In 1992, Jeff Ditzenberger walked into an abandoned building near his farm in Monroe, Wisconsin and lit it on fire. His intent was that he wanted to die in there, but as the building continued to go up in flames, he changed his mind and escaped the blaze. 

Later charged with arson, he was able to get help in a psychiatric ward, where he was able to talk without judgment. However, with those he knew, Ditzenberger found it less embarrassing to have a felony on his record than to admit that he was attempting suicide, and he kept it a secret for years. 

In 2014, Ditzenberger, wrote a blog post about those moments for the Wisconsin Farm Bureau to bring awareness to his and others’ struggles. It went viral. A year later, he started an informal support group called TUG.S, which stands for Talking, Understanding, Growing, Supporting. The name was inspired by his time in the Navy on a large displacement ship, where, when things went awry, they would call in a small tugboat for help. He thought: “Why can’t life be like that?”

Now a community nonprofit with a bricks-and-mortar location in Monroe, TUGS works directly with individuals and community groups that emphasize peer connection and support, letting them know that “it’s OK not to be OK.” Due to media attention over the years, the nonprofit receives calls for peer support not just from Wisconsin but from all over the world. 

“Farmers have always been stoic, prideful people that don’t want to talk about stuff,” says Ditzenberger. “The stigma around mental health is what is causing us to not have the conversation. We all need that tugboat that we can call, that can throw a life preserver and pull us to shore safely.”

Part of the work of TUGS is also mental health training to better understand how to handle situations where someone might be struggling. “You don’t have to have a BS behind your name to help people in need; you just need to be able to ask questions.”

Photography via Shutterstock.

At risk

According to the National Rural Health Association, farmers are 3.5 times more likely to die by suicide than the general population. A recent CDC study of occupational suicide risk also found that male farmers, ranchers and other agricultural managers had a suicide rate more than 50 percent higher than the overall suicide rate of men in all surveyed occupations.

Farming and ranching are physically and emotionally demanding jobs with high risks of chronic stress, anxiety and depression due to a number of challenging factors—many out of their control—including extreme weather, outbreaks of pests and diseases and market volatility. Many deal with the stresses of potentially losing farms that have been in their family for generations. 

With all of these pressures, there are also several barriers to getting help, including stigma and many producers feeling like they should be able to handle the situation themselves. Along with a lack of anonymity in small towns, there’s also often a lack of access to proper providers or support in rural areas. According to a survey from the American Farm Bureau Federation, 46 percent of farmers and farmworkers surveyed said it was difficult to access a therapist or counselor in their local communities. The rest of the survey also revealed barriers due to cost prohibitiveness of treatment and embarrassment. 

As a response, Ditzenberger’s organization is one of many across the US that has emerged to provide mental health training and peer-to-peer support in person and online.

Seeds of Wellbeing at the 2023 AgrAbility conference.

Prioritizing peer-to-peer

In January, the Farm Family Wellness Alliance, a coalition of organizations including the American Farm Bureau, announced the availability of Togetherall, an anonymous, clinically moderated online peer-to-peer community with a special section for farmers and ranchers. Typically expensive, the alliance came together to make Togetherall free for farm country.

“In a peer-to-peer community, you seek that sense of belonging and that sense of being able to express yourself without judgment,” says Jessica Cabrera, staff lead for the American Farm Bureau’s Farm State of Mind campaign. 

Clinicians monitor posts 24-7 and are available to talk privately if necessary. If support needs to be escalated, they will be referred to someone who specializes in agricultural support. 

There are also courses for self-assessment, as well as access to services outside the platform, including consultants that handle legal, financial, childcare and many other concerns. “It’s important to keep working to break the stigma around mental health challenges and just encourage people to reach out for help,” says Cabrera, who adds that the American Farm Bureau has already seen a 22-percent shift in farmers being more comfortable talking about mental health. 

Learning to speak the language

Learning to take on the mental health challenges of farmers is a specialized and intricate process. In 2003, a group of rural nurses formed AgriSafe to offer that training to health-care providers. 

“People in ag tell us that they don’t want to have to explain their work,” says Tara Haskins, who oversees Agrisafe’s Total Farm Health initiative and mental health programming. “They don’t need to get advice to take a couple [of] weeks off, which is self-defeating.” The organization created training that gives health-care professionals a peek into the agriculture field and the challenges that come with it. They can then better understand what drives the mental health crisis.

The nonprofit has since partnered with the University of Kentucky to develop agriculture-centric training in QPR (Question, Persuade, Refer), a suicide prevention training program. AgriSafe has done the training on webinars with more than 2,000 people all over the US and Canada. 

Haskins says anyone who is connected with somebody in agriculture could benefit from the program. People are often afraid they might say the wrong thing to someone who is suicidal, but training helps develop those skills. She also says farmers they’ve interviewed who either attempted suicide or thought about it wished for someone to reach out. 

A workshop held by Seeds of Wellbeing.

Cultivating community

“Ultimately, it’s about preventing suicide, but we don’t want to wait until that happens. We want to go all the way upstream, and that takes both skill and effort,” says Dr. Thao Le.

Le is the project director for Seeds of Wellbeing (SOW), a farmer wellness initiative through the University of Hawai’i Manoa, which provides peer-to-peer support through a growing Ag Mentor training program. 

The program, which started more than two years ago, began with a survey of more than 400 farmers across the archipelago to study the state of mental health in Hawai’i’s agriculture scene. The results that came back showed that many were under a lot of pressure, with one third suffering from depression. 

Le wanted to start a project that builds relationships and creates safe spaces for that to unfold.

The program has 62 mentors across the Hawaiian Islands. The mentors can be reached individually, but they also hold regular meetings on their respective islands for community workdays and potlucks. There is also an additional Ag Navigators program that requires navigators to visit two farms monthly for six months to build relationships.

Le says the program allows the mentors to become role models with their willingness to be open and vulnerable. “[This] is the crisis of our time,” says Le. “We really do need a solution to help build community and leaders to help us navigate.”

“Everybody struggles with basic needs, the frustration to navigate the bureaucracy, policy and legislation, the crazy financial restraints,” says Le.

Le is waiting to hear about a $2.5-million federal grant from the Department of Health and Human Services to fund the next three years, which involves not just training for farmers but also first responders.

“We need to have more innovative ways to do this, because we will never have enough mental health professionals; there [are] never going to be enough first responders. Each of us needs to cultivate being a place of refuge for other people.”

The post Farmers Face a Mental Health Crisis. Talking to Others in the Industry Can Help appeared first on Modern Farmer.

At the time, she was working for a Hawaiian culture-based preschool as a family advocate and, while the civic center was supposed to be for the community, Chung felt an intuitive nudge that the land was meant for something else. 

A year later, the recession hit and investors pulled out of the project. It was then that she and two of her friends, Hala Medeiros and Lovey Simmons, realized they wanted to build more for their children and opt into a decolonized system of living that favors people over profit.

“So we started off with food. How can everybody be fed?” says Chung.

A vision of community

Over the next four years, a grassroots effort of volunteers, neighbors and equipment donors helped clean up the land to prepare it for what was next: Ma’ona Community Garden, Hawai’i Island’s first community garden. Founded by Chung, Medeiros and Simmons, the garden grew out of an effort to create more community access to nutritious, sustainably grown food. 

Now, more than a decade later, the 5.4 acres of land have been transformed to create a multifaceted food system designed to meet the needs of local families and empower food sovereignty, particularly for the Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander communities most in need. 

Currently, Hawai’i imports 85-90 percent of its food and, according to a report tracking the incidence of financial hardship in Hawai‘i, 44 percent of people cannot afford basic necessities. In 2015, in Hawai’i County alone, that number was 55 percent, with Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders disproportionately represented. 

RELATED: The Struggle to Contain, and Eat, the Invasive Deer Taking over Hawaii

Recently designated a USDA People’s Garden, Ma’ona (which in Hawaiian means “full or satisfied after eating”) produces an abundance of fruits and vegetables, some of which are grown in several demonstration gardens, along with individual and family plots that provide land access to local residents to grow what they want.

Ma’ona also grows the traditional staple crop of ulu (breadfruit) in partnership with Māla Kalu’ulu, an organization restoring the ancient breadfruit agroforests that existed prior to colonization. Taro, another traditional food staple, is also grown on the property, and there is also an experimental food forest and fruit germplasm repository maintained with another partner, Hawai’i Tropical Fruit Growers, to store and study fruit seeds and genetic material. The garden also features a 3,500-gallon aquaponics operation that grows watercress and ong choi, as well as traditionally farmed fish such as awa and ‘ama’ama. 

Vegetable starts. (Photo courtesy of Ma’ona Community Garden)

The garden’s focus on community includes free community workshops on how to grow food and monthly food plant giveaways. There are also work-shares available for those needing to fulfill USDA work requirements to receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. 

“This way, some of them can bring their kids, so they don’t have to worry about paying for childcare,” says Chung.

A wormy waste management system

In 2016, Ma’ona started its Community Composting Project, which has evolved into the island’s most impressive community waste management operation.

The state of Hawai’i County’s waste infrastructure is dire, with one of only two landfills permanently closed. Not long after China stopped accepting plastics from other countries, Hawai’i County’s private contractor Business Services Hawai’i said it could no longer afford to process most types of plastic waste, so the county ceased accepting a majority of it for recycling. 

When you enter Ma’ona, one of the first things you see are stacks upon stacks of cardboard, bags stuffed with shredded paper and a lot of plastic waste and glass bottles, all surrounding more than a dozen forty-by-four-foot vermiculture bins. 

Inspired by models made in India, the bins are used for thermophilic composting, which encourages microbial activity to generate heat levels that kill off human pathogens and other bacteria. They hold thousands of worms that process food waste into what Chung says is some of the finest compost on the island. 

Chung uses perionyx excavatus, or “Indian Blue Worms,” to process food and paper waste into compost. (Photo courtesy of Ma’ona Community Garden)

Chung partners with Hawaii’s Ulu Cooperative, a co-op made up of more than 80 local farmers, to take care of their food waste. In the early days of their partnership, before enlisting other composters, she was composting a thousand pounds of food waste a week. 

To expedite the breakdown process, Chung helps redirect other waste streams from paper and cardboard; the latter usually gets shipped to Asia or ends up in the only landfill available on island. The cardboard takes 4 to 6 months to break down in the bins. It not only helps sequester carbon in the soil, but it supplies energy to the microbes as it decomposes, improving soil quality and structure. According to Chung, the worms love it. 

RELATED: Mending Hawaii’s Lack of Food Security Through Breadfruit

Chung used to scavenge for the cardboard all over Kona and shred it herself, but in the last two years, she has been partnering with the mobile shredding company Circlepack with machines to do it for her. The garden now hosts a 24/7 drop-off for communities and businesses for monthly community cardboard shreds, which typically yield up to a thousand tons of cardboard that can be put to productive use, either at Ma’ona or dispersed among other farmers. 

Fifteen of the worm bins produce compost she uses for the rest of her operation, and the rest is donated to schools and organizations and distributed to farmers and gardeners, many of whom are sitting on a long wait list to receive it. 

“This place runs on relationships,” says Chung.”It’s the people and their relationships in the community that make this happen.”

She began building a new worm bin in February that will incorporate  glass and plastic bottles into the eco-bricks that make up the bin’s concrete structure. Prior to being entombed in the concrete blocks, the eco-bricks will have 1.5 to 2 lbs of non-recyclable plastic pushed inside, which will amount to about 300 lbs of plastic encased in 200 bricks.  

Chung shows off a pile of cardboard waiting to be composted. (Photo courtesy of Ma’ona Community Garden)

“I’m not a big waste management company or a multinational corporation who wants to run those sales. I’m in a direct relationship with farmers and producers,” says Chung, adding that she doesn’t want to service people outside of a 15-mile radius. 

Chung says she would like to see her model replicated. “My greatest joy would be to see twenty to thirty of these [operations] all around the island, producing for their farmers from their farmers; servicing every food hub, every food processor.”

As for what’s next, she wants to build a certified kitchen, which is necessary to process food and legally sell it. Chung has also been thinking about how farmers like herself can best support each other’s well-being and mental health—a struggle in the industry that has become nationally recognized as a public health crisis over the last few years. 

The solution, she thinks, comes down to what Ma’ona is founded on: relationships. 

“What I want to see, seven generations from now, is a secure, well-fed, relationship-rich ecosystem of people that are prosperous, where the land is fruitful and well taken care of and where everyone is taking care of each other.”

The post Meet the Hawai’i Farmer Turning Island Waste into a Composting Community appeared first on Modern Farmer.

At the time, 92 percent of Hawaii’s food was coming from somewhere else.

However, before the legislation was introduced, in North Kohala, the rural northern tip of Hawaii Island that’s zoned mainly for agriculture, community leaders had already come up with a plan to reach 50-percent food self-sufficiency in the next two decades. 

One of those community leaders was David Fuertes, who along with his wife Carol, decided, in response, to form the agriculture education nonprofit Kahua Pa’a Mua.

Initially an expansion of a family taro cooperative, the nonprofit has grown in the last 12 years to have culturally rooted ‘aina (land)-based programs for both youth and adults, where the goal is not just to empower them to grow their own food but to foster aloha and togetherness.

[RELATED: Mending Hawaii’s Lack of Food Security Through Breadfruit]

Fuertes, who came from a long line of community builders and homesteaders, moved to North Kohala in 1975, but he grew up as one of eight children in Kauai, where his father migrated from the Philippines to work for one of Hawaii’s many sugarcane plantations. 

His father was one of the community organizers of fellow plantation workers to strike for better work conditions and pay. Low wages led many plantation families, including the Fuertes’, to sustain themselves with their own gardens, chickens and goats. 

While having that garden left an impression, it wasn’t until Fuertes was 14, when his agriculture teacher had him learn to recite the creed from the Future Farmers of America (FFA), that Fuertes would begin his life-long agriculture journey and craft the values that would help him fulfill his vision for wanting to help the community down the line. 

Founded in 1928, the FFA is one of the largest youth organizations in America, promoting agriculture education. Its creed—which involves faith, leadership, maintaining a fondness for the work in times of discouragement and bringing abundance to others, not just oneself—is something Fuertes still recites.

It would be one of his fellow FFA colleagues that would eventually donate five acres of unused land to Fuertes and become home to the nonprofit’s agricultural Learning Lab farm.

Photo by Malia Welch.

At that farm, along with another five acres that contains their certified imu (underground oven), they have their Ho’okahua Ai (HA) youth mentorship program, which teaches students from ages 13 to 21 about animal husbandry and crop production to grow and distribute food throughout the community. Ho’okahua Ai in Hawaiian translates to: “to build a foundation of nutrition, sustenance, communication and sharing.”  

“What we teach our students are values, not just planting, which I think strengthens the program and has our kids coming back,” says Fuertes, adding that part of his purpose is to help the youth connect more to who they are, so they can more easily connect to their purpose. 

The youth initiative sustainably employs both organic farming and Korean Natural Farming methods. The latter fertilizes soil with indigenous microorganisms from one’s surrounding area, helping to produce healthy soil and high-yield crops. 

These methods are also employed by the nonprofit’s Ohana Agriculture Resilience (OAR) initiative, which provides six to 10 families with two 100-foot crop rows to grow whatever they want on their farm for free. 

[RELATED: The Struggle to Contain, and Eat, the Invasive Deer Taking over Hawaii]

Over the course of a year, families learn various aspects of farming and animal husbandry, attending several workshops led by Fuertes with other mentors and organizations, which teach topics such as plant propagation, crop production, aquaponics, poi-making and Hawaiian plant medicine practices. 

Once they graduate from the program, the families have a choice of equipment to continue their own operations at home. Options include a mobile pen called a chicken tractor to raise chickens, a Korean Natural Farming odorless pigpen that composts manure and processes toxins under the pig’s feet or an aquaponics tank to grow fish and soil-less produce.

During the pandemic, the OAR families organized to plant more crops to help feed the community. They ended up growing and giving away hundreds of pounds of produce and poi to the food insecure, many of which were area kupuna (elders). 

The nonprofit also partnered with youth conservation nonprofit KUPU to host a farm training initiative for those who lost their jobs due to the COVID-19 pandemic, giving them pay and benefits to work alongside the HA and OAR programs.

“My thing is bringing people together, working together and finding a common purpose,” says Fuertes,  who hopes to maximize the same values in the community to make Kohala a better place. “It’s not for us now. It’s for the next generation and the generation that’s not even born yet. That’s who we’ve got to work for.”

The post Meet the Modern Farmer Working to Increase Food Self-Reliance in Hawaii appeared first on Modern Farmer.