, agriculture, forestry, transportation, air and water quality, and more.
Farmers with livelihoods ruined or teetering on the brink will take their own lives. This isn’t a statistic. Like every other fact about climate change driven mortality, it is PEOPLE. Human beings like us.
Whether you are swept away in a flash flood or take your own life because your livelihood is ruined after 10 years of climate change-driven drought, you are NO LESS DEAD.
After America’s 1980s farm crisis abated, mental health resources dwindled. It’s clear that as a nation we need to pay attention to mental health and get resources – screenings, clinics, health care professionals – deployed where they are needed, for this and for the many other mental health challenges our country faces.
But we also need to do something else. We need to STOP TAKING what the government and fossil fuel corporations are handing us.
I am energized and inspired by the huge demonstrations in New York City protesting the murder of Jordan Neely and its grotesque initial mishandling by the police. People are rising to protest the systemically racist system that kills Black men and women without a second thought, while coddling vicious white attackers like Daniel Penny.
Our systemically racist society kills people. Climate change also kills people. So where is the collective fury about that?
There is world class reporting and opinion writing about the climate crisis on this site. We are treated on the regular to illuminating and in-depth pieces by the likes of Pakalolo, Meteor Blades, and Michelle Deatrick.
But stories about climate change still struggle to reach the top of the rec list, or make it as featured stories, and when I read the comments I am often struck by the level of defeatism on display.
It is late. IT IS NOT TOO LATE.
People are dying. More people will die. This isn’t getting better. Emissions keep going up. Why is our collective hair not on fire? Why are we all not out in the street?
I am honestly asking.