How farmers are fighting stigmas surrounding poor mental health within their communities.
On 23 March, when Boris Johnson called for a strict lockdown that would put the country to a near halt for almost four months, not everyone had the luxury of opting to work from home. While we clapped on our doorsteps every Thursday in appreciation for medical staff and carers, it was hard not to think also of other key workers who kept the UK afloat. Some of these workers included farmers.
To recognise the unrelenting work of the British farming industry during the pandemic, agricultural magazine Farmers Weekly launched a campaign entitled Feed the Nation.
It raised the public’s awareness to the fact that, no matter how testing the circumstances, farmers rarely have a day off. They continue to grow and produce our food, adjusting to any issue or difficulty they may face. One of these difficulties is poor mental health.
Although mental health issues affect individuals from all backgrounds, and figures show that there has been an increase in the number of people suffering with anxiety and depression in the UK during the lockdown, there is no denying that poor mental health has always been an urgent problem within farming communities.
In February this year, Ffion Hooson a young shepherdess from Denbighshire in North Wales, admitted on Twitter that she had for a while been suffering from mental health difficulties. “I’m 20 years old and farming alone and I am constantly putting a brave hard face on, yet deep down I’m pretty much breaking inside. It’s the most I’ve struggled, and no one really understands, but I have no choice but to carry on,” she wrote in a tweet that garnered almost 25,000 likes and 2,000 retweets.
Farmers and non-farmers alike from South Wales to New South Wales demonstrated their support and empathy for Hooson, while some even shared their own experiences of dealing with mental health issues.
The problem stems from a variety of reasons – loneliness, financial uncertainties, adverse events that can affect animals and crops, among others – and can lead farmers to feel anxious, depressed, and even suicidal. According to figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), from 2011 to 2015, 325 male suicides were recorded among people working in the agricultural industry in England alone. More recently, in 2018, 83 male and female suicides were registered among people working in agricultural trades, including fishing and forestry, in England and Wales.
The week after Hooson’s tweet went viral, the Farm Safety Foundation (FSF), a British charity aiming to preserve and protect the physical and mental wellbeing of young farmers in rural areas, ran its annual mental health campaign, Mind Your Head. Attempting to raise awareness of mental health issues within farming communities, Mind Your Head began in 2018, after the foundation undertook a survey of 450 farmers across the UK and found that 84 per cent of them suffer – or have suffered in the past – with some kind of mental health issue.
“The farmers who took part in the survey told us what mental health means to them,” says Stephanie Berkeley, FSF’s manager. “People said that they feel lonely as they’re on their own all day, they’re at the mercy of the weather, and that recently there has been Brexit to think about too.”
Elfed Wyn Jones, 22, is not surprised that so many farmers struggle with loneliness. The founder of the group Farmers for Welsh Independence, Jones comes from a farming family based in one of Wales’ least populated and most rural counties, Gwynedd. His father’s farm, which has been in the Jones family for generations, is situated at the heart of Snowdonia National Park.
“Something that I’ve noticed that’s changed a lot in the farming community over the past 30 years is that less and less people are farming,” he says, “so, those people who do still farm feel lonely because they can go days without seeing anyone.”
As well as loneliness, Jones also believes that alcoholism is a “huge” problem within the farming community. It has been an issue that he has personally struggled with, but he sought help to quit drinking and has been sober now for eight months. Sadly, this is unlike many people he knows.
“It’s really sad, three farmers who suffered from alcoholism took their own life recently in my valley alone,” he says. “But they wouldn’t have wanted people to know about their problems.”
Aarun Naik is a counsellor and a psychotherapist based in Liverpool, and he also emphasises the connection between alcohol and a farmer’s mental health and wellbeing.
“People use alcohol to alleviate the stress of farming. But a lot of it is hidden.”
Before his professional training, Naik worked within the agricultural industry and for the National Farmers Union (NFU) for almost twenty years, therefore, as a therapist, it made sense for him to specialise in working with farmers.
“The farmers who come to see me are generally in a low place – they are lacking in motivation, feeling lost, or have nobody to talk to,” he says.
Naik suggests that not talking about one’s problems, or hiding them, may often be linked to complex cultural issues, particularly surrounding masculinity.
“Farming is a very male-dominated industry and farmers don’t want to seem weak. They are very competitive too and they don’t want other people to know their business or know about their issues. Once one person knows, so many other people do too, because it is such a close-knit community.”
However, mental health is much less of a taboo subject among younger generations, compared to older generations. Young farmers’ clubs across the UK are enabling young people to be involved in discussions surrounding ill mental health.
Katie Davies is from a farming family in Pembrokeshire and is the chair of Young Farmers Club (YFC) Wales. Each year, the chair chooses one or two charities to support for the duration of the role, and Davies opted for two mental health organisations: Daniel Picton-Jones (DPJ) Foundationthe and the Royal Agricultural Benevolent Institution (RABI). Both charities were founded to help farmers and farming families dealing with issues relating to mental health, bereavement, and financial concerns.
“By choosing these charities I wanted to raise awareness of how mental health difficulties are affecting young people, since farming is a very isolating profession,” says Davies. “Some young people only leave the farm to go to a YFC event or meeting – that is sometimes their only way of socialising with other people.”
When the lockdown ends, Davies is planning a 12-peak challenge to raise money for the DPJ and the RABI, for which she will hike the highest mountain in each Welsh region.
“My aim with this is to encourage people to go walking and spend time outside,” she explains. “It will also be an opportunity for people to walk with me, and to talk to me about anything they like at the same time.”
Another cause of stress for farmers, which can lead to suicidal thoughts, is adverse events. One of the most widely known cases of this was the outbreak of Foot and Mouth disease in the UK in 2001, where after only six months, almost four million of the country’s animals were slaughtered. More recently, South Wales suffered the brunt of Storm Dennis in February this year. A month’s rainfall was poured in just 48 hours, causing multiple landslides and serious damage to farmers’ fields and crops.
Laura Phalp qualified as a Clinical Psychologist from the University of Liverpool in October 2019, and during her three-year doctorate she examined the relationship between adverse events and farmers experiencing suicide ideation. Originally from North East Yorkshire, Phalp was brought up on a farm, and having discussions with her parents about farmers in the region sadly taking their own life, is what led her to choose to look at the problem more closely.
“There would always be the narrative of, they took their life because of ‘X’, and that was usually some kind of adverse event that had happened on the farm,” she says.
“Farming is unique in many ways – there aren’t a lot of jobs where you can throw absolutely everything into it, and you can look across your fields and they look fantastic and you’re really pleased with them, but then you wake up in the morning and they’re all completely gone.
“So many things are completely outside of a farmer’s control,” she adds.
Welsh farmer Gareth Wyn Jones agrees. He owns land at the foothills of the Snowdonia mountains in North Wales, which saw severe and unexpected snowstorms in March 2013, devastating his livestock. Since then, Jones has been active on Twitter and has become somewhat of a celebrity within the British farming world, boasting around 34,000 followers.
Jones uses his platform to share entertaining and educative videos of Welsh hill farming, as well as to reach out to other farmers, particularly helping those who sometimes struggle with mental health issues, like twenty-year-old Ffion Hooson. Although he values social media, he also believes it can often be a cause of much distress to people like Hooson.
“Trolls target farmers and call us murderers, rapists, killers; you name it,” he says. “This pressure leads to depression and that drives people to kill themselves.”
However, Jones is hopeful that farmers will continue to pull together as a community during times of difficulty. His personal approach is to ignore the trolls and try to be as honest as possible with the public.
“I have a voice and a platform, and I intend to use them to the best of my ability, always,” he says. “I want to show audiences what we do as farmers, and that there are a lot of different types of farming. I want to go out there as an individual and tell my story. Then people can make an educated choice about eating meat or not. People can make their own minds up about the farming industry.”
As the lockdown eases and we go back to the office, back to the pub, and back to our favourite restaurants, cafés and takeaways, let us not forget the people who made life a little easier for all of us – despite the difficulties they faced, and continue to face. When we take the first bite out of our first meal outside our homes, surrounded by our friends, let us not forget how that food reached our plates, and the people making that possible, every day.