 We agree that sustainable agriculture has to do with environment and natural resources, has to do with production, and has to do with human beings, and the idea that all of those things can flourish simultaneously. This effort really looks at the human component of that, and I think that we are as farmers to agriculture, to communities, and to making the system going. So as Beth mentioned, one of the things that brings me to this work, I work for the Minnesota Department of Agriculture, and now have for many, many years, I used to be the organic lady there now. I am the stress lady. But the thing that brought me to this work really is my exposure on my own farm. I came to dairy farming as a mature person. I married my husband in 2012, and we started dairy farming together a little bit before that, but we have an organic dairy in South Central Minnesota in Leesore County. We milk about 70 cows, and then I have little side businesses in non-certified pork and beef and direct market foes, and I work part-time now for the Department of Agriculture, and this is just a few shots of our farm. It looks like many other farms in our area kind of rolling, where we think animals are a critical component, so we're really appreciative of that, and you can see our happy happily married picture. Most days it still looks like that, but a few days there are stresses on our own farm, and it doesn't look like that. So that's my farm life, but the project that I'm going to talk about really engaged a whole bunch of other people in making it happen, and I bring this to you with the idea that in your area you may be one of the people, or you may be from one of the organizations that makes an effort like this happen. And what I'm hoping today is you could see some things here that resonate with you that would inspire you to take it back to your own world and say, hey, I heard about this project, what if we try something like it, or I heard about this project, let's not do that, but let's do something else instead. You know, you can harvest kernels and take from this whatever you want. But these are the groups and organizations we received a sale grant, I think it's about $70,000 from SAIR, and I'll tell you the sort of the genesis of that and what we've done with it and how we're trying to impact agriculture in Minnesota for all farming communities, really. And I do want to note that part of an effort, I think, are the people that are involved. And our effort has had an advisory group of folks, farmers, and other people who work in agriculture from around Minnesota, and I listed those at the bottom, you know, summer and production agriculture. One is a dairy farmer who's no longer dairying, couple extension folks, and somebody from one of the state college systems. So if I put this slide up here, I think there's probably nothing that you don't recognize. When we think about the multiplicity of stressors that farmers experience, not just in bad financial times, but really always, it is a stressful, it is a stressful profession, but it is something that drives us, that we are driven to do. And yet managing all of these stressors, trying to manage them, when some of them are factors, quite frankly, that are outside of our control, can be really quite overwhelming. And I think we see that really come into a head now with what is going on with financial pressures and especially weather stresses that we've had for the past few years. And Beth alluded to the fact that I came out of some struggles on our farm. In 2016, we lost our milk market. We lost our milk buyer. And we dumped milk for two months while we were looking for somebody else to take it. We did eventually get on a conventional truck. But on a week-to-week basis, you know, when you have a catastrophe happen, you don't know if you're going to weather that storm. And looking back now, I can say, oh gee, everything turned out fine, that was okay. But the panic that you go through on a day-to-day basis really brought home to be how fragile we are and what we do in our relationships with each other. And really caused me to focus on what my friends and neighbors were also going through. Very other, very significant challenges, different than mine, but that we were all in this boat together. And when I went back, our story had a happy ending. We found another organic milk buyer. We're shipping organic milk today from our 70 cows. But the conversations that I had with people, neighbors, friends, colleagues, professional colleagues in the world, and when I got back to the Department of Agriculture really led me to strongly... Our principle of belief is that people want to help when they see other people in trouble. People want to reach out and help, but often they don't know what to do. And that's really true for people who work to support farmers and agriculture. Our project, that's not the next slide. When we look at folks who interact with farming with extension educators and veterinarians and milk haulers and grain buyers and elevator operators and feed store guys at the elevator there, looking and saying, you know, I'm looking around and I've seen people that I've known for years and years and I'm sensing that they are really in trouble. And I don't know how to talk to them about it. I don't know if it's my place. I mean, I don't know if you have the North and South Dakota way. We're pretty like, oh yeah, well, you know, it's none of my business. I don't want to step out of my way there. People are well-intentioned that sometimes they just don't know what to do. And when people don't know what to do, what do they do? They do nothing, Charlie Johnson. They do nothing. And so we said, well, how can we change this? And so we tried something. And the origin story of this larger SIR project was in 2017 I got together with the Minnesota Sheriff's Association with a psychologist in Minnesota who works only with farmers whose name is Ted Matthews, who's actually kind of famous for doing that and with the Farm Service Agency. And we put our heads together and said, what would help people who work with farmers be more responsive, be able to recognize and respond when they see farmers in trouble? So we put together our workshop, we took it on the road, we did it in six places and nearly 500 people showed up at this workshop at some place or other. These were clergy people. These were pesticide inspection people. These were dairy inspectors. These were veterinarians, FSA staff, people from offices, all kinds of people which really brought home to us that our hypothesis was right. People want to help but they don't know how. And I'll just show you the agenda here. You can read that for yourself. It was just basic stuff about how do you take care of yourself in a stressful situation? Adjust your own oxygen mask so you can help other people. So taking care of yourself and some of this work. And sometimes stress gets to a point where it's confrontational it can actually get dangerous. And so we want to make sure that people stay safe in that situation. But probably the biggest take home message on here with two things were number four and number six. And one was this idea of having conversations with people and really engaging and helping people get out what is happening to them. And being a listener in a way that that person needs to be heard. And sometimes that means just working on something in the shop together and not talking. I mean that's a way of communicating and being with somebody and supporting them. And sometimes that's a heartfelt conversation at the bar or in the coffee shop or on the telephone so that it looks different. But people are used to solving other people's problems and not just listening and walking through and with somebody when they're in difficulty. And so the challenge here is how do you help somebody find the wherewithal to figure out how to solve their own problems. These are the types of people we reach. This was the slide I was looking for before. Just a whole gamut. And so we realized with 500 people coming to this thing we were on to something. And like SAIR and like Northern Plains Sustainable Ag Society we begin to evaluate and we ask people what they think. And when we looked at what the people who came to this workshop said and we said what more do you need? What would make you more effective? What would help you in your job of supporting farmers in their jobs? Because we're all interconnected here. And they said a number of things. They said we are worried about suicide in our communities. We're scared about that. You mentioned it in your down on the farm session but we need more on that because we see it happening. We're scared of it. They said what about kids on farms? What's happening there? They said how do we bring this program to our area? You only did it six times. How can we do more of it? And they said we are afraid of conflict. And we don't like having there are a lot of tough conversations that have to be had. We don't know how to deliver bad news effectively and we feel really bad when we have to give bad news. So conflict and difficult conversations are tough. So my proposal to Sarah was can you help us create efforts in all of these areas? And so that is what we did. So the first thing that we're doing, I'm just going to run through these quickly, is we're turning this down on the farm workshop that we did into a curriculum that other groups and organizations can use. And they don't have to buy it. And they don't have to use it as it is they can. It's like a recipe book. Here's a slide set. Here's some guidelines. Here's the kind of team you might want to put together. So you have the resources and you can tailor it for your own community. Whether you're in Pennsylvania, Colorado, or Mandan, North Dakota. So people could do this for themselves and have the same sort of engagement. And attract the same kinds of partners who are eager to do this kind of work and support workshops like this. That diagram or the people that helped underwrite down on the farm really wasn't very expensive to do. But you know organizations tipped in $200, $500 and made that happen. And it's going to be free of charge. So it's something that will be very, very, we hope it will be useful but we also hope it will be that terrible or inaccessible. We hope it will be affordable for groups and organizations to do. And that would be big organizations like if the Farm Service Agency wants to use it for training, that's great. If a local church wants to use it for training or the Elks Club wants to do something about like this in their community. They can do that as well. The second one gets at this navigating conflict and difficult conversations. And the things that I put up here are feedback from folks that went through that workshop and that was about 220 people. We did this one six times, too. And we had a partner in our extension community vitality session, Denise Strowing, who put this workshop together for us. And this is what people said they were leaving with. These were kind of the intentions or the resolutions that they left this workshop. And it was a little off the cuff. It was very participatory. And I think people came in expecting to learn how to get a script on how you give bad information gently. I think they were looking for kind of a recipe on that. And instead Denise's training really got at what's coming out of you. What are you bringing to this conversation? What are your intentions? How are you going to be in this moment? How do you reframe the expectations that you're going into a conversation with? Because generally when something's going to go bad, you have a sense of that beforehand. You know you're going to have a tough conversation. So what do you do to prepare yourself so that the best possible things can happen? So it was a little touchy-feely by people staying and they were engaged. And a lot of them left with intentions like they were saying I have gained something here and I'm going to make some changes and try to change the way I do the world or avoid going into situations with a win-loss mentality or something like that. So that was extremely helpful. And since our six initial workshops, Denise has had calls from two other communities and has added two more of these. So she's done two more workshops. People that were at these first ones and said could you come, Pollution Control Agency said could you come and do this for our staff for example. So she's done two others. The third is an effort that we looked at farm youth and thinking about, we spent a lot of time worrying about adults and what they're going through and farmers and spouses and business partners. But what are kids going through? Particularly adolescent kids who are at the point that they see what is going on, they recognize the stresses, they feel the stresses, but they probably don't have the cognitive and emotional capacity to really grasp what has happened and what their role is. What their role isn't quite frankly. And a lot of teachers in rural areas don't have farm backgrounds and so they need some help on knowing what are the clues. What makes farm kids different is in some ways farm kids just are different. So we reached out to teachers and librarians, youth pastors, and we tried to cast the net very wide on that. And the whole thing was like a mini-down on the farm but oriented toward adolescent stress and how do you recognize and respond when you see youth and stress. And so some of that had to do with just cognitive development and how kids develop because their grades quite frankly are different than ours are. They are emotional development and just knowing some of those practical aspects. So think about this project in quarters. This is the quarter that I thought, oh nobody's going to want to come and talk about suicide. That's just too, it's just too scary. And this is the one that was just packed to the rasters. We worked with the Minnesota Department of Health. They have a state suicide prevention coordinator. This is not an area I know anything about so I had to turn to people who were no longer behind me. And she advises to use a program called Safe Talk. It's a three hour program that's very experiential and teaches people actual skills about, number one, how you recognize somebody having thoughts of dying by suicide. Number two, how to engage them and how to interact with them and get over your own stigma and fear about doing that. And then three, how to keep them safe until you can find them more permanent health. So this is not, we need to turn everybody into a psychologist or a grief counselor. This is, you are a natural helper in your communities. How do you intervene and keep somebody safe? How do you recognize not only not only the outward size and symbols that somebody might be contemplating something like this, but how do you pick things up in words? How do you pick things up in what people say in what they don't say? What are the clues? And so what we did, this is a program that's done all over the world. It originates in Canada and it's done all over the world, but it's very generic. It's very general. And so what we did is we worked with somebody who adapted it more for agriculture and rural communities and really helped people from that perspective see how this is applicable and have those conversations. So we stretched it kind of from three hours to four hours. We could only take 30 people per session. We started with six sessions. So you get in here, six sessions of everything and had to add three more because there were wait lists for every session we did. And by the time I ended, I still had 100 people on wait lists. So now we're trying to figure out how to help this go forward. And when we asked people in the follow-up evaluation survey, one of my favorite questions to ask is would you recommend this to someone else? Because we ourselves will put up with a lot. You know, I'll put up with crummy food and I'll put up with bad hearing adults and I'll put up with boring speakers, but would I recommend that to somebody else? No, I wouldn't say that. Go to that hospital if they're not going to treat you well. So that's the question I like to ask. And 85% of the people said that they would definitely recommend this to somebody else. And I think that's why it's had such uptake and there has been such interest in it. So we're busily trying to figure out how we can equip more of the people who teach safe talk to understand this rural agricultural curriculum and be able to talk about that. Because not just anybody can drop in and talk with any kind of credibility or sensitivity about some of the unique struggles that happen and the situations that might come up in agricultural settings. So we're continuing to do some work on that. And then the last little thing that I wanted to mention to you, do you know what time it is, Beth? I don't know what I did with the whole thing. Okay, I have about 10 minutes. So the last thing I want to... So with that, that's the fourth piece of this SAIR effort that we did that really has engaged a lot of people all over the state and has been very... It really has exceeded my expectations, I guess I would have to say. At the same time, Beth asked me to talk about another effort that we're doing that some of you may have heard because you are in the Red River Farm Network listening area. Has anybody ever heard a show on your RFM station called Transformation? Does that ring a bell? Well, this is a project that we co-created with Don Wick at Red River Farm Network. And it has since taken on a life of itself. We sort of helped by we, I mean the Department of Agriculture in Minnesota. And the idea is that farmers are probably the most valued source of information for other farmers in many ways. And we are curious about what our peers do and what they're going through and how they have managed things. And so we have identified farmers in the Northwest and Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota by and large who have gone through some sort of challenge and are willing to talk about how they navigated that. And these are 60-second shows that air during crime time like during the farm report, they're not buried at three o'clock in the morning when the PSAs are on. So it's paid radio stories. We buy the time for. And farmers in their own words talk about what they have gone through and how they have navigated that. And then because it takes a lot of tape to get 60 seconds of useful conversation, we also have companion podcasts that are anywhere from 12 to 15 minutes. So for each 60-second episode, there's another 12 minutes that people can go onto the internet and listen if they want more. And we've done everything from, the first one we did was how not to let the farm wreck the marriage. There's a dairy farm talking about the stresses that farms put on marriages and the stresses that marriages put on farms and how we navigate those. We've had a couple of episodes of people who were farmers from generations back and for some reason they found themselves having to exit farming and they've talked about very frankly what that was like for them and how they went through that and what they are doing now and how they feel about it. And in both cases they feel really good about it but they said it was a very difficult, it was the hardest thing they've ever done for themselves and in some cases for their kids, you know, coming home and telling your son we're not going to be farming anymore or your daughter. We talked about it's okay not to be okay and this was Doug Kramer who is a farmer near Bajew, Minnesota. He's in his late 70's now but when he was going through the farm crisis in the 80's he went to see a therapist and it happened because he was on his farm and a salesman came one day and they were talking about this, that and the other thing and I guess about I don't know, they were talking about feeling low and the salesman said well, you know I go to the, I go to a head doctor for that and it's been really helped and Doug said, you know, I thought about that and I thought, I'm not getting any better so maybe I should do that too so he talks about what it was like and how he felt and how nervous he was and people would see his truck outside the counselor's office and he said, you know, after a while I kind of didn't care who sold my truck because it was helping me and I was feeling better and things were getting better and so now, you know, 20, 30 years later he feels safe enough that he can talk about that because it was in the past but, you know, he's a farmer like every other farmer and I fucked into people who are like my god, we have no idea Doug ever did that that's kind of cool that he's willing to talk about that we've had several on suicide and people talking about losing a son Nathan Saradka's dad from Adam's North Dakota Doug, not Doug but Dale talked about what it was like to lose Nathan when Nathan was 29 years old and took his life and what that's been like and how hard it's been to talk about and why he feels it's important for other people to know about what happened to Nathan so that it doesn't happen to their kids Teresa Gilley, who was the president of our Minnesota Soybean Growers Association lost her husband to suicide about three years ago and she was very candid in what's happened and how it is that she's able to keep farming and what her life's been like after that so I mean, I just give you these examples that these are really meaningful point of stories and the people who tell them are extremely brave but it's an opportunity for folks to hear other human beings who are going through the fire and struggling through it and the strategies that they have used and it's taken off I'm advertising it on Facebook it's up on the Red River Farm Network site which is at the top of the page here and I just reposted one I think I just reposted on Facebook Nathan's story and 2900 people have clicked on it to listen to it and those are people all over the country and I get calls from other places saying how did you do this or how can we do this in our community and it's really finding somebody who's interested in telling the stories and Don's been very excited about it at Red River Farm Network and lots of local businesses have wanted to support this because they see that it's important we're all in this together and if I learn something here that I can share with you I will and it's quietly in the shop in the truck or at the dinner table when the radio's on in the background my view of radio is you don't know what years you're going to reach and what impact that will make and so it's kind of a safe way to deliver that message and then people can do with it what they want but it's sort of a non-threatening way to listen to the radio so those are some of the strategies we've been using I have here Minnesota Department of Agriculture Propaganda that I will just pass out all states have sweets all sorts of services and programs and individuals who are particularly helpful and this just gives you an idea of some of the things that we're highlighting in Minnesota some of them are affiliated with our department some of them are with the University of Minnesota some of them are from organizations like the Farmers Legal Action Group non-profit organizations but we really try recognizing that there are very real stressors that different people need different things to help them make decisions of whether the stressors and our job is to help people find the kind of help that will be useful to them as quickly as possible and so we very much appreciate Sarah's support of the odd things that we were trying we're glad to report that in this case when we threw this bigotty at the wall a lot of it has stuck and so if there's anything that sticks with you and you want to try any of the little things that I hear please do and you certainly can reach out to me and I'll give you any other information that I can but I wonder what questions you might have for me for the tape I'm going to say that Charlie Johnson is recommending a movie called Country which was that the 80s you think late 80s anyway start Jessica Lang and really or dealt with some of the relationships of what happens with people involved in the complicated life of farming and that's a recommendation I'm not sure I have a question for you but I mean every over half of my time this year I was probably not just talking to farmers going to visit them and had nothing to do with soil health and nothing to do with research nothing to do with extension but it was to have a tool like this would be really useful specifically in extension when you're getting these phone calls and farmers calling you on Saturday telling you that they're really depressed and so this is really helpful so sometimes we think a conversation or a visit is about one thing and it turns out to be something else doesn't it and I know that I treat my vet as a therapist you know my vet comes out he never comes for a good reason somebody's always down and I know it's always costing me money and it's a 50-50 chance that I'm going to get that money back but after word we go out we stand outside the truck we scuff the dirt and we talk about you know what's happening in other places and sort of you know he's the circuit rider of what we're seeing so you know we pick the people that we feel safe talking to and for some people that's a vet and for some people that's their family doctor and for some people it's Abby and for some people it's a 24-hour health plan they can call at 2 o'clock in the morning and nobody will ever know who they are or you know where they are it's an anonymous conversation so people need what they need and so I think it's our job as human beings to try to go back to what I said and sometimes we don't know how so that's what we're here for I live north of Grand Forks and I had it was a couple-hour conversation it was a potato he runs a watch plant a potato watch plant just south of Grand Forks and he said the farmers the farmers demeanors are just they're so low they're self-esteem this is actually perfect timing I think for something like this and this was already last fall so farmers are in general even up in our area they're not in a good place is it a speakers bureau that people who are speakers can be trained and spread this message and or how do we become part of the solution and help get this out there so we can get other people trained I think a speakers bureau is an awesome idea MPSAS could do a bang on a job helping promote that idea and it wouldn't have to be MPSAS people but you could be the catalyst of saying how do we work with extension and the departments of agriculture and find the people who have the energy and the passion to do this and get out and talk about it and really get other people talking about it so that we begin to think it's not just in our heads but sometimes when we start talking oh wait I never quite thought of it that way because you're hearing it out loud so it's finding the messengers I guess to get the conversations going and some of those messengers I think very much are farmers to go out and talk about what is happening I'll tell you a lot of the public speaking that I do is to non-farm audiences I'm like the agriculture interpreter I talk to mental health professionals and social workers and people in groups and organizations whose work touches farmers but they don't know anything about what it's like to farm and they understand that something is wrong in agriculture but they don't quite get why and they don't quite get the complexity of that dynamics and you know that tangle in the beginning that I put up about what's land prices and weather and health insurance premiums and family dynamics and when you market uncertainties when you really begin to tease this out they begin to say well we had no idea they get a window into the culture I guess I would say they kind of need to speak to us very well so to educate them