Farm profitability is more than a discussion about margins, debt, input costs and commodity prices. Behind those numbers are farmers and farm families carrying the responsibility of keeping their operations viable.
Yan Gladkiy, founder and CEO of GCN Workforce LLC, says agriculture needs to pay closer attention to the link between financial pressures and the people who keep farms running.
Gladkiy’s connection to agriculture is personal and professional. His parents run an agricultural business that raises pigs, while his uncle farms. His professional work focuses largely on workforce infrastructure for U.S. agriculture, food production and related businesses.
He says a conversation with Gillian Ward prompts him to examine farm profitability and mental health more closely. Ward connects reducing financial pain and improving farm profitability with the need for agriculture to talk openly about suicide.
Gladkiy stresses that financial pressure alone does not cause suicide.
“I am not a psychiatrist, and I would never claim that financial pressure alone causes suicide,” he said. “That would be both scientifically unsupported and unfair to the complexity of every individual life.”
However, financial difficulty can combine with weather, debt, markets, family expectations, succession and isolation.
Gladkiy says one pressure people outside agriculture may not fully understand is how difficult it can be for farmers to separate business performance from personal identity
A family farm may include land that parents or grandparents build and maintain, the family home, employees who depend on the operation and children who may eventually take over.
The farmer, therefore, carries more than just the financial performance of a business.
“The person sitting at the kitchen table may be asking a much heavier question: ‘Am I going to be the generation that loses what my family spent generations building?’” Gladkiy says.
That concern applies equally well to Canadian agriculture, where family farms remain a major part of the industry.
Gladkiy says agriculture should not discourage the independence and self-reliance that help farmers deal with uncertainty. Instead, it must recognize when independence becomes isolation.
Farmers routinely consult agronomists about crops, veterinarians about livestock, mechanics about machinery and accountants about finances. Gladkiy says seeking another perspective on financial or emotional pressure should carry no greater stigma.
“The problem begins when independence quietly turns into isolation,” he said.
He suggests asking a farmer under pressure a straightforward question: “You have been carrying a lot. Who is helping you think through it?”
Privacy also matters, particularly in small rural communities where farmers may worry that discussing financial or personal difficulties quickly becomes common knowledge.
Canada has farm-specific resources that recognize those concerns. The Manitoba Farmer Wellness Program, for example, provides confidential counselling designed specifically for farmers, farm families and farm employees.
Gladkiy also sees a gap in how agricultural support systems deal with multiple problems.
Crop insurance addresses one type of loss. Lenders deal with financing. Accountants deal with financial management. Mental-health programs focus on the individual.
The farmer may deal with all those pressures simultaneously.
“At the farm kitchen table, those problems don’t arrive in separate folders,” he said.
Gladkiy says that better connections among lenders, farm organizations, advisers, veterinarians, accountants, and professional support services could help identify problems earlier without turning agricultural professionals into mental-health specialists.
The goal is not to remove risk from farming. Agriculture remains a business where weather, markets and production create uncertainty.
The challenge is recognizing when several manageable problems start combining into something much larger.
For Gladkiy, protecting farm resilience also means recognizing the farmer as part of the equation.
The land, livestock, machinery, and crops all matter, but so does the person responsible for them. •
— By Harry Siemens