Farming Without Burning Out: Boundaries, Joy, and Mental Resilience

About this episode

This episode explores the mental well-being challenges faced by farmers and offers insights on avoiding burnout.

To start off the year, I wanted to explore a topic that often gets swept under the rug. Mental well-being, or the lack of it, in farming communities has reached epedemic levels. Farmers in Europe face a nasty mix of chronic overwork and poor recovery, high uncertainty and low control in their work, and heavy admin/compliance pressure, often while working in social isolation with a culture that can discourage help-seeking. Those pressures stack and reinforce each other (less sleep and more stress lead to worse decisions, more conflict and injuries, tighter finances, and even less time off) driving burnout, anxiety/depression, and in some contexts elevated suicide risk. The stress factors for farmers are only increasing too, as weather variance, economic pressure, bureaucratic stress, and social factors mount. For this reason my hope in this panel session is to shed some light on mental health, and some ways to avoid burnout in the upcoming season from a number of different perspectives.

People in this episode

Host: Oliver Goshey

Topics covered

• mental well-being
• farming communities
• burnout
• mental health
• resilience
• work-life balance

Keywords

• mental health
• burnout
• farming
• resilience
• stress
• anxiety
• depression
• work-life balance

Mentioned in this episode

Places: Europe

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