5pgs, Attention to stress and mental health among agricultural producers has increased over recent years, and Cooperative Extension has been active in offering educational workshops and resources to agricultural audiences. This article describes the process and effectiveness of expanding two (university) Extension farm stress management programs to Cooperative Extension in other states through a national Farm Stress Management Summit. The two-day training Summit provided deeper knowledge about farm stress issues and prepared Extension professionals to offer behavioral health programs in their own communities and respective states. Evaluation findings highlight effective aspects of the Summit and next steps.
3 pages, This article provides a brief overview of Farm Dinner Theater (FDT), a novel intervention that positively influences the health and safety behaviors of senior family farmers and their family. The FDT uses principles of adult learning and engages the audience in conversations about their health and safety experiences. The FDT was developed through interdisciplinary community-engaged research and tested using a repeated measures design with 553 intervention and 317 comparison participants. Significant changes were reported and the FDT is now being used by Extension through the use of a toolkit developed by the project.
10 pages, via online journal, As the agricultural industries of developed countries undergo an extended period of change, increasing numbers of farmers are leaving farming. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between intention to exit farming and farmer wellbeing, drawing on and adapting the conservation of resources theory of stress. In a quantitative analysis of 674 Australian farmers, we show that the more likely a farmer is to leave farming, the poorer their wellbeing; but this is moderated by smaller farm size, greater profitability, earning a larger proportion of income off-farm and older age, all of which attenuate the relationship between exit intention and poorer wellbeing. We conclude that it is important for policy-makers to consider the wellbeing of farmers when designing strategies to assist exiting farmers, as poor wellbeing at exit may reduce capacity to adapt successfully to life after farming.
