America’s young farmers are burned out. I also stopped
Chang-Fleeman started working in agriculture right after college, working on the campus farm for several years. As a third-generation Chinese-American, he noticed a distinct lack of Asian vegetables at local farmers markets, especially those grown organically, and suspected that if there were supply, there would be demand. He started trying a few varieties, and his suspicions were soon confirmed when samples of his choy sum caught the attention of Chef Brandon Jew of Mister Jiu’s, a contemporary, Michelin-starred Chinese eatery in the heart of Chinatown. San Francisco. Jew provided some seed funding for what would become Shao Shan Farm in 2019.
During his first year of running his farm, Chang-Fleeman focused his sales on his relationships with local restaurants, while attending some farmers’ market sales to supplement his income. But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, he lost all his restaurant accounts overnight.
Like many farmers at the time, he switched to a CSA model, offering farm boxes that could provide a household with a week’s supply of vegetables.
“So literally in one night I reworked my cultivation plan,” he told me. “Just to get through that year, or that season, not knowing how long [the pandemic was going to] last.”
As if a global pandemic wasn’t enough, California entered a drought in 2021 and lost the ability to irrigate its crops in mid-summer, putting a hard stop to production.
“I hoped to find a certain rhythm, and every year it felt a bit like I had to start all over again,” Chang-Fleeman reflected.
Throughout his farming ownership, he worked side jobs to compensate for the slow build-up of farm income and the fact that he could only pay himself a monthly salary of $2,000. He regularly worked 90 hours a week. At the same time, agricultural costs rose.
“The cost of our packaging has increased three times in one year and the cost of the products has not changed,” he explains. “Our operating costs increased by 30% post-COVID.”
In four short years, Chang-Fleeman experienced an avalanche of extenuating circumstances that would bring most farms to their knees. But what ultimately caused the closure of his business was burnout. He talked about the experience of exhaustion and increasing stress over time until he reached a breaking point. “If I don’t stop now, it’s going to kill me,” he remembered thinking.
Chang-Fleeman’s burnout reminded me of my own story. In the fall of 2018, I took what ended up being a two-month medical leave of absence from an organic farm I managed in Northern California to try to resolve a series of strange symptoms, including dizziness and heart palpitations. If you know anything about farming, fall is not the time to be absent. It is peak harvest time and the culmination of all your work is underway. But as my medical anomaly continued to worsen, I got no closer to returning to work. After many doctor visits, several trips to the specialist, a series of blood tests and a week of heart monitoring, it took one Xanax to solve the mystery.
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The prolonged physical stress I had experienced at work had triggered the onset of panic disorder, a nervous system disorder that had left me in an almost chronic state of fight or flight mode, causing a range of physical symptoms that would normally not be associated with ‘tension.”
For me this was a wake-up call. I turned to a slew of Western and naturopathic remedies to alleviate my symptoms, but ultimately removing the stressors of farm management was what allowed me to achieve nervous system balance above all else. Even still, six years later, I am constantly navigating the “new normal” of this diagnosis.
A pilot study conducted by agricultural researcher Josie Rudolphi and her colleagues in 2020 found that of 170 participants, approximately 71% met criteria for generalized anxiety disorder. By comparison, in the US, an estimated 18% of adults experience an anxiety disorder. Rudolphi’s work indicates that these disorders may be three times more common among young farmers and ranchers.
This rang true as I went from farm to farm trying to figure out what so often goes wrong in a new farm. Time and time again, mental health care was a through line. Collette Walsh, owner of a cut flower business in Braddock, PA, put it bluntly to me: “I usually get to a point in late August or early September where there’s a week where all I want to do is cry.”
How can we build an agricultural economy that helps young farmers not only stay, but thrive on the land? The Farm Bill, a federal legislative package that funds agricultural programs, is one route. As the Farm Bill restart approaches, it is a critical time to ask these questions and advocate for policies that support young farmers and the barriers they face in maintaining long-term careers in agriculture.
Take for example Jac Wypler, director of farmer mental health services at the National Young Farmer Coalition (Young Farmers), which oversees the Farmer and Rancher Stress Assistance Network (FRSAN) in the Northeast region. The organization was created in 2018 by the Farm Bill to develop a network of service providers for farmers, ranchers and other farmworkers dedicated to mental wellness. Through the network of service providers she leads, called ‘Cultivemos’, Wypler and her colleagues use a layered approach to address mental health in agricultural spaces. Cultivemos partners provide direct support in moments of stress and crisis, as well as peer-to-peer support spaces.
There is a clear need for a comprehensive (and subsidized) program that scales efforts like Cultivemos to a size that suits the young workforce. But it’s only part of the picture.
“While we believe it is important to ensure that farms, farmers and agricultural workers have direct support around their mental health,” Wypler explains. “We need to take away the stress that is causing them stress.”
Cultivemos works to address the structural root causes of stress, including climate change, land prices and systemic racism, to name a few. They target communities disproportionately harmed by these structural root causes, particularly Black, Indigenous, and other farmers of color. Finally, they try to achieve this impact by putting the financing directly into the hands of these farmers.
“The way I think about refinancing is that the USDA and these big institutions are the Mississippi River of financing.” says Wypler. “We’re trying to get the funding into these smaller rivers and tributaries to spread these funds and shift the power dynamics and leadership dynamics.”
The next Farm Bill cycle will be critical in ensuring this work continues. In November 2023, lawmakers signed an emergency funding bill that allows for a one-year extension of the 2018 Farm Bill. Lawmakers are currently deliberating on the bill until September, when it will be voted on. Young Farmers emphasizes the importance of the appropriations process, through which program areas authorized in the farm bill are allocated funding.