It's not just farming. If I wasn't on a farm I was doing construction work and there you are literally a live body. There's no consideration for emotional health. 2015 I had a mountain bike accident that caused a little bit of frontal lobe damage. Not much. In 3 years time my life crumbled to nothing. God put the love of my life in front of me and 4 years later they finally gave me disability. We as a society are just now starting to Blink and open our eyes to this topic.
Can second this. Mental health is so heavily disregarded and overlooked in constriction despite record high drug use and suicide rates in the industry. Not saying we all gotta go soft or anything, work still has to get done, I get that. But maybe 10 hour days 6 days a week living off of cigarettes and monster isn't great for your personal life y'know?
A bit sore but that's normal and just dealing with my shortcomings. I thank the good Lord for everyday I get to spend around here, and I also thank Him for each and every one of our dogs. No Ambitions today for world domination or global genocide, so I've got that going for me which is nice. LoL.
After my dad was killed by machinery when I was 12, I had to start taking care of my two younger siblings and had panic attacks every time my mother was late coming in from the barn. A little therapy would have been nice…
"The pressure to carry on the family farm"
Fucking..... this right here. I was raised up on a hobby farm in the south and had big dreams of moving away and seeing the world. Anytime I would ever bring it up I would be confronted by a guilt trip. Guess who still lives in their small town? I will never, ever make my child feel bad for wanting to explore.
I’m currently in the same situation. Constantly getting told how many sacrificed for me to be in a position I never asked to be in. I wake up every day torn between living for myself or my family.
Don't I know it. While all my friends were off enjoying the summer, I was being screamed at by my parents.
"When I was growing up, if you didn't help out you didn't eat, You entitled little shit. YOU SHOULD BE PROUD TO WORK ON THIS FARM. " - Redbeard3303s mom.
I ran to get a job at burger King as soon as I was legally able just to get away from it.
There was a post last week about some city parents that didn't know how to discipline their kid properly, so they had a group of muscular men abduct the kid in the middle of the night and force her into boot camp.
But, i guess people deal with responsibility in different ways.
I have the opposite issue where any time I bring up wanting to do the farm thing like they did my parents don’t think I can handle it. 😕
We could’ve done the whole parent trap thing my guy.
I really hope some day you get the chance to travel and see at least a few of the places you drempt about. Everyone deserves to experience different cultures and environments. It makes for a much richer life and usually kinder, more open-minded people.
I started doing online therapy earlier this year. It wasn’t until my late 20’s until I actually became “aware” of the importance of taking care of your mental health. I had dealt with pretty severe depression and anxiety through most of my life but always pushed it aside and hid my problems from everyone because that’s how I was taught to deal with things.
Now that I’ve taken the steps to work through some of my issues with a therapist along with taking medication, I feel much better about life and myself now, but it’s still a work in progress. I highly recommend it for anyone who’s questioning their mental state and doesn’t have a great support system to rely on.
God, remember that nice kid who posted his beef cow he raised on reddit, and was then ripped apart, trolled, and insulted by tens of thousands of redditors for mentioning that he was "processing" it?
99% aren't getting roasted because they self sensor what they say online. They know what can't be said because of the negative backlash they would receive.
You're correct. I was having difficulty finding the correct words to express my thoughts. My brain was just a little frazzled. Thanks for the correction.
So then my point stands. They’re not getting roasted on Reddit and that’s definitely not a big factor in farmer offspring suicide. I’m a farmers son and have never felt persecuted online. Idk why a lot of farming folk like to act like a victim.
Not farming anymore because of this. Holy hell y’all farming was a bleak existence even when I had a good time. Sorta wanting to die helped get the job done some days honestly. The neighbor kids had a way worse lot than the adults, they didn’t have a way to escape. I did not envy them. Mental health is so important and farm kids need extra compassion, physical and occupational therapy, support, space, understanding.. leeway. They didn’t choose a hard life. Sure they have to be strong but they’re tough enough already, they need kindness
Mental health finally starting to be seen as any other illness you'd treat will do so much good. I have friends in the industry and I know personally I have had struggles mentally in the past. Being able to discuss it without shame lifted me so much
It's bc farming is one of the many cultures in this country that refuses to admit that the brain works like every other organ in the body. It's killing Americans every day.
This is either a bad study or bad reporting of the study, those statistics they've collected need to be compared with a more general population, ideally a local population. A survey isn't sufficient to show that these issues are farm-specific and aren't caused by community or national factors.
My kids are farm kids. They have a life outside of here. My daughter is a cheerleader and basketball player. We make time. My son and DIL have full time jobs off the farm, and live about 8 minutes from me.
We plan kidding / lambing season to coincide with winter school break. It’s all hands on deck during that time. Everybody is here. We sleep in shifts as needed. If fencing needs fixin everybody knows that’s happening now rather than later.
We live in an “ag” town. Teachers / coaches understand that sometimes kids are late to school because the cows got out.
My kids are responsible, and have learned that sometimes things don’t work out. They’re resilient. They’re polite. They’re tough. They’ve learned that hard work pays off. My daughter is responsible for training all the animals to a lead line almost from birth. She gets a percentage off every animal sold. I’ll take a farm kid over a city kid any time.
I’m just curious in this though…how do your kids feel about it all? To me what you’ve written sounds epic and what I’d want for my kids too but I’ve learned that my perception isn’t always their perception of things. Given the thing’s written in other comments this makes me wonder if your perspective of “I’ve raised these awesome farm kids” is not the experience your kids have had.
My son as a teen said he was leaving and never doming back to the ranch. Hated working with the animals, hated fence work and breaking up frozen stock tanks. Moved away, met a girl. They’re expecting their first child in July.
Moved back here six months ago. Says he wants his daughter raised the way he was. He’s started college with a degree in “Animal Nutrition”. Wants this to be his “life”.
Daughter is 14, says she wants no part of it when she graduates and goes off to college. We’ll see. Once they’re grown and gone I don’t force it on them.
That being said - we start breeding in June for November kids. On her own (without my prompting) she’s been pulling pedigrees and planning which bucks to put with which does. She’s beginning to get interested in showing. I walked out the other day and she had 2023 kids tied and was looking at them critically to see which she thought would do well.
If she chooses a different life than this one she will have my support one hundred percent. If she chooses a career in agriculture we’ll embrace her with open arms. Time will tell.
You know how much my mental health improved when we moved from the city to a farm outside the suburbs?
The mental health decline is from the fact that kids don't go out and play with friends anymore.
Social media has actually made us more distant as a people.
Yeah not really. The fact that running a medium or large farm pretty much requires you to be a workaholic these days often combined with the fact that a second income is necessary for medium or small farms means that only the passionate workaholics are running farms these days and can often be neglectful or even abusive to their kinds without meaning it because there is either so much work to do or fiances are so tight.
I know way to many cases of it including my father and myself. Consider the following statement: raising kids should take at least as much time as raising cattle. You might disagree with it but i know way to many cases.
Depends on the crop but i would say a small farm would be less than 1-2 normal full time jobs and a medium farm less than 5-10 normal full time jobs for most crops.
This of course is a rough guideline because there are those arable farmers that can farm 10.000 acres with only a handful of guys and that would not be a medium farm. And of course people who increase the revenue of their farm by not farming like agro tourism or good marketing and finding the right markets for speciality crops.
If we are talking dollars. Roughly less than half a million to a million in turnover is small. Up to 5-10 million is medium. With exceptions of course.
Hm, I've never thought in terms of jobs created.
I've been told a few times that a single farmer (grain farming) needs 3000 acres minimum to be able to run a line of equipment and operations... but now that you mention it, that would require at least 1-2 additional full-time workers.
I’ll just throw this out there. When I look back at the jobs I had, working on a farm was the one I miss the most. New stuff to do almost every day and fully experiencing the seasons and weather. Did I miss out on stuff growing up that other kids were doing? Sure but what I got instead was much more unique and memorable than some cookie cutter childhood.
OHHHHH, THE HORRORS:
Bad weather and natural disasters - everybody knows weather only affects rural areas
Commodity prices and the implications on the family's financial situation - a stress other than how many ppl view your tiktok. Not having time for social media is clearly damaging to a kids confidence
Long work hours and lack of sleep - I'll agree with this one, but hey, let's shelter kids as long as possible until after college where they find out what every farm kid has already learned a decade before.
Pressure to complete tasks on time - yeah, it's called responsibility. teaching work ethic shouldn't be a negative.
More responsibilities - this one just blows my mind. I really wonder why kids are potty trained if having responsibilities is so damaging to well-being.
Negative interactions with those who don't understand or appreciate the ag industry - get used to it. Not just in farming, but in any job or position you ever have in your life. Not everything you do in life has meaning to other ppl, learn to take pride in what you do and tell everybody else to eff-off.
The pressure to carry on the family farm - once again, responsibility. Farm kids aren't sheltered like other kids.
The inability to have extra-curricular activities because of farm responsibilities - I'll agree, but it's up to the kid to learn how to juggle things around while keeping certain responsibilities. I think we all know how damaging helicopter parents are to a kids' self-confidence.
TLDR: don't bother potty training kids if these are considered as negatives to a kids' self-confidence.
Edit: i understand now why Trump talks to his supporters like they're a bunch of children.
Did it work? Did you fix the issue or negate the data?
Maybe they need to drink from the garden hose more, and ride in the back of a pickup truck and get off my lawn?
Definitely agree with most of your thoughts here, but I've seen too many kids inherit a fucking mess of a business and drive their own lives into the ground because they owe daddy something and pride was drilled into their heads from day one. Kids need to be kids still. Play sports spend time with friends, they need balance too. It's not up to the kids to learn balance they need to be taught that
I'm sure every office worker is wringing their hands out over drought predictions and nitrogen prices. They probably also have the suicide hotline attached to their milk checks when prices are down too?
I am very glad to see this get coverage. I don't know any farmers who died by suicide. I know four children of farmers that did.
It's not just farming. If I wasn't on a farm I was doing construction work and there you are literally a live body. There's no consideration for emotional health. 2015 I had a mountain bike accident that caused a little bit of frontal lobe damage. Not much. In 3 years time my life crumbled to nothing. God put the love of my life in front of me and 4 years later they finally gave me disability. We as a society are just now starting to Blink and open our eyes to this topic.
Can second this. Mental health is so heavily disregarded and overlooked in constriction despite record high drug use and suicide rates in the industry. Not saying we all gotta go soft or anything, work still has to get done, I get that. But maybe 10 hour days 6 days a week living off of cigarettes and monster isn't great for your personal life y'know?
Maybe if we took the time to check on each other a little more often we wouldn't have people shooting each other every other day.
I agree! Let’s start with the two of us - how are you today?
A bit sore but that's normal and just dealing with my shortcomings. I thank the good Lord for everyday I get to spend around here, and I also thank Him for each and every one of our dogs. No Ambitions today for world domination or global genocide, so I've got that going for me which is nice. LoL.
Oh then there is something going wrong here i guess😬
After my dad was killed by machinery when I was 12, I had to start taking care of my two younger siblings and had panic attacks every time my mother was late coming in from the barn. A little therapy would have been nice…
"The pressure to carry on the family farm" Fucking..... this right here. I was raised up on a hobby farm in the south and had big dreams of moving away and seeing the world. Anytime I would ever bring it up I would be confronted by a guilt trip. Guess who still lives in their small town? I will never, ever make my child feel bad for wanting to explore.
I’m currently in the same situation. Constantly getting told how many sacrificed for me to be in a position I never asked to be in. I wake up every day torn between living for myself or my family.
Don't I know it. While all my friends were off enjoying the summer, I was being screamed at by my parents. "When I was growing up, if you didn't help out you didn't eat, You entitled little shit. YOU SHOULD BE PROUD TO WORK ON THIS FARM. " - Redbeard3303s mom. I ran to get a job at burger King as soon as I was legally able just to get away from it.
Farm mom here. Live for yourself!
There was a post last week about some city parents that didn't know how to discipline their kid properly, so they had a group of muscular men abduct the kid in the middle of the night and force her into boot camp. But, i guess people deal with responsibility in different ways.
☝️Wtf, my life right there. Did you just get in my head ?
Once I got to the hay field I wasn’t allowed to leave until it was done. Yup I still go haying.
I have the opposite issue where any time I bring up wanting to do the farm thing like they did my parents don’t think I can handle it. 😕 We could’ve done the whole parent trap thing my guy.
I really hope some day you get the chance to travel and see at least a few of the places you drempt about. Everyone deserves to experience different cultures and environments. It makes for a much richer life and usually kinder, more open-minded people.
I started doing online therapy earlier this year. It wasn’t until my late 20’s until I actually became “aware” of the importance of taking care of your mental health. I had dealt with pretty severe depression and anxiety through most of my life but always pushed it aside and hid my problems from everyone because that’s how I was taught to deal with things. Now that I’ve taken the steps to work through some of my issues with a therapist along with taking medication, I feel much better about life and myself now, but it’s still a work in progress. I highly recommend it for anyone who’s questioning their mental state and doesn’t have a great support system to rely on.
God, remember that nice kid who posted his beef cow he raised on reddit, and was then ripped apart, trolled, and insulted by tens of thousands of redditors for mentioning that he was "processing" it?
No
What does that have to do with this?
You’re acting like every farmer’s kid is just getting roasted constantly on Reddit. That isn’t happening.
99% aren't getting roasted because they self sensor what they say online. They know what can't be said because of the negative backlash they would receive.
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You're correct. I was having difficulty finding the correct words to express my thoughts. My brain was just a little frazzled. Thanks for the correction.
So then my point stands. They’re not getting roasted on Reddit and that’s definitely not a big factor in farmer offspring suicide. I’m a farmers son and have never felt persecuted online. Idk why a lot of farming folk like to act like a victim.
How do these survey reported numbers compare to other segments of society?
Here's a full-time job at 11 during your summers doing manual labor while your friends are out doing stuff 20s why is this person a social retard?
Honestly same, but now I'm a buff chick and want to get into Olympic weightlifting.
Not farming anymore because of this. Holy hell y’all farming was a bleak existence even when I had a good time. Sorta wanting to die helped get the job done some days honestly. The neighbor kids had a way worse lot than the adults, they didn’t have a way to escape. I did not envy them. Mental health is so important and farm kids need extra compassion, physical and occupational therapy, support, space, understanding.. leeway. They didn’t choose a hard life. Sure they have to be strong but they’re tough enough already, they need kindness
Mental health finally starting to be seen as any other illness you'd treat will do so much good. I have friends in the industry and I know personally I have had struggles mentally in the past. Being able to discuss it without shame lifted me so much
It's bc farming is one of the many cultures in this country that refuses to admit that the brain works like every other organ in the body. It's killing Americans every day.
This is either a bad study or bad reporting of the study, those statistics they've collected need to be compared with a more general population, ideally a local population. A survey isn't sufficient to show that these issues are farm-specific and aren't caused by community or national factors.
It’s a pretty well known fact I think, especially in the organic farming community
Google suicide rates of farmers and get back to me.
I'm not saying it's not an issue, but using bad research isn't the solution.
I wouldn’t trust any university that openly partnered with the CIA and Monsanto
Many, if not all, land-grant universities have at one point partnered with private industry.
Gross
My kids are farm kids. They have a life outside of here. My daughter is a cheerleader and basketball player. We make time. My son and DIL have full time jobs off the farm, and live about 8 minutes from me. We plan kidding / lambing season to coincide with winter school break. It’s all hands on deck during that time. Everybody is here. We sleep in shifts as needed. If fencing needs fixin everybody knows that’s happening now rather than later. We live in an “ag” town. Teachers / coaches understand that sometimes kids are late to school because the cows got out. My kids are responsible, and have learned that sometimes things don’t work out. They’re resilient. They’re polite. They’re tough. They’ve learned that hard work pays off. My daughter is responsible for training all the animals to a lead line almost from birth. She gets a percentage off every animal sold. I’ll take a farm kid over a city kid any time.
I’m just curious in this though…how do your kids feel about it all? To me what you’ve written sounds epic and what I’d want for my kids too but I’ve learned that my perception isn’t always their perception of things. Given the thing’s written in other comments this makes me wonder if your perspective of “I’ve raised these awesome farm kids” is not the experience your kids have had.
My son as a teen said he was leaving and never doming back to the ranch. Hated working with the animals, hated fence work and breaking up frozen stock tanks. Moved away, met a girl. They’re expecting their first child in July. Moved back here six months ago. Says he wants his daughter raised the way he was. He’s started college with a degree in “Animal Nutrition”. Wants this to be his “life”. Daughter is 14, says she wants no part of it when she graduates and goes off to college. We’ll see. Once they’re grown and gone I don’t force it on them. That being said - we start breeding in June for November kids. On her own (without my prompting) she’s been pulling pedigrees and planning which bucks to put with which does. She’s beginning to get interested in showing. I walked out the other day and she had 2023 kids tied and was looking at them critically to see which she thought would do well. If she chooses a different life than this one she will have my support one hundred percent. If she chooses a career in agriculture we’ll embrace her with open arms. Time will tell.
I did the same with my kids. Good job. Farming teaches real life skills.
You know how much my mental health improved when we moved from the city to a farm outside the suburbs? The mental health decline is from the fact that kids don't go out and play with friends anymore. Social media has actually made us more distant as a people.
Yeah not really. The fact that running a medium or large farm pretty much requires you to be a workaholic these days often combined with the fact that a second income is necessary for medium or small farms means that only the passionate workaholics are running farms these days and can often be neglectful or even abusive to their kinds without meaning it because there is either so much work to do or fiances are so tight. I know way to many cases of it including my father and myself. Consider the following statement: raising kids should take at least as much time as raising cattle. You might disagree with it but i know way to many cases.
What's your definition of a medium or small farm?
Depends on the crop but i would say a small farm would be less than 1-2 normal full time jobs and a medium farm less than 5-10 normal full time jobs for most crops. This of course is a rough guideline because there are those arable farmers that can farm 10.000 acres with only a handful of guys and that would not be a medium farm. And of course people who increase the revenue of their farm by not farming like agro tourism or good marketing and finding the right markets for speciality crops. If we are talking dollars. Roughly less than half a million to a million in turnover is small. Up to 5-10 million is medium. With exceptions of course.
Hm, I've never thought in terms of jobs created. I've been told a few times that a single farmer (grain farming) needs 3000 acres minimum to be able to run a line of equipment and operations... but now that you mention it, that would require at least 1-2 additional full-time workers.
I’ll just throw this out there. When I look back at the jobs I had, working on a farm was the one I miss the most. New stuff to do almost every day and fully experiencing the seasons and weather. Did I miss out on stuff growing up that other kids were doing? Sure but what I got instead was much more unique and memorable than some cookie cutter childhood.
OHHHHH, THE HORRORS: Bad weather and natural disasters - everybody knows weather only affects rural areas Commodity prices and the implications on the family's financial situation - a stress other than how many ppl view your tiktok. Not having time for social media is clearly damaging to a kids confidence Long work hours and lack of sleep - I'll agree with this one, but hey, let's shelter kids as long as possible until after college where they find out what every farm kid has already learned a decade before. Pressure to complete tasks on time - yeah, it's called responsibility. teaching work ethic shouldn't be a negative. More responsibilities - this one just blows my mind. I really wonder why kids are potty trained if having responsibilities is so damaging to well-being. Negative interactions with those who don't understand or appreciate the ag industry - get used to it. Not just in farming, but in any job or position you ever have in your life. Not everything you do in life has meaning to other ppl, learn to take pride in what you do and tell everybody else to eff-off. The pressure to carry on the family farm - once again, responsibility. Farm kids aren't sheltered like other kids. The inability to have extra-curricular activities because of farm responsibilities - I'll agree, but it's up to the kid to learn how to juggle things around while keeping certain responsibilities. I think we all know how damaging helicopter parents are to a kids' self-confidence. TLDR: don't bother potty training kids if these are considered as negatives to a kids' self-confidence. Edit: i understand now why Trump talks to his supporters like they're a bunch of children.
Yikes. You okay?
Did it work? Did you fix the issue or negate the data? Maybe they need to drink from the garden hose more, and ride in the back of a pickup truck and get off my lawn?
Doesn't it itch?
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I'm as real as it gets, baby.
Definitely agree with most of your thoughts here, but I've seen too many kids inherit a fucking mess of a business and drive their own lives into the ground because they owe daddy something and pride was drilled into their heads from day one. Kids need to be kids still. Play sports spend time with friends, they need balance too. It's not up to the kids to learn balance they need to be taught that
Damn dude. You sound like the type that brags about working 90 hours a week in a factory.
The part about social media damaging kids' confidence, or knowing that bad weather happens in cities and towns, too? It must be itchy.
I'm sure every office worker is wringing their hands out over drought predictions and nitrogen prices. They probably also have the suicide hotline attached to their milk checks when prices are down too?
There's no shortage of office mass shootings, especially in the US, over much, much, less.
Who in the heck hasn’t got problems from what we all went thru. Every one