Colorado farmers and ranchers lost access to a critical lifeline when the U.S. Department of Agriculture last week 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 mental health challenges and the statistically higher rates of suicide.
AgWell funding comes from a $10 million federal grant to the USDA’s Farm and Ranch Assistance Network funneled in part through the Western Regional Agricultural Stress Assistance Partnership. The Western regional partnership 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 ranch he was working on in southern Colorado all died by suicide within a matter of months.
Ben Walker directs cattle toward a pen he brands calves in on the TMAC Ranch, May 19, 2023, near Merino. (Hugh Carey, The Colorado Sun)“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 that was, you know, probably a sixth-generation rancher just upriver from us. So it definitely heightened my awareness of the issue at that time. And at the same time, I was going through some issues and joined the Farmers Union as a staff member. I had the opportunity to kind of create the program, and then federal funding for it was enabled through the 2018 Farm Bill.”
The “business card” that can change everything
AgWell has helped producers in the Eastern Plains town of Peetz, says Danny Wood, a 61-year-old dryland farmer who grows corn, wheat and grain and who is the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union director for his region. Wood spoke to The Colorado Sun from his fields on Tuesday.
“I’m out here in my fields right now, and it is so dry, we are in such a drought, it’s stressful,” he said. “The economy is stressful. It was hard for everybody to get their operating lines (of credit) renewed this year because we lost money last year. And we’ve lost money for the last three years. So there’s the added stress of that now.”
Franke says AgWell was created out of the understanding that farmers and ranchers “tend to be solitary, do-it-yourself kind of people, who will do what they need to do to get things done,” but “when it comes to mental health, you can’t do that. You can’t do it alone.”
AgWell, he said, “has really honed in on not so much talking about strictly mental health and mental wellness, but about the need for community, the need to watch out for our friends and our neighbors, and how to do that.”
☀️ READ MORE
Colorado farmers just lost their most important mental health lifeline
3:35 AM MDT on Apr 25, 20258:35 PM MDT on Apr 24, 2025Gray wolf released in Colorado earlier this year dies in Rocky Mountain National Park
7:58 PM MDT on Apr 24, 20258:13 PM MDT on Apr 24, 2025Jared Polis vetoes bill regulating social media sites operating in Colorado; lawmakers signal override fight is coming
6:08 PM MDT on Apr 24, 20257:01 PM MDT on Apr 24, 2025To that end they offer summits “where we invite just the general public to come in. This is not just for our members,” he said.
“And we do things like Pizza4Producers, where we will pay for the pizzas and invite producers to come out, just talk, and build that connection among neighbors, while sharing some of that information of, this is what you need to look out for in yourself and your neighbors. These are some of the resources. We’ve got little business card-sized handouts that have a list of those crisis management resources.”
Wood says he has used those cards three times in the past six months to help producers in his community.
“They have contact numbers on them of places you can call if you need to talk to someone,” he said, adding they can get six free sessions of anonymous, professional counseling.
He gave the first card to a high school junior who approached him in distress.
“Now, can you imagine approaching a gentleman who’s 61 years old” that you know but aren’t close to “and telling him ‘I need some help?’ I mean, that had to be a milestone killer for him to do it.” But Wood was able to pull out the card and direct the young man to help.
The second person was a single mother caring for her child and her ailing parents, who reached out to Wood’s wife implying she wanted to die by suicide. He was able to give her a card, too, connecting her to a therapist.
And the third was an older man having a hard time with his farm who couldn’t get an operating line of credit. Wood gave him a card, and the man said, “Well, do you want me to let you know what happens?”
“No, no I don’t,” Wood answered. “That’s not what this program is about. This is a resource to give them the contact, and it’s completely anonymous. They talk to this therapist or the specialist. And I don’t want to know what happened. That’s not my business.”
“This is the most amazing program, and I can’t believe the funding got cut for it,” he added.
“They wouldn’t cut it if they had any idea how important this is. Because there’s folks just like me. I’m out here spraying all day. And it’s dry, it’s bleak, it looks horrible. I mean, it’s depressing. And this was a horrible time to have a cut, I guarantee you.”
Helping a new generation adapt to the challenges of agriculture
Leah Ricci, interim executive director for the Quivira Coalition, which supports new ranchers and farmers interested in regenerative agriculture in several Western states, says AgWell funding has helped participants in the coalition’s New Agrarian program adapt to the isolation associated with working in agriculture.
“One of the things we have heard directly from our participants and from alumni is that isolation is one of the number one challenges they face when trying to enter careers in agriculture and particularly in the West, when people are often like, no joke, two hours from the nearest grocery store,” she said.
“They may be working and living somewhere where literally the only people they see are their boss and their boss’s family members. So being able to access opportunities that support their social well-being, help them feel connected to other beginning ranchers and farmers and just to provide a regular space for them to gather is critical to helping them navigate the type of isolation they have to deal with.”
With AgWell funding, Quivira has been able to create a “weekly wind-down” Zoom call that’s modeled after a call AgWell first offered to ranchers and farmers in Colorado.
“It’s essentially a weekly space that anyone can show up to, and if someone has something hard to talk about, they know the space is there,” Ricci said. “But more importantly, it’s a consistent space that anyone can show up to if they want to just connect with others, and they know that there’s going to be a staff person there who’s welcoming and supportive, and other farmers and ranchers who they can connect with.”
Maggie Hanna’s childhood home on Hanna Ranch, near Hanover southeast of Colorado Springs, is now the roof over the ranch hands’ heads. Hanna’s father died by suicide in 1998, when she was 9. Now 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)“Those meetings are based on a recommendation that the number one protective factor against mental illness and suicide is having a supportive social network,” she added. “Particularly in these rural communities, when there aren’t very many third spaces, anything we can do to provide that social network is a protective layer.”
Finding other funding is crucial
Franke said the AgWell program is so important not only to producers but to rural communities that the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union is committed to shuffling its budget, finding new partners and seeking out new grant opportunities to keep it going.
Supporting producers through mental health programs is crucial, he said, because of the service they provide, the food they grow, for America and the world.
“But when you look at the numbers, in the last five years, we’ve lost around 400,000 family farm and ranch operations in this country. That is rural America,” he said. “You know, the eastern Colorado towns, the mountain towns, the reason they exist and continue to exist is because of agriculture. If we lose family farms and ranches, the small towns across this country will continue to die off and just shrink in population and no longer have a reason to exist.”
Franke said the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union met with the USDA Thursday and USDA reiterated that all Farm and Ranch Assistance Network grants have been suspended.
Four Democratic state lawmakers introduced House Bill 1321 earlier this month that would send $4 million from the state’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act cash fund to the governor’s office to support the state’s legal defense against Trump administration actions slashing federal dollars meant for Colorado.
“The additional funding will ensure that Colorado is ready to respond swiftly and effectively to future federal actions that threaten nonnegotiable services like health care, early childhood education and public safety,” said state Sen. Jeff Bridges, a Greenwood Village Democrat. He’s one of the lead sponsors of the measure.
The bill passed the state House and on Thursday its first vote in the Senate. Republicans are fighting the measure but do not have the votes to block it.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Colorado farmers just lost their most important mental health lifeline )
Also on site :