Death on the Farm | General Homesteading Discussion | Forums

A pretty sad article, I think I posted the article here before from the Bangor Daily News about the dairy farmer suicides here in the state, is this happening in your area?

On January 21, 2010, a cold, clear day, Dean Pierson woke up early, as usual. The 59-year-old put on a pair of blue jeans and a hooded coat before the sun was up, then went to his barn, turned on the lights, closed all the doors and windows, powered off the fans and cranked up the volume on the radio. He then shot each of his milking cows with a .22-caliber N1 carbine rifle, about 51 of them, between their horns and eyes, hitting their brains and killing them instantly. Pierson then sat down in a wooden chair with an upholstered seat, pulled a ski mask over his face, picked up a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun and shot himself once in the chest.

Around 9 or 9:30, a truck driver from the Agri-Mark co-op arrived to collect milk from Pierson's tanks. The driver saw a note attached to the barn door warning whoever found it not to enter and to call the police. He called his dispatcher, who called Pierson's milk inspector, who telephoned Bill Kiernan, the farmer next door.

Kiernan sent his grown son, Walter, and an employee to check on their neighbor. On the way to the barn, Walter ran into Dean's mother, Pauline, who lived on the farm and happened to be out walking down the road. The two of them entered through the side door while the employee went through the back. Walter spotted Pierson first. Behind the blood-soaked chair, on a narrow wooden desk attached to the wall, were two notes written on yellow cards used to tag cows. One of them had words and phrases written like bullet points: Lonely. Discouraged. Overwhelmed. No hope. Can't go on. Danger to my family. Worn out. The kids are so talented. Gwynne you are a good person. The other note simply said, So sorry.

The state police arrived shortly after 1 p.m. "It was perfectly quiet, no rattling around of cows in their stalls," recalls investigator Kelly Taylor. George Beneke, a veterinarian, came dressed in coveralls and boots and brought a stethoscope to determine which cows were dead, although he didn't need it. By that time the cows were bloated, and they had all fallen backward in identical positions. "He was pretty efficient," Beneke says of Pierson. "He knew how to kill a cow."

A Suicide Every Two Days in France

For decades, farmers across the country have been dying by suicide at higher rates than the general population. The exact numbers are hard to determine, mainly because suicides by farmers are under-reported (they may get mislabeled as hunting or tractor accidents, advocates for prevention say) and because the exact definition of a farmer is elusive.

People started talking about farmer suicide during the 1980s farm crisis. By the 1960s, technical innovations had made farming easier, and farmers were expanding operations by taking out loans. But the 1980s brought two droughts, a national economy in trouble and a government ban on grain exports to the Soviet Union. Farmers started defaulting on their loans, and by 1985, 250 farms closed every hour. That economic undertow sucked down farms and the people who put their lives into them. Male farmers became four times more likely to kill themselves than male non-farmers, reports showed. "In the West, the guys were jumping off silos," says Leonard Freeborn, a horse farmer and agricultural consultant.

Since that crisis, the suicide rate for male farmers has remained high: just under two times that of the general population. And this isn't just a problem in the U.S.; it's an international crisis. India has had more than 270,000 farmer suicides since 1995. In France, a farmer dies by suicide every two days. In China, farmers are killing themselves to protest the government's seizing of their land for urbanization. In Ireland, the number of suicides jumped following an unusually wet winter in 2012 that resulted in trouble growing hay for animal feed. In the U.K., the farmer suicide rate went up by 10 times during the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in 2001, when the government required farmers to slaughter their animals. And in Australia, the rate is at an all-time high following two years of drought.

Robert Fetsch, a retired professor of human development and family studies at Colorado State University, says there are profound social reasons farmers are reluctant to seek help. "Farmers are extremely self-sufficient and independent," he says, "and tend to work around whatever they have, because they are so determined to keep moving."

One factor disputed among agricultural and mental health professionals is the connection between pesticides and depression. A group of researchers published studies on the neurological effects of pesticide exposure in 2002 and 2008. Lorrann Stallones, one of those researchers and a psychology professor at Colorado State University, says she and her colleagues found that farmers who had significant contact with pesticides developed physical symptoms like fatigue, numbness, headaches and blurred vision, as well as psychological symptoms like anxiety, irritability, difficulty concentrating and depression. Those maladies are known to be caused by pesticides interfering with an enzyme that breaks down the neurotransmitter that affects mood and stress responses.

"A lot of farmers are very familiar with the pesticides, so they sort of take it for granted," Stallones says. "It's an invisible kind of thing, so if you can't actually feel it, taste it, touch it, you might not believe it's an issue."

Not everyone is sold on the link between pesticides and depression. "I don't think there's firm data on that yet," says Jill Harkavy-Friedman, senior director of research at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. A greater contributor to suicide in rural areas, she says, is the easy access to guns. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, most suicides in America involve firearms, and more than half of all firearm deaths every year involve suicide. Harkavy-Friedman points to a 1998 study published in The British Journal of Psychiatry that showed the most common means of farmer suicide in England and Wales from 1981 to 1988 was guns. Following firearm legislation in 1989 that reduced access to guns, the total number of farmer suicides went down.

That's good news in Britain, but not much help in America, says agricultural consultant Leonard Freeborn. "I don't think you're ever gonna find a farm without a gun [here]."

Running on Milk Money

Copake is about 110 miles north of New York City, near where New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut meet. This part of upstate New York boomed in the 1940s and 1950s, when men like Dean Pierson's father started farms there because of the rich soil and close proximity to major cities. For years, Copake ran on milk money. When bulk milk tanks were introduced, farmers there and in nearby Ancram were the first in the country to get them. New technology made farming easier, and farms across the country expanded until the 1980s. Then the farm crisis hit. By 1988, the number of cows in the area was half of what it had been two decades earlier. In 2003, only 15 dairy farms were left. Roeliff Jansen High School, which trained farmers like Pierson, closed in 1999 and remains vacant, and buildings with for-sale signs surround the Copake Memorial Clock at the center of town.

Dean Pierson's father, Helmer, immigrated to the United States from Sweden with his family when he was 3. The family lived near Copake, and Helmer's father, Dean's grandfather, worked as a dairy farmer. Helmer got married in 1942, and the following year, he enlisted in the Army and fought for his adopted country in World War II as an airborne engineer.

In 1951, Helmer and his wife bought a farm, which they renamed High Low. Dean, their only child, was just 1 at the time, and he grew up helping his parents run the farm. He played high school football and participated in 4-H, as his father had. He studied agriculture at the State University of New York at Cobleskill and graduated in 1970. He then returned to High Low, helped expand it, purchasing more land and building new barns. In 1980, he took it over from his aging parents. In 1988, he married Gwynneth Oberly, 12 years his junior.

Just a few years into their marriage, things started sliding away from Dean and Gwynneth. "I could see he was getting very discouraged because it wasn't working out," says Beneke, their veterinarian. "He became a very unhappy man." In 1996, the Piersons auctioned off their cows, tractors and even their immaculate antique Ford Model T, and Dean did other work, including construction and carpentry. People in town found him hard to deal with. "I think that was really when he was starting his spiral down," says Kiernan, the neighbor.

Two years later, Pierson did something that stunned his neighbors: He reopened High Low, purchased new cattle and built a new barn full of technical innovations. A computerized feeding mechanism circulated hay bales around a track, and the "ventilating system with its four-foot fans is the first in the area," said a local paper.

A decade later, however, the 2008 recession crushed dairy farms. The government lowered its fixed price on milk, while the cost of fuel, feed and fertilizer went up. In July 2007, American farmers were getting $21.60 for every hundred pounds of milk. By July 2009, that was down to $11.30. "It was just a horrible, horrible year," says Ruth McCuin, Pierson's milk inspector at the time.

"I could see there was a change in Dean," says Jim Miller, who had known him since childhood. Pierson lost interest in hobbies like deer hunting and snowmobiling, and fell out of touch with friends. "He withdrew within himself."

"I feel lousy, exhausted, and frustrated nonstop, which leaves me with insomnia and general crabbiness," Gwynneth wrote to a college friend in January 2008. "My marriage is in name only. Dean acts depressed and seems to have a kind of dementia. He is really tough to be around as his thoughts are his only reality."

Most farms the size of Pierson's had employees or family members helping, but Dean worked alone. His grandfather had come from Sweden to be a dairy farmer. His father, who died in 2005, had achieved the American dream with High Low Farm. The burden now fell on Dean to save it, and he was in free fall. Susan Johnson, a cousin, remembers something Dean asked his wife around that time: "If I got rid of all the cows, would you love me?"

can read the rest here

http://mag.newsweek.com/2014/04/18/farmer-suicide-farming.html