Farm stress and the production of rural sacrifice zones

Abstract

For years, farmer suicides have made the news as a slow-brewing farm crisis resonates across the rural U.S. with widely varying claims about the cause. Using a suite of qualitative and quantitative methods, we juxtapose data from a farmer-oriented crisis hotline in Nebraska, the Nebraska Rural Response hotline, alongside semi-structured interviews with people working in organizations that respond to the current epidemic of farm stress. Taking these sources of data together, we find that farmers, ranchers, and members of farming communities most frequently seek help for economic distress, and the most common psychiatric diagnosis assigned to hotline callers who seek therapeutic support is connected to both acute external events in rural life and high rates of suicide. We identify a “crisis belt” of high call volume in the Sandhills region of Nebraska and connect this geospatial finding to processes of economic restructuring in that region. Our findings support the claim that the current resources available to farmers in distress target individual farmers' responses to stress but do not address its causes, which can be understood in terms of economic restructuring and consequent adverse changes in the social fabric of rural communities. The mental health paradigm for farm-related distress constrains the possibilities for addressing it. We argue that analyzing this distress in terms of the production of rural sacrifice zones makes room for collective agency and systemic solutions to the root causes of farm-related distress.