Family Farm Members’Stress and Coping Experiences
Behind the Research: Q&A with Dr. Emily Paskewitz
Q: Can you talk about why you decided to family farm members in particular?
EP: Studying family farm members is something that’s very personal to me. I grew up on a family dairy farm in Minnesota. It was a second-generation farm that my dad took over for my grandfather. So I was in activities at school, but I still had to help feed calves and milk cows and bale hay in the summer.
If you look at the recent USDA statistics, 96% of farms in the US are family farms. With a family farm, you can’t focus on the family more than the business, because then the business goes downhill. But if you focus too much on the business, you destroy the family. And so focusing on family farms was really a way to dive into some of the unique dynamics at play for family farm members when they’re engaged in farming and ranching activities, but they’re doing it with family members who are often are very, very close and tight knit.
Q: Do your co-authors also have personal ties to agriculture?
EP: Laura Miller is my research colleague who specializes in health communication, so she was a perfect one to bring in for this. Her dad grew up on a crop farm in Illinois, so she was a generation removed from the farm. Victoria Bertram didn’t grow up on a farm, but she grew up in a rural community. And then Charlotte Streat grew up in FFA, showing cattle and livestock. So all of us have some sort of understanding of rural life and farming. And frankly, that’s how we got most of these farmers to do a two-hour interview with us.
Q: And so when you say 96% are family run or family farms, does that mean that they’re exclusively family run?
EP: We used the exact definition that the US Department of Agriculture uses for family farm: they define it as any farm that’s organized as a sole proprietorship, partnership, or family corporation, and family farms cannot have hired managers or be non-family corporations or non-family cooperatives. They define it in a way that keeps it very family centered, and there’s typically not a lot of extra management from non-family members.
Q: Who were the family members involved in farm operations of your participants?
EP: We wanted to know from our participants who was involved in the day-to-day operations on the farm. Most of them talked about working with their parents, with their siblings, and spouses. It was really focused on that nuclear family that they worked with; the few individuals who went a little bit broader than that nuclear family mentioned cousins, aunts and uncles, and grandparents, but the majority of participants talked about working with siblings and parents.
Q: You list Stress and Coping Theory as a theoretical framework for the research, but then the coping mechanisms that you discovered in this group didn’t fit neatly with that theory. Can you talk a bit about that?
EP: We use stress and coping theory because we felt that was the best lens that existed to highlight the balance between stress and coping that farmers go through. Now, one of the interesting things is, when you look at stress and coping theory, Lazarus and Folkman (Stress, appraisal, and coping, Springer, 1984) define stress as: I as an individual look at my environment, and I assess everything, look at everything, and determine this is stressful to me-whether it’s because it can cause me harm, or there’s potential for harm, or because harm happened. And now I’m responding to what has happened, and there’s stress.
We knew that part of the theory fit with farmers. We knew they were stressed by those challenges that we identified, the finances and the environmental things, those weren’t surprising to us. We were very familiar with those stressors. But what we were interested in is diving in more to how are farmers choosing to cope with that. Stress and coping theory focuses on stressors that are short-term, stressors that I have the capability to resolve. It does a really great job for things like, Oh man, I can’t find my keys. What do I do now? Well, okay, let’s problem solve-I’d better go look around and try to find them, right? That’s my coping technique.
But if we think about the stressors that these farmers face-the financial market volatility and how it’s going up and down, livestock health with the dairy industry right now looking at avian flu, the weather, from extreme drought conditions to being deluged with water. Farmers have absolutely no control over any of those things, and while stress and coping theory does a great job outlining coping for things that are within a person’s ability to solve, the coping techniques in the theory aren’t as helpful for those who don’t have the ability to fully resolve their stressors.
Q: Can you elaborate on the reframing techniques that you found – whether those are a healthier way to process stress, or just different from the mechanisms suggested by Stress and Coping Theory?
EP: What we found was that farmers did this reframing process, which, if you get picky, could probably fall into the avoidance category, but we didn’t want to call it full avoidance because they weren’t avoiding the issue. They knew those stressors were there. But what we found fascinating is they looked at those stressors and went, OK, yes, the weather is very stressful for me, but I also get to sit here and watch these crops go from seed to green sprouts to coming up out of the ground. I get to breed these animals and watch them give birth months later and raise those young animals. And it was fascinating to us how they took all of these stressors and went, yes, those are stressors, but I’m going to focus on the positive aspects of these things that stress me out.
That was the term we came up with-reframing-because they were fully acknowledging that those stressors exist and that those stressors won’t go away; they are somewhat inherent stressors with the profession. So instead of them being able to problem solve or do full emotional coping and resolve all the emotions with it, instead, they went, OK, but what are the positive aspects of what I’m doing in my day-to-day life? I get to work with my family every day. I remember one participant talking about getting to watch kids and grandkids running around the yard having fun with each other-who would go sit in an office all day and give that up, right?
They talked about reframing to that farmer identity, which is so central to every farmer, whether they’re a family farmer or not: I’m providing food for the nation. I have pride in what I do. I know that I am doing an important task, and I do it well. This reframing process of coping helped them almost redefine who they were and look at the positive aspects of what they were doing, so that those negative pieces didn’t add as much stress to their plate.
Q: What further research do you think might be done based on the findings of your work here?
EP: A lot of the farmers we spoke to are older individuals, and a lot of these individuals are trying to figure out what to do with this idea of succession planning, which can be a major family stressor. There’s a lot of research in the world of agriculture is looking at the question of how to help farmers manage this succession planning issue. One of the challenges that my co-authors and I saw looking at that succession planning literature is that a lot of it was focused on the financial part of decision-making, and not the family dynamics. That’s one of the things my co-authors and I want to do for future research is looking at some of those kind of underlying identity and emotional issues, like life definition, things that make succession planning and farm dissolution so complicated.
And going back to individual stress and mental health, we’ve been targeting messaging at individual farmers. But what if it’s presented to them like, hey, watch out for your neighbors? They might be more receptive. They may be more willing to show up and talk about it. If we talk about it in a way that they become the problem solver, not the risk holder, maybe they’ll hold onto the information and have it there if they do get to that dark moment themselves. I’d love to look at that in the future.