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When the love of farming isn’t enough: Chronic stress triggering mental health conditions
This article was first published in Progressive Dairy magazine.
Being a farmer isn’t just a job. It’s an identity and a lifelong love. Even when stressors like natural disasters, labor shortages, and shrinking profits continue to pile up, farmers push on. The possibility of doing anything else seems unimaginable, but loving the job isn’t enough anymore, and many farmers are reaching their mental breaking point.
For Sam Rossier of Sunday Bell Farm in Danville, Vermont, it showed up as anger last summer. He works two jobs, like the 82 percent of U.S. farmers who rely on off-farm income to survive. It became too much.
“In general, I love what I do, and I’m happy,” Rossier said, “And then, once in a while, you snap and have these fits of rage, and it’s like, where did that come from? It’s not healthy. It’s dangerous.”
Rossier was having trouble focusing on simple tasks because he was so distracted by his thoughts. He later learned anger is a less commonly known symptom of depression.
“Mental health wasn’t on my radar that much…I have family members that have wrestled with depression a lot. And now I see I have those same issues and can relate. So, that’s been a wakeup call for me,” Rossier…
