A Drop in Yields: Farm Stress and Farmer Suicide in Rural Michigan This Rural Mission

*PLEASE BE ADVISED: This episode discusses very sensitive and triggering content including suicide and self harm. Please continue reading/listening at your own discretion.
This Rural Mission is a podcast brought to you by Michigan State University College of Human Medicine, The Herbert H. and Grace A. Dow Foundation, and the Michigan State University College of Human Medicine Family Medicine Department. We are so excited to bring you season three. I'm your host, Julia Terhune, and I hope you enjoy this episode.
On January 24th, 2020, the CDC published the following, "In 2017, nearly 38,000 persons of working age, that is, 16 to 64 years, in the United States died by suicide," which represents a 40% rate increase in less than two decades. 79% of those 38,000 people were male. And the breakdown of those men in different occupations was as follows, fishing and hunting workers, machinists, welders, soldering, and brazing workers, chefs and head cooks, construction managers, farmers, ranchers, and other agricultural managers, and retail sales persons.
In addition to this devastating data, the CDC has shown that suicides are around 30% higher in rural communities in general when compared to urban communities. What do these two things have in common? Farmers. That's the population that I want to pay attention to on this list, though I want to acknowledge the depravity and the sadness that this list holds.
The thing about farmers is that they are a really important population. They take care of our plates, of plates around the world. And in 1900, 40% of the workforce was in agriculture, but by 2002, that number was down to a staggering 1.9% of the workforce. The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that there will actually be an even greater reduction, a 6% reduction in farming jobs over the next 10 years. And since the 1990s, the rate of suicides by farmers when compared to the general public is 3.5 times higher.
So here we are. In the last six years, more than 450 farmers have killed themselves. The numbers of farms totally has decreased, but the productivity and output of the farms that are left has increased more than 50%, partly because it's had two. And the total amount of debt that farmers owe has increased 5%, which may not sound like a lot, but that number equals $16.4 billion, billion with a B, that farmers owe since 2017, in addition to what the debt already was.
There's a fantastic article that USA Today has published, and we will link to that on our website. This article goes over many of the reasons why this phenomenon of farmer suicide is happening, but I wanted to provide all of you a perspective from the people who are working with this population, live with this population, love this population, and are trying to do something about this problem.
I conducted interviews for this podcast in late 2019 and early 2020, but the stressors and complexities for farmers that my interviewees talk about are not outdated. If anything, they've become more acute than they were before.
The first thing I want to show is that the stressors that the CDC, NIH, USA Today, and so many others have identified as problems were also identified by my interviewees. And I think that these are issues we're all worried about. We all care about the environment, and obviously we all want to have financial stability, but these are all real stressors for farmers because it affects their livelihood, and their livelihood affects our livelihood. Literally. It's actual food. They make our food. Without farmers, we don't eat.
And of course, there's a lot to say about small farms versus big farms and how that business phenomenon and how that transition is affecting our food, but the idea of farm stress and the idea of farmer suicide doesn't hit one sized farm over the other. It's something that is taking a toll on everyone, and something that my first guest, Sarah Zastrow, knows firsthand and professionally.
So I grew up on a farm o