Debt and Rural Suicide

When we think of debt, we think of a modern-day urban and suburban malady. Buying homes we can’t afford. Running up credit card bills that we can’t pay. Keeping up with the Joneses – and the Smiths while we’re at it.

However, to see the dangerous toll that runaway debt can take on your mental health, you should look past the suburban high school football fields and out into the vast farmland. There, you can see that the talk about mental health dangers posed by debt is not phony.

Some farmers live with a high debt burden. They also carry a high mental health burden. The sad little secret is that the prospect of suicide is as much a part of farming as milking the cows and feeding the pigs. The suicide rate among farmers is significantly above the national average for urban citizens according to Michael Rosmann, an agricultural industry researcher.  In addition, the suicide rate among male farmers is higher than the rate for other men living in rural areas. 

Despite government studies, no one firmly knows the reason for this fact, and researchers suspect many possible contributing factors. But one thing can be said about the male farmer suicide rate – there is evidence that bad economic times lead to rural suicides. For instance, between 1979 and 1982, a time of economic difficulty, 95 of 273 farm deaths in the Canadian province of Ontario were suicides. In recent years, rural debt in India has led to a wave of farmer suicides. This trend is not limited to other countries. In America, suicides by farmers increase to three to four times the urban rate in America during hard economic times, according to Rosmann. 

“The grief has finally won out – the low prices, bills piling up, just everything. The kids deserve better and so do you. I just don’t know how to do it. This is all I know and it’s just not good enough anymore,” reads a suicide note from an Iowa farmer, found in a Rosmann presentation.