Tracy Ross
Reporter
Sneak Peek of the Week
Colorado farmers just lost a critical lifeline to mental health programming
Maggie Hanna’s childhood home on Hanna Ranch, near Hanover southeast of Colorado Springs, is now the roof over the ranch hands’ heads. The ranch on Fountain Creek has been in her family since the 1940s. Hanna’s father died by suicide in 1998, when she was 9. She and other agricultural producers are working to make sure farmers and ranchers have access to mental-health services when and where they need them. (Nina Riggio, Special to The Colorado Sun)“Mental health in general is an area of concern in the United States, but within the ag community, the stress is unique and pervasive.”
— Chad Franke, Rocky Mountain Farmers Union president
400,000
Number of small U.S. family farms and ranches that have shuttered in the past four decades
Colorado farmers and ranchers lost access to a critical lifeline when the U.S. Department of Agriculture on Friday froze funding for a program that supports the mental health of a population whose suicide rate is at least two times higher than the average population and whose profession is marked by uncertainties in the weather, market and cost of operating.
LeeAnne Sanders, spokesperson for the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union, said annual funding for the union’s’ AgWell program in Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico is just $100,000 to $160,000 but that funding helps counter the stresses of farming and ranching, which contribute to the statistically higher rates of suicide and other mental health risks.
AgWell funding comes through a $10 million federal grant to the Western Regional Agricultural Stress Assistance Partnership, which recognizes that high levels of stress are present in agricultural communities from causes like unstable finances, carrying the pressure of multigenerational farm lineage, injury, acute illness, adverse weather and climate change. The partnership helps producers in 13 Western states from Washington to New Mexico as well as Alaska, Hawaii and four U.S. territories.
And neither Chad Franke, president of the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union, nor AgWell founder Dan Waldvogle can understand why a program costing so little would be slashed when it helps people do the critical work of providing food for America and the world as their challenges loom larger all the time.
“There is a recognition that mental health in general is an area of concern in the United States, but within the ag community, the stress is unique and pervasive,” Franke said. “Farmers and ranchers really don’t control their own destiny. When it comes to business, it rains too much. It doesn’t rain enough. It hails. The wind blows. It snows too soon or it doesn’t snow enough. There’s just so little that farmers and ranchers really, truly have control over that it’s a unique situation as far as stress goes.”
Waldvogle conceptualized AgWell in 2018 after four ranchers living near the southern Colorado ranch where he worked died by suicide within a matter of months.
“One of those individuals moved cows for us up in the high country in the summers,” he said. “Another one, I was actually their mentor. He was a beginning farmer. And then another was an old timer, probably a sixth-generation rancher, just upriver from us. So it definitely heightened my awareness of the issue at the same time I was going through some issues.”
Waldvogle joined the Farmers Union as a staff member, started AgWell as the Rural Peer Assistance Network in 2019, and secured funding for it through the 2018 Farm Bill in 2020.
The announcement the Department of Agriculture is cutting the program indicates it doesn’t know how important the funding is not only to ranchers and farmers but rural communities, says Franke.
Go to The Sun to find out more about the loss as well as the results of a meeting the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union plans to have with the department, on Friday.
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In Their Words
Greeley wants to unsqueeze the Poudre River
Whitewater rafters run the Poudre River on Aug. 13. (Tri Duong, Special to The Colorado Sun)“I don’t want to say we ignored it. But as a whole, I felt like we turned our backs on the river.”
— Victoria Leonhardt, City of Greeley senior urban transportation planner
2 miles
Length the Poudre River has shrunk due to decades of abuse
The old stereotype, perpetuated by water parks, poetry and the occasional country music song, rings true in this case: Rivers really are lazy.
Greeley is piecing together a plan to free the Poudre River of some constraints.
For decades, cities across Colorado abused rivers, using them as dumps, corralling them into canals and surrounding them with concrete and bridges. Greeley wasn’t any better, and as a result, the length of the river decreased by 15%, or about 2 miles. Squeezing the river increased its speed, and that led to erosion, killed much of the aquatic life and, most of all, led to flooding. It also limited, if not downright evaporated, the chances of any recreation.
Victoria Leonhardt, a senior urban transportation planner for the city of Greeley, said “we just want to give the Poudre more room.”
“I don’t want to say we ignored it,” said Leonhart, who is heading up the project. “But as a whole, I felt like we turned our backs on the river.”
Greeley hopes to change that by reconnecting the Poudre to its historic floodplains, giving it room to spread out, increasing its length and creating spawning beds, wetland ponds, boulder clusters, gravel bars and places where the public can spend some time with it, if not in it.
The last part would likely be the most exciting to the general public and would resemble the efforts of many cities across Colorado to make their rivers a place where people can play. Even Greeley’s neighbors, such as Windsor and Fort Collins, have made recent improvements to incorporate the Poudre in its recreation plans. That fact alone is a reason Greeley officials want to improve its section of the Poudre. The city hopes to focus those efforts on the downtown area for now, from 35th Avenue east to U.S. 85.
“The recreation piece is huge,” Leonhardt said. “It could be a destination-type attraction or amenity. We want to make sure people stay in Greeley to recreate, and ideally, others could come here.”
The rest of the river restoration plan is bold and visionary. But as freelancer Dan England reports in a story that will run over at The Sun next week, the plan’s ethos so far is simply to get out of the river’s way.
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Breaking Trail
PETA to Colorado Department of Agriculture: Snakes have unique needs and wants!
This undated image made from a video provided by Project RattleCam shows a “mega den” of rattlesnakes in a remote location in northern Colorado. California Polytechnic State University scientists put up a webcam on the den, which they say is one of the biggest they’ve ever seen. (Project RattleCam via AP)“Snakes are individuals with unique wants and needs just like any cat or dog.”
— PETA General Counsel Lori Kettler
29
species of venomous and nonvenomous snakes in Colorado
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is going to bat for Colorado’s squirmiest population — pet snakes, which the advocacy group says need larger enclosures and stronger protection in the pet trade.
They’re making their plea at the Colorado Department of Agriculture’s public hearing Thursday on proposed changes to the Pet Animal Care and Facilities Act regulations. They and other snake allies are urging the department to require enclosures for snakes be at least long enough to allow the animals to stretch out fully — which experts agree is essential to their health and well-being.
“Snakes are individuals with unique wants and needs just like any cat or dog, but the Colorado Department of Agriculture’s proposed rules would allow snakes to be crammed into tiny boxes only half the length of their bodies, never able to fully stretch out,” PETA General Counsel Lori Kettler said. “PETA is calling on the department to listen to subject matter experts whose recommendations are based on scientific evidence-based research and require enclosures that give snakes the space they need to be afforded basic welfare.”
Colorado snake lovers aren’t as rare as one might think, given the fact that over the past 60 million years the human brain has developed a “special corner” dedicated to fearing and avoiding them, experts say. That’s good for humans who like Colorado’s outdoors, because they’re riddled with rattlers born in places like a mega-den complex up north where hundreds hibernate through the winter and the females in August give birth to five to 17 snaklets per litter. That’s a lot of snakes and a lot of venom: The average bite contains between 75 and 125 milligrams (dry weight), but can deliver up to 590 mg in a single bite.
You can’t own a venomous snake in Colorado but plenty of people have rattler skins on their fireplace mantles and some lucky ones find the actual rattles. But captive snakes don’t always have it as good as the prairie, Western and massasauga rattlers common across Colorado. Another 26 or 27 snake species here aren’t venomous.
Peer-reviewed studies make it clear that to be psychologically and physically healthy, snakes held in captivity must be able to fully stretch out their bodies, and that snakes who can’t stretch out feel stressed and experience various health problems, including injuries, illnesses, joint disease, constipation and obesity, says a news release from PETA.
That’s why the Colorado Reptile Humane Society, the Animal Law Program at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law and PETA are calling on CDA for stronger protections, the release says.
Snakes are beautiful. Everyone should have one, snake mom Stacey Barbalinardo, from Colorado Springs, said as she beamed at a green and yellow boa she’d started fostering in 2021.
Her days are better if they involve play time and “love boops” from her reptiles, she added. “Hanging out with a snake can teach you a lot. About them, about yourself, about life.”
So it’s only fair that the enclosures captive snakes live in are big enough for them to extend to their full length, for relaxation and ease of digesting rodents among other things.
The commenters are also urging the department to lower the licensing thresholds for reptile and amphibian breeders so that more animals will be protected under the Pet Animal Care and Facilities Act.
Learn more about the hearing in Tracy Ross’ story at The Sun next week.
— t
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