 Welcome. Thank you so much for coming. It's great to see so many people interested in this topic. My name is Fiona Doherty. I use she, her pronouns. And today we'll be talking for the next hour and a half about some stress management practices, mental health and wellness. I do want to promote a session at three o'clock. That's a little more informal. It's a community conversation. So if you just want more of this topic and more of this topic, you can come to that session at three. I'll be facilitating that as well, but it's much more of an informal space, more kind of generative, pure knowledge sharing. I'm usually a person that moves around the room, but I'm going to try to not trip over this cord. So I might just kind of hover in this area. If that's all right with everybody. So I always like to start with sort of telling you what I'm going to tell you and what we'll be doing for the next hour and a half together. So here's an overview of the workshop. We'll be starting with the grounding and why this topic is important. I've had the pleasure of leading a workshop project for the past couple of years that's funded by North Central SARE focused on really sort of taking a pulse on beginning pharma mental health in particular in Ohio. So I'll be sharing some findings from that project that was done in partnership with OVA. Next we'll be talking about some stress management practices and activities that you can use. I think often we think about mental health and we think about the individual, like what we can do as the individual and I think that that is really important but I think it's also important to take a step further out into these other layers, looking at our social support networks, looking at the more structural factors that are causing us stress and how we can play a role in trying to change those. So the graphic there in the bottom right corner is from Brown from Brenner, his ecological systems theory and I think it's really a great theory to apply to pharma stress because we're the individual, right? But we're embedded in all of these layers, these systems that impact our life day to day. And then I feel like it's always great to have some space to think about, all right, well, that workshop is great but what am I gonna use for it? So hopefully we'll have five or 10 minutes at the end of this session for you to write some goals. Maybe think about the upcoming farming season and what you can apply specifically to your own firm practice. Does that sound good with everybody? Yeah, like the thumbs up. I know we are all go, go, go people and I think often we're kind of just embedded in busyness and are going from one thing to the next. So I like to start most of my programs with a grounding activity and today we'll just do a really quick one to maybe help you quiet some mental chatter, help you be present in the moment. I know our bodies are here but our minds might be elsewhere, right? Worrying, planning, it's pretty normal. So as a grounding, I'd like for you to just offer some gratitude to all of the resources, the people, the circumstances that have allowed you to come to the OFA conference this year. So just take a really deep breath and think about that for a second. Offer gratitude to the people, resources or other circumstances that have allowed you to be here today. I'm gonna do it too. So I also want to acknowledge that we occupy the ancestral and contemporary land of the Hopewell, Adina, Miami and Shawnee people and I want to just raise recognition to the historical context that continues to affect these tribal nations today. All right, so you might be wondering who is this nice lady at the front of the room talking to me? So I am a graduate student at Ohio State, the Ohio State University, excuse me, in the College of Social Work, but my background is in farming. This is little me, if you can't see, the picture might be small, but I'm like stacking chicks onto a rope swing. Just, I feel like really shows where I come from. So I grew up in a small organic farm in upstate New York in the Cooperstown area. And my favorite part of this picture are the bird oaks on my shoes. I'm pretty sure as a child, I just always had bird oaks on my feet. Anyway, besides the point, so I have a background in farming. I worked with Cornell Cooperative Extension for several years in a statewide position, offering professional development and leadership development to urban educators around New York State. It was a great experience. And with that experience, I did a lot of kind of reflection and realized that it was the people part of my job that I love the most. And I wanted to learn how to continue to support people and learn more about the systems that we're all embedded in. So I decided to pivot and I get my master's in social work here at OSU and I finished that up recently, have continued on to their PhD program. And so my research interests relate to human wellbeing, environmental justice, and in the context of climate change. And how can we both adapt to climate change but also mitigate it, right? So farmers are a big piece of this puzzle for me. Some of the core pillars that I embrace in my work, reflection, mindfulness, and social connection. So you'll see these will be common threads throughout everything that we're doing together today. I want to nod my hat to North Central SARE who provided me with the Graduate Student Grant that was funded the research project I've been a part of. And also the Columbus Athens-Schweitzer Fellowship Program that's allowed me to bolster some of the outreach that I've been doing for farmers directly. For example, I offer the stress management drop-in sessions that any of you could participate in, no cost, they're via Zoom, it's 45 minutes we meet, I can refer you to resources, I can listen, I can help with goal setting, whatever you feel like you need that 45 minutes to do. I want to emphasize this is not for, I think sometimes when we think about mental health, we think about, oh, I'll care with that or care for that when I'm at a cracking point or a breaking point. But these sessions are for you, so you can be more proactive and begin to build in resilience practices every day to become a more resilient farmer. Just some nuts and bolts, speaking in a mask is difficult. If you cannot hear me at any time, please let me know. If you also, if you need anything else at any time, let me know, raise your hand, we're all friends here. Also practice a beginner's mindset. I think one of the most challenging parts of being a facilitator is the wide variety of experience levels that are in the room. Some of this might be old news to you and that's okay. I just invite you to really practice that beginner's mindset because you'll likely learn something new. And then on the right hand side of that slide, we have some guidelines for engagement. This is a potentially sensitive topic, right? Maybe a topic that we're not used to talking about so much, so I'd like to offer a couple of guidelines for us all and if there are others that you'd like to add to that list, we can add those as well. So the first is confidentiality. Whatever is shared in this group, please keep in this group unless you have permission to do so. For example, if someone were to share a story, right? Keep it in this group, confidentiality. Second, give yourself the gift of being as fully present as possible, which is so hard and so rare, right? We have our phones, we have a million distractions. So do whatever you need to do to be fully present, whether that's silencing your phone, whether it's working to quiet some mental chatter, so worrying or planning that maybe you're doing in your mind, try to be fully present. Third, speak your truth in ways that honor and respect other people's truths. So a great way to do that is using I statements. And then fourth, if the going gets rough, turn to wonder. So for example, if you find yourself feeling judgmental or uneasy, sort of approach those emotions with curiosity rather than reacting to them. So let's get started. Here's our workshop roadmap. We'll continue to kind of see the slide. Let's get started in the grounding of why this topic is important. What are some of the unique stressors that you as farmers face? Time management, what else? Money, time, labor, enough labor to get all of the work done for sure. Extreme weather events, yes. Here's some snapping, yeah, floods. I mean, we don't have fires in Ohio, but California, the West, it's very real. Floods, droughts, winds, yeah. So through North Central Sare in partnership with OFA, we received a graduate student grant to focus specifically on beginning farmers in Ohio. So these are folks that have been farming for 10 years or less. And to really try to get a pulse on wellbeing, how are folks doing? What are stressors, how are mental health levels? We also looked at food security as well. So we distributed a survey in the fall of October, 2020. And we also did some qualitative interviews the past spring, so spring of 2021. And I'd like to share some of our results from this survey that we distributed. So top stressors, well, I think these look familiar, I think so. Having too much to do in too little time, 89% of respondents reported that COVID-19 makes sense based on the time period of when we collected data, right? It was kind of a peak of COVID. Not enough person power, right? Labor, not having enough labor. Climate change, those extreme weather events, and then social justice also percolated to the top as one of the top stressors. Through the qualitative interviews, we tried to tease out what social justice really meant to people because I think that's a term that can mean very different things to different people. So when we have our qualitative data ready, I'm excited to tease out what social justice really means to our sample. And then as far as coping resources, people were using alternative or body-based therapies, web-based resources, faith-based services. Some folks were using in-person therapy and telecancelling. I wanna note that these stressors did vary by subgroup. So farmers of color and also farmers who identified as gender nonconforming had rated social justice and discrimination in the agricultural sphere as higher stressors for them. We also looked at symptoms of anxiety and depression. 58% of our sample reported symptoms of anxiety and depression. And you might think, well, it was peak COVID, of course, but when we compare it to Ohio's general population taken at the same time, it was actually quite a bit higher, right? So the general population, 38% had symptoms of anxiety and depression and our sample was 58% had symptoms of anxiety and depression. And then the last thing I'll share is that about one third of the sample had not accessed any stress management or mental health support in the past 12 months, which is I think a pretty large number of people, right? Any stress management or mental health support. So I think that's telling. And then of male respondents, about 67% of them had not received any mental health or stress management support in the past 12 months, which is quite a bit higher compared to the other gender identity subgroups. So what can we glean from these results? Well, I think the top takeaways so far, anxiety and depression symptoms are high among farmers in our sample, right? Much higher than the general population taken at the same time. And that stressors and coping strategies vary by social identity. So I don't think there's a one approach fits all to this. We have to really embrace intersectionality and these larger elements of systemic racism and sexism at play. And while some are seeking mental health support, a third of the sample had not. And then I'll give you a sneak peek to some of the qualitative findings. Barriers to care were health insurance, either not having health insurance or having inadequate health insurance, geographic isolation being very far from care, and then stigma, which we named earlier. Any questions about this project before we move on to actually practicing some mental health practices? Just wanted to take some time to really ground us in why this matters, right? So we'll start, let me move back again. We'll start at the individual level and we'll work out to the community and kind of systems level. And with the individual level, let's start with another think-pair-share of how do you personally know when you are stressed? Just take a moment to think about that question. How do you know when you are stressed? What are some of the ways? Anger, get feel angry? Okay, yeah, irritable, short. Yeah, that's definitely a sign of stress for sure. Kind of irritable, maybe apathetic towards what you have to do or just overwhelmed, right? Headaches, stomach aches, digestive issues. I think often stress can show up in the body because maybe we're trying to push it out of our minds, right? Like, I'm okay, I can push through it. And then before it's too late, you have a body condition going on, right? That leads us into mindfulness. And so I think that mindfulness is a really great tool to become more aware of those body sensations but also more aware of what's happening in your mind. Sort of acknowledging some of the rumination or mental chatter that you're experiencing. So I want us to do a couple very accessible mindfulness practices that will hopefully encourage you to sort of cultivate your own mindfulness practice if you don't already have one. And before we do that, I want to define mindfulness because it may be one of those buzzwords that you hear a lot, but you're not quite sure what it means. So mindfulness is the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose in the present moment and non-judgmentally to things as they are. You'll see I underlined non-judgmentally because I think that can be the hardest thing, right? We're always judging our thoughts but really just noticing them, right? I'll read that one more time because I think this is a really key thing to sort of carry out with you and your bones after this workshop. Mindfulness is the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose in the present moment and non-judgmentally to things as they are. And so I think another way that I like to think about mindfulness is we are shifting from doing mode, which we are so often in to just being mode. From doing to being. So we're moving from this individual layer to our community social support layer and social connections are really important for good health. We think about preventing stress, buffering stress. Who do we lean on? Our loved ones, our friends, our community, our mentors, right? But it's not often that we take the time to sort of identify who those people are and examine how we might build or maintain our social support networks. So this is a resource that I have adopted from another organization and they have called it this pod mapping tool. So you can think of a pod as a term for a community but a pod is more specific to those who are close to you such as trusted family, members, friends, neighbors, coworkers or mentors. So let's move on to our final layer of kind of stress management practice. I mean, we could do mindfulness all day and the world could be crumbling around us. So I think it's really important to acknowledge that there are some, you know, greater structural factors at play and to think about how we can get our voices engaged in enacting change. So just kind of popcorn out. What are some greater structural factors that weigh on you? Poverty, climate change, right? These are like the wicked issues of our time. Poverty makes you think of food insecurity, right? I mean, that is the basis of what farmers are up to is providing food to our communities. Societal expectations, whoa, that's a big one, right? Yeah, so we, you know, we're carrying a lot on our shoulders and there are areas where you can get involved to start to enact change whether it's social change or environmental change. And you probably are familiar with OFA's policy team. They were so kind to share a couple of their ongoing initiatives with me to share with you all. So these are areas that you can get involved with right now. And the first is the Soil Health Task Force petition. So if you're interested in soil health, I mean, that's another thing I think a lot about especially with extreme weather events and mitigating climate change, right? How can we mitigate climate change and sequester carbon through our soil? So here's one thing, if it piques your interest you can learn more on the OFA website. The next, you're probably familiar with the Farm Bill. It's a huge piece of legislation that's passed every five years. The next kind of go around will be in 2023 but in 2022 is when a lot of the groundwork is being laid. So OFA has a huge initiative and a huge push right now. There are several town halls that you can attend some in person, some virtual. And then if you just can't make it but you still want to share your thoughts or your opinions you can fill out an online survey. And then lastly, you can set up a one-on-one meeting with a member from OFA's policy team. So Ava, Heather shared their contact information with you all to for you to learn more about what they're up to and where you might be able to plug in. I think that's pretty generous and cool that you can meet with them one-on-one. I also want to tip my hat, I guess. Give a nod to other organizations that are highly involved with farm related advocacy. So Farm Aid, they have a really great website. They have an action center and a tools for change webpage. They also have a booth at the exhibit hall today. I talked with Rachel earlier she's super approachable and nice. There is the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. They have an advocacy toolkit online. And then the National Young Farmers Coalition does a lot of great policy related work. So three solid places to hook in. There are also a variety of networks that you can plug into. One that I follow and that I really look up to is the Women Food and Agriculture Network. They actually just promoted this session that's next week. They have a series called Growing Community Resilience and there's a particular session that's focused on parenting and farming in the time of COVID. I think a lot of folks can relate to that. So mark that on your calendars if you're interested. So I've been talking for a long time. I've put you all to work. We've relaxed together, we've shared together. It's been really fun. And I want to sort of wrap it all up and put it all together and give you some time to think about what you will take away from this workshop. I love adult learning theory and this is a big piece of actually having information stick is before you leave to actually think about what you're gonna use. So what new piece of information or new practice might you incorporate to prepare you for this upcoming farming season? I think we often think of sustainability as being mostly like environmental or economic, right? But there's a social piece. It's the three-legged stool, right? We need the person, we need the farmer. We need that social aspect to maintain our food system, for sure. I want to take a moment to promote a few things that are going on. If you came in late, I was mentioning that I offer some farm stress management drop-in hours twice a week. These are at no cost to participants. Any farmer, farm worker in Ohio or in the greater Ohio region is welcome to Zoom with me. This can take a lot of different forms. Some folks like to talk about goal setting or I've done a lot of resource referrals if there's certain things that you know you would like to access. Sometimes I just listen, right? We just need somebody to listen and hear us. So I encourage you to go to that website and sign up. I'd love to see some of your faces there. And I think I said this at the beginning but I'm just gonna emphasize it that this is not something that you need to wait for a breaking point or a cracking point to do. This can be a more proactive action that you take to really bolster your wellness. And I will promote the community conversation that's happening at three today. It's a more informal space to share practices and resources around wellness. And then you can also see me at the farmer wellness table in the exhibit hall. I have a nice collection of books that you could take a picture of or thumb through and other resources and activities that you could take home with you.