SYNOPSIS:

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. In this talk, I draw on 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, it becomes possible to understand farm stress as a structural issue related to the economic and social hollowing out of rural communities.