It is also worth separating lived experience from proof. The article combines personal observation, expert commentary and selected statistics, which can highlight an important pattern without fully explaining how common each problem is, which groups are at greatest risk, or which interventions work best. References to concepts such as cognitive distortions and high-effort coping are useful framing tools, but they should not be treated as simple explanations for every family conflict, stress reaction or health outcome in rural life.
For readers in farming communities, the practical takeaway is less about attaching labels and more about noticing where strain becomes chronic: persistent sleep problems, escalating conflict, emotional withdrawal, hopelessness, loss of pleasure, feeling trapped, or a work culture where asking for help is treated as weakness. Those warning signs may show up in spouses, children and hired workers even when the operation itself appears functional.
The broader health message is that resilience and self-reliance can be strengths until they become barriers to rest, communication and care. In high-stress environments, mental health support is not just crisis response; it is part of maintaining family stability, safety and long-term functioning.
What a blessing ranch and farm life are. Is there really a better way to raise a family? I’m entirely sure there is not.
It is an existence of the highest highs. A first calf heifer calves and goes straight to caring for her calf. Your eldest daughter experiences the chance to care for her first bottle calf and learns how important her dedication to that animal really is. Or how about watching your son chase cows across rugged, desert terrain confident in his abilities at the ripe age of 8.
But it is also a life of the lowest lows. Drought that leaves the landscape barren and scorched while cattle resort to eating cactus to sustain themselves. Hard choices made about how long one should hold onto an operation, both from a farm and ranch owner’s perspective, but also from the cowboy or farm hand’s too. No one in the industry will ever say the work is too much, because the tasks are never ending and the weight of that never ending list gets heavy.
Ranch and farm life are tough.
No one in the industry denies that fact. But it’s taken a long time for agriculture as a whole to accept that mental health is part of the equation for everyone involved.
Often, we hear or read about the mental stress operators and managers of farms and ranches experience. However, an area still underrepresented and in need of help is the roles played by wives, kids, hired hands, and others who hold it all together in the periphery. The nervous wife keeps the house running while waiting at home for her husband to gather strays in a remote canyon with no cell service. The hired hand who does the most dangerous of tasks with little to no input on how the job gets done. The kids who see mom and dad fighting over the finances, not understanding what is happening but knowing they feel unstable and unsafe.
Chad Reznicek, behavioral health state specialist for the Colorado AgrAbility Project, recognizes this as an ongoing issue.
“A lot of mental health support in agriculture is built around the operator, the owner, but not so much the support roles,” Reznicek said. “This whole topic is moving in the right direction, but it still has a lot of evolution to go. It needs to evolve in terms of better supporting farm workers, particularly Spanish-speaking farm workers, wives, kids, and other supporting roles.”
Farm and ranch wives are often the invisible support behind the operation owner or manager. She isn’t just raising kids; she’s also holding the household together and planning for activities and the future, while wondering where her spouse is and whether they are safe. There is always the lingering thought while waiting for her husband to come back from the field or from gathering cows, “will they come back and will they be okay?” The worry is only relieved when they walk back through the door.
This feeling of holding it all together without acknowledgment or understanding has a name: kinkeeping.
“Kinkeeping has to do with all the invisible labor that usually is carried by the spouses. They’re responsible for carrying on family traditions, for mediating conflicts, organizing healthcare appointments, for childcare, for setting up family holidays, and preserving family recipes, and all these other things that they often don’t get credit for,” Reznicek explained.
On top of all that work, ranch and farm wives are often pitching in with meals during harvest or working times on a ranch. It is no small task to plan, shop, and execute meals (which too often feel like the size of what a caterer would prepare for a party). Multiply that by many days or weeks, and the stress itself multiples.
These tasks are often undertaken by wives who may have, prior to motherhood, been out on a horse or in the field with the others, helping to get the work done, something that filled her soul. Many a young mother has watched the crew trot out of the ranch yard to go work, with a young child on her hip, a sink full of dishes, a meal to make, and a heart that feels heavy because she is missing out.
Financial stress is another significant stress factor for the owner/operator, but it also affects the support roles. While spouses and hired hands may not be responsible for, or even privy to, the specifics of the budget, they still feel the stress that comes from cutting costs and even directly from their partner or boss through changes in attitudes and behavior.
In some situations, these support roles are the sole responsible party for the finances, adding to an already full load of work and an extraordinary amount of stress. No matter the level of complexity, the stress is there.
Ranch and farm hands and other hired help, often drawn to the profession because it’s something they are passionate about or that brings fulfillment, also carry invisible stress. Rural locations can disconnect employees from their families and friends for extended periods. Couple that with typically long hours and sometimes subpar living conditions, and you have a recipe for mental health disaster.
For many who chose this profession, the job provides more than money and a place to live; it fills their souls. Some employers recognize that and use it to their advantage. Employees might be expected to listen and operate without input. This setup can work, but it limits employee buy-in and leaves people feeling powerless. A sense of powerlessness can trigger deep psychological distress and act as a catalyst for severe mental health conditions, including depression and anxiety.
Across all areas of life, people can create alternate realities adjacent to what is actually happening and sometimes expect vastly different outcomes. Reznicek, who often sees this in people in agriculture, notes these are people operating within cognitive distortions.
“The idea is that we expect our sacrifice, self-denial, to pay off as if someone’s keeping score. [We] feel bitter when it doesn’t happen,” he said.
Cognitive distortions can create barriers to what needs to happen within the family unit, often involving discomfort or contention.
“There’s a conversation that I need to have with my spouse, but I can justify not dealing with it by fixing the fence until 1 in the morning. Or, I know my spouse wanted me to be at the kids’ game tonight, but I have to finish this hay before it rains,” are two examples that Reznicek shares about how those in agriculture can operate in these cognitive distortions.
This shows up in hired hands who avoid thinking or planning for their own future, instead putting all their effort and energy into the operation they work for, expecting their hard work and dedication to pay off despite no attempts at self-advocacy.
Often a point of pride in rural communities is the work ethic of ranch and farm kids. Employers love hiring ag kids because they are reliably known to work hard, are committed and passionate, and honest to boot. But this early development of work ethic can come at a price. A strong work ethic and self-sufficiency are great, but they can also lead to heart and other health issues when not balanced with self-care, rest, and downtime.
As an icebreaker to open workshops and sessions with 4-H members, Reznicek asks what their superpower would be; the results aren’t overly surprising.
“The number one superpower that 4-H youth chose was super strength so that they could do their chores better.” Most parents feel a strong sense of pride and a job well done upon hearing this answer. But Reznickec said, “That’s enlightening and concerning.”
The John Henry Active Coping scale was created in the 1980s by Sherman A. James to measure a person’s drive and ability to cope with severe, chronic social and economic hardships using high-effort striving. The concept was named after John Henry, a legendary African American man who beat out a steam-powered drill while racing to carve a railroad tunnel through a mountain. After his triumph, he passed away from total exhaustion with his hammer still in his hand. This scale shows that the higher one scores, the more likely they are to suffer from cardiovascular and hypertension issues.
The scale includes 12 statements such as “when things don’t go the way I want, that just makes me work harder,” which are rated by agreement from 1 to 5, with five being the highest agreement. The score ranges from 12 to 60, with higher scores indicating a higher likelihood of active, effortful coping. The average score for most people in agriculture, including 4-H members, is 52.
Mental health isn’t just an abstract wellness topic and matters deeply. When it goes unaddressed, the results can be catastrophic. Outside agriculture, this is true, but it’s even more so within the industry. A grim statistic shows people involved in agriculture are 3.5 times more likely to commit suicide than the general population.
Keith Olander, Dean of Agricultural Studies and Executive Director of the Northern Agricultural Center of Excellence with AgCentric & Agricultural Partnerships, explained about a program used when stress and fear become too much.
“One of the mental health specialists within our program has started suicide support groups for rual and farm families. This is for spouses who have survived their spouse committing suicide. This is an obviously extreme situation, but it’s very real,” he stated.
As mental health in agriculture becomes more accepted, programs and support are growing. Typically, the focus in established programs is on the owner-operator. Still, programs such as Colorado’s AgVoucher program give access to counseling to anyone involved in agriculture offering ten free sessions. The program has conducted over 1,500 hours of free therapy, reaching close to 400 Colorado ag producers.
When Reznicek talks about this program, he notes the majority of the time the topic turns to family.
The top problems they report are “family, marital, and personal problems,” he said. “Probably two-thirds of the clients are looking for help navigating family relationships.”
In Minnesota, Olander shares that rural mental health has long been a topic of importance to the state. A rural mental health specialist program, funded in 1988 through the state legislature, still exists today. The initial push for this program stems from the ’80s farm crisis and was later expanded in 2016 after severe economic downswings.
The program, which started with one specialist, is now at three staff members to serve and help rural and agricultural folks through tough mental health times. The program partners with the farm business management program, which can call in a mental health specialist at any time.
With widespread drought, high input costs, record debt and interest, and continued trade wars, agriculture is arguably one of the most stressful career paths in today’s economy.
“The one thing that’s relieving about unprecedented times, there’s absolutely no expectation that an individual should know how to navigate that by myself,” said Reznicek. “You can’t do it the same way, just putting your nose to the grindstone like your great grandparents did. Now’s the time to reach out and ask for help, whether it’s improving the efficiency of your irrigation or getting help because you’re having panic attacks or you can’t fall asleep at night.”
With the continued expansion of resources available to producers, mental health support in agriculture is at an all-time high, both in acceptance and support programs. If you or someone you know is suffering with their mental health, now is the time to ask for help. Not tomorrow or in a week, but now.
Here is a list of select resources available to those in agriculture who need assistance:
For immediate help, reach out to these crisis help lines:
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AgriStress Helpline: Call or text 1-833-AGRI-STRESS (1-833-247-4778) for agricultural workers and farmers needing specialized rural support
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988 Lifeline: Call or text 988 (available 24/7, free, and confidential) for mental health distress or suicide prevention.
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Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor via text.
Resources for farmers and ranchers across the country both for mental health and tools on the farm and ranch:
Tiffany Selchow lives on a working cattle ranch in the Superstition Mountains of Arizona. With a life entrenched in the Western lifestyle and agriculture, her goal is to share worthwhile, intriguing, and exciting stories of the rodeo world, ranchers and farmers, the outdoor lifestyle, and more.
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