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Farm Suicide

Who is more vulnerable to suicide: a veteran back from combat in the middle east? Or an American farmer?

The farmer.

I address some of these issues in the Lupaster mystery I am working on now. I call it Blind!, at least for now. Reggie Haskell, the transplanted urban sophisticate, confronts some of the issues of the farmer.

My dairy farmer father had himself committed to a state mental hospital when he found himself planning suicide one spring in the early 1960s. My thirteenth year, I spent a dismal summer visiting my father Sunday afternoons on the grounds of what he sometimes called the insane asylum. A farmer neighbor stepped in to milk the cows, so my father could keep the herd. Ten years later, the neighbor hung himself in his barn.

Another farmer neighbor, who happened to be a relative, burned himself to death in his car by dousing himself with gasoline and lighting a match.

I read an article in the Guardian yesterday that cited a CDC Report : nearly 85 farmers per 100,000 commit suicide, five times the national rate for all occupations and double the rate for military veterans. The next lowest rate, construction, is a dramatic thirty points lower.

I am not surprised. I was raised on a farm and I knew the two farmer neighbors who committed suicide. My father came close to self destruction, but he was lucky to seek help at the right time. I can’t think of any acquaintances in other businesses who were suicides. I worked in software development for thirty years and I heard of one or two suicide deaths, but no one in the industry whom I knew or talked to ever killed themselves.

I have noticed young people interested in growing high quality local food. I hope these idealists know what they are signing up for. Farming, raising food, has a type of stress that other vocations do not. A farmer has little control of his fate. Software engineers can study harder, acquire better tools, work smarter and work long hours with a reasonable assurance that they will succeed.

A successful farmer must do all these things, but some years the rain won’t fall, or too much will fall at the wrong time, spring turns cold and wire worms devour the roots of sprouting corn seed, impeccably managed milk cows will get mastitis for no apparent reason, the price of wheat will plummet, or the price of diesel will soar. An early freeze will rot the pumpkins before Halloween, a late freeze will wipe out an entire crop of seedlings. A farmer defies nature and the market to earn a living, and some years are failures through no fault of the farmer.

And make no mistake—farm work is hard, debilitating, and dangerous. Look at the hard calluses and cracks on a farmer’s hands with embedded grime that will never appear clean. Look at the heating pads, and bottles of liniment and arthritis medicine in their bathrooms. Farm work is physically hard, repetitious, solitary, and mind numbing. Some make a good living. Many don’t. Even more only farm part-time, working excruciating hours at another job to subsidize their farm.

What then possesses farmers to make them farm? The answer cuts close to the reason they hang, burn, shoot, and use their tractors to mangle themselves. The driving passion of my father and many farmers I have known, is to raise food. To feed others. This could be an instinct hard-wired into the brains of our species.

When farmers are threatened with the loss of their farms, their tools, their means of production, they strike out at the only enemy they can blame: themselves. Their desire to punish themselves for failure runs as strong as their hard muscles and stubborn brains. After a withering and sacrificing fight, they only see a future like the past; painful death beckons as sweet justice and respite.

I admit to having had these feelings on occasion, although I’m not a real farmer. I own the family farm. If I were a gentleman, you might call me a gentleman farmer. In reality, I am a lumpen farmer with a few vestiges of a true farmer’s feelings.

I understand the idealistic attraction of farming today. The desire to provide is strong in this age when our manufactured food supply seems to decline in quality and become a toxic threat to well-being. The farmer may be a hero, but the heroism of the farmer comes hard, maybe as hard as heroism on the battlefield. There are no medals for hand weeding for sixteen hours straight or returning to the house, slimy and bloody with afterbirth and cord blood from carrying a newborn calf to the barn at two in the morning, but feats like these are all in the farmer’s year.

Harvest festivals are a few days in the fall, and some years celebrate a step toward bankruptcy, not a profit, much less a windfall or a jubilee.

Farm suicides are a hard harvest.

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The Barn

Barns in Whatcom County, and all over the US, changed in the mid-twentieth century. In Whatcom County, the dairy industry propelled the change. In the old, pre-refrigeration, days, every farm had a few dairy cows, just enough to supply the family with fresh milk, cream, and butter. A few dairies near population centers were larger and supplied fresh milk to non-farm families, but their size and location was severely limited by the rapid handling required to prevent milk from spoiling. Butter and cheese were the only traditional ways of preserving fragile milk and they were not an effective economic connection between remote farms and city populations.

Until the forties– I’m not sure of the year– my grandparents had only three or four cows. My grandpa and and my dad sat on three legged stools and milked the cows by hand. The milk was cooled by placing a twenty gallon milk can into a tank of cool well water. The milk that the family and one or two neighbors could not consume then went to a hand-cranked, later electric, centrifugal cream separator. Cream kept long enough to sell to a dairy, and the perishable skim milk went to the hogs.

For its first fifty years, cash crops on the farm were quite diverse. Grandpa sold potatoes, eggs, sugar beets, wheat, oats, garden vegetables, beef, pork, cream, and probably other things I never heard about. Mid-century, the diversity of cash crops ended. The farm became a dairy farm with three cash crops: whole milk, eggs, and potatoes.

The economy of the family centered on the monthly milk check. Dad and Grandpa sold an occasional cull dairy cow for beef, a load of hay, straw, oats, or wheat when they had a surplus or the price was too good to pass up, but those were bumper crops and windfalls, not to be counted on to pay taxes and the electricity bill. Dad continued to raise grass, wheat, oats, and corn, but as feed for the dairy cows, not as cash sources. The eggs and potatoes were still cash crops, but these sidelines were only assurance that there would be no idle time left after dairying and raising fodder.

The transformation to a dairy farm also transformed the barn. In 1940, the barn housed a team of horses, a bull, a few cows and calves, and their hay, grain, and bedding. By 1950, the herd grew to close to thirty head, requiring specialized space for milking and more storage for hay, silage, and grain. The horses were replaced with a tractor and the adoption of artificial insemination eliminated the prison-like quarters for a sometimes violent bull.

The  war time Seattle population clamoring for refrigerated whole milk drove the change. With improved transportation and refrigeration, Whatcom County, a  hundred miles to the north, became a major milk supplier, and eventually grew to be one of the largest milk producing counties in the US. But Whatcom dairy farms first had to meet the requirements of the King County Health Department to get a Grade A license, which was the entrance ticket to the twentieth century economy for a farmer in what was called the fourth corner of the country.

Like health departments all over, King County required concrete floors, painted walls, and generally sanitary conditions in the milking barn and milk house. As time went on, they also required refrigerated storage of milk on the farm. The days of cans of well-water-cooled milk sitting on milk stands waiting for the milk truck were over. From the cow to a refrigerated storage tank to a refrigerated tank truck was the only acceptable way to handle Grade A milk.

Dad and Grandpa added a concrete floored milking wing to the barn before I was born. The milking barn had eighteen stanchions to hold cows while they were milking and was specifically constructed to meet King County Health Department regulations. The stanchions were equipped with vacuum lines to operate milking machines. They also added a concrete silo to replace the small wood stave silo that was only adequate for the small herd of the old days. The old milk house was located at the well and set up for water cooling the milk; Dad replaced it with a new milk house that was closer to the barn and contained a refrigerated milk tank.

In addition to changes to the barn, Dad appropriated every bit of spare dry space in out buildings for storing oats and wheat that he had milled for his own blend of dairy feed. The old horse barn, hog barn, even the little mother-in-law house that Grandpa built for my great grandmother were eventually requisitioned for grain storage.

This was the barn as it was while I was growing up. It continued to be used in the same way for close to fifty years until an accident forced Dad to retire.