Fifteen years ago, Elan Love needed a fresh start. He quit his Seattle job doing contract research on Arctic fisheries, moved to a 20-acre organic farm northwest of Missoula, and started raising turkeys and growing ginger, turmeric, garlic, and heritage painted mountain corn. Love now lives off the proceeds of his farm, called Deluge Farms. He said he finds farming extremely “rewarding” compared to his old corporate job, especially “having my labor directly translate into a tangible, solid result.”
But, he almost lost it all. The River Road East fire, fueled by hot winds and dry grass, burned over 17,000 acres in Montana in August of 2023 and nearly destroyed Love’s Deluge Farms as well. “It was extremely frightening,” Love said. “There was nothing between us and the fire, except for ... dry grass.”
The fire was just the latest in a series of dramatic weather events that Love says are all “arguably climate change related.” In 2022, there was a severe grasshopper infestation. He estimated Deluge Farm had around five tons of grasshoppers, which ate through layers of protective plastic netting to consume his crops.
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Elan Love, with his dog Rosemary, runs Deluge Farms, a 20-acre organic farm in western Montana. Last summer, the 17,000-acre River Road East fire nearly destroyed his farm.
He’s also weathered drought, extreme hail, and record low temperatures of -40° F in the winter. Love said 10 years ago, the surface of the soil rose to over 160° F, “literally cooking” his freshly harvested garlic crop, which was lying in the fields to cure. “Hundreds of pounds of garlic actually roasted,” said Love. “The neighbors said they could smell roasted garlic driving by our property.”
It isn’t just Montana: 2024 was a year for record-breaking rainfall, flooding, drought, heat waves, and wildfires across the globe. Organizations like the World Meteorological Organization warn that these climate-change related events will only become more common as the Earth warms. For farmers like Love, climate change’s effects — fire, grasshoppers, hail, drought, diseased crops — add an additional stress to the existing uncertainty that comes with farming. “The stresses can be extreme,” he said.
A burned structure left from the River Road East fire is seen near McLaughlin Creek Road outside the town of Paradise on Aug. 31, 2023.
As climate change fuels increasingly unpredictable weather and economic uncertainty, Montana farmers and ranchers are grappling with rising stress levels. A 2020 study published in the Journal of Rural Mental Health found that 75% of the Montana farmers and ranchers surveyed believe that climate change is negatively impacting the profitability of their agricultural businesses, driving high levels of stress and anxiety. Mental health is one of the most overlooked impacts of climate change, yet for Montana farmers and ranchers, the climate crisis is quietly propelling a deadly epidemic. The state leads the nation in per-capita suicide rates, but male farmers and ranchers are particularly vulnerable with a suicide rate of 49.9 per 100,000: the second-highest among any occupation in the country.
In response to the nationwide agricultural mental health crisis, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network launched a $500,000 non-competitive grant program in 2021, providing state Departments of Agriculture with funding to support mental health initiatives. Montana used this funding to provide access to mental health services for agricultural communities which broadly lack access to services, but grant funding ran out earlier this year.
Though climate change threatens the physical and mental health of Montanans, and especially farmers and ranchers, a 2023 Yale Climate Opinions Map found that Montana residents are less likely to believe that global warming is real and human-caused than the rest of the nation. According to the survey, 67% of Montana residents say that global warming is happening, compared to 72% nationally, and 52% believe it is mostly human-caused, compared to 58% nationally.
Montana’s constitution, however, protects the right to a "clean and healthful environment," a clause at the heart of the landmark Held v. Montana case. In 2023, a Montana court sided with youth plaintiffs who argued the state violated this right by barring officials from considering climate impacts when reviewing fossil fuel permits. The decision has drawn national attention, but it hasn’t bridged the gap between state policy and the daily realities of climate change for farmers.
Despite the mounting stress of climate change, Montana offers no programs addressing the intersection of climate change and mental health for agricultural workers. For farmers like Love, the dual crises feel urgent, even as systemic solutions lag behind. “It's very easy to get sucked into anxiety about what thing in the future is going to be scary or difficult,” Love admitted.
Montana’s built-in risk
Christy Clark, former director of the Montana Department of Agriculture.
Even without the added stress of the climate crisis and agriculture, many risk factors for suicide are ingrained in Montana’s geography and culture. There are high rates of alcohol use, poverty, and access to firearms across the state. Then there’s the vitamin D deficiency caused by long, dark winters, and the high altitude which has been shown to increase risk for suicide. The state’s rural status also makes it difficult for people who want or need mental health services to access them.
One of the most pressing risk factors is also social isolation. Montana has only 6.7 people per square mile, compared to the national average of 88.7, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. For Christy Clark, former director of the Montana Department of Agriculture and a fifth-generation Montana rancher, isolation was a major feature of her childhood. She grew up raising cattle on a ranch 25 miles away from the nearest town of Choteau, which had a population of about 1,700 people in the 2020 census.
Her family visited town once a week to get groceries, sometimes the only contact they had with the outside world. “That isolation can just be so crushing,” Clark recalled. “When I was 12, we bought another place that was a mile from town, and I thought I had just died and gone to heaven. It's still a small town, but I could ride my bike to town. I could see people more than once a week.”
Beyond the geographical factors, cultural factors also dissuade Montanans from accessing mental health care. Alison Brennan, a professor of human development and community health at Montana State University and extension agent who works on implementing farm stress assistance programs, noted that Montana’s do-it-yourself culture makes it difficult for people to talk candidly about their struggles. “There's really that culture, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and we're rugged and tough and independent and stoic. So, there's this apprehension to say, ‘hey, I'm not doing so hot,’” Brennan said.
BRENNAN
Then, there’s the general stigma around mental health which is often exacerbated in small communities. “In small towns and rural communities, people talk. They all recognize each other,” said Brennan. “Because of the stigma, people don't want to be seen going to a mental health fair,” she added. This stigma is a major reason why most mental health programs targeted at agriculture workers are marketed as “wellness” or “stress” programs. “For some reason, when we talk about mental health, people automatically think ‘mental illness.’ But mental health is just like physical health. If you are a human being, you have it,” she said.
These risk factors have tangible results: Montana has a much higher rate of crisis mental health concerns, including suicide, than the rest of the nation. According to KFF (formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation), a nonpartisan nonprofit that provides data and analysis on health care issues, the age-adjusted suicide rate in Montana per 100,000 was 32.0 in 2021, compared to the national rate of 14.1. The state also experiences high rates of chronic mental health conditions, with 34% of adults in 2023 reporting major anxiety or depressive disorder. An additional 3.42% of adults reported living with a severe mental illness such as schizophrenia, bipolar I disorder, or major depression with psychotic features.
Despite the widespread risk factors for suicide and prevalent mental health conditions, Montana’s infrastructure is not equipped to address mental health in the state. A July 2024 report from Inseparable, a mental health advocacy group that provides state-by-state data on responses to mental health crises, found that while some of Montana’s interventions for mental health are effective — such as a robust 988 suicide crisis hotline — the state lacks crisis response teams and short-term crisis beds overall. A ratio of 60 psychiatric beds per 100,000 people is considered optimal to provide the minimum level of treatment for people with severe mental illness. With 174 state psychiatric hospital beds for the entire state, Montana has a rate of 15.5 beds per 100,000.
Facing crisis on all fronts
For farmers and ranchers, their profession brings additional mental health risks. One major factor is that there is no work/life separation for farmers and ranchers: they live where they work. For farmer Love, this means there is also no separation between his personal life and his business. He lives with his co-workers and eats the same crops that he sells to earn money. There’s also no time for vacation. “I did not leave my workplace for like, seven years at one stretch. I didn’t spend a night away from it,” Love said, referring to Deluge Farms.
Then, there are the chronic, uncontrollable stressors that are part of working in agriculture. There’s the unpredictability of weather, as Love has experienced. There are also global market factors and financial unpredictability. For example, during the pandemic, supply chain issues caused by travel restrictions and changes in demand due to lockdowns made it difficult to get crops and animals to market and led to changes in the prices of goods. From her work in farm stress assistance, Brennan knows that it’s these types of uncontrollable stressors which are the most toxic for agriculture workers. “They are dependent on these really complex systems that they, at an individual level, can't do much about,” she said. “When you look at what types of stress contribute most to mental health conditions and to suicidality, it's those that are chronic and uncontrollable.”
Last summer, Elan Love watched nervously as the 17,000-acre River Road East fire approached his neighbor's farm.
For farmers and ranchers, climate change is another chronic, uncontrollable stressor, one which has dire consequences. A study published in 2022 by the Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics at the University of California found that extreme heat was associated with higher rates of farmer suicide, and another 2021 survey from a Colorado-based suicide prevention group found that when drought increased, so did farmer suicides. Today, almost no data has been collected in Montana about how climate change affects mental health in farmers, apart from the 2020 study about farmer perceptions on climate change and anxiety levels. Despite this, Brennan knows from her work as an extension agent that climate change almost certainly has an effect. “We have not directly looked into the issue of climate change and mental health in producers, but when you think about the pile-up effect with extreme weather events, wildfires, harsher winters, or hotter summers, that’s another chronic, uncontrollable stressor for agriculture workers,” she explained.
Addressing farm stress
It was the stigma and culture of mental health that Director of Agriculture Christy Clark hoped to address with the USDA grant funding, which the Department of Agriculture received in 2022. “Just sharing my experience of the feeling of that crushing isolationism growing up, I wanted to normalize that life is stressful, and to let people know that it's natural to have difficult times and it's okay to have to reach out for help,” Clark said. The non-competitive, one-time grant of $500,000 was available to all state departments of agriculture, though only 17 states applied for it. A few of the states who did, including Wyoming, modeled their grant programs after Montana’s.
Charred remnants of an old dairy barn left from the River Road East fire are seen off of Highway 200 outside the town of Paradise on Aug. 31, 2023.
For Clark, the project was significant personally as well as professionally. She recalls attending many funerals for her friends and neighbors in agriculture who committed suicide. In most cases, the community had no idea that the neighbor was struggling. “It’s the same story every time: The church is overflowing and people are all saying, ‘she was always the first one to help, I had no idea that she was internalizing her struggles.’ Going to those funerals you just know that we have to get better at this. We have to say ‘how are you, is everything okay? I mean, I appreciate you bringing brownies for branding, but is everything OK?’ And we just don't do that,” Clark said.
The first of the three parts of Montana’s grant program was a media campaign called Beyond the Weather, sought to prevent funerals like the ones Clark is all-too-familiar with attending by incorporating mental health into regular agricultural conversation. In partnership with Northern Broadcasting System, Beyond the Weather sought to expand conversation by “moving beyond just talking about the weather,” to talk about real mental health challenges according to their website.
It’s important to help create deeper conversations in agriculture, because that’s often uncomfortable for ag workers, but very necessary, Clark explained. “We're great about talking about the weather or the price of calves or the price of hay, but do we ever really just stop and say, hey, are you doing okay?” she said. Beyond the Weather broadcasted television and radio advertisements with farmers and ranchers candidly discussing their mental health struggles, and also directed people to mental health resources.
Clark said this had tangible impacts on her own family. When Clark’s son-in-law attended a community street dance, a neighbor approached him and asked, “how are you doing, beyond the weather?” Clark laughed, recalling her son-in-law’s discomfort with the conversation. “It is uncomfortable for us in agriculture. I mean, we're just not used to that, but I think we're getting there,” she said.
Funding from the grant also went to support community-based workshops, speaker programs, and other outreach efforts aimed at promoting mental health awareness in agricultural communities. The program provided grants ranging from $1,000 to $10,000 for organizations that offer workshops on mental health, stress relief, and agricultural suicide prevention, and allowed agriculture organizations to hire mental health speakers for their conventions. Clark said that the speakers were especially popular. “Even though the funding has dried up, I’m still seeing ag conferences that include mental health speakers,” Clark noted. This shift, she believes, shows the growing recognition of mental health issues within agriculture, and she’s hopeful that these conversations will continue, even without government dollars.
The final project funded by the grant was a partnership with mental health clinic Frontier Psychiatry, which provided every farmer or rancher with free mental health services delivered via telehealth. According to Frontier’s data, 70 individuals from Montana’s agriculture sector sought counseling through this program, more than half of whom had never accessed mental health support before. Clark heard from one farmer who used the telehealth service during his divorce. The farmer had been feeling increasingly hopeless, but didn’t want to talk to community members about it, because he felt ashamed. Then, he tried teletherapy. According to Clark, teletherapy was a “game-changer” for the farmer. “He just came up and thanked me for it,” Clark said. “He said it pulled him out of a really dark place and offered support that he just couldn't reach for in the community.”
Despite these successes, the end of funding for the farm stress grant leaves many unanswered questions about the future of mental health services in Montana’s agricultural communities. Clark believes that the government’s role should be to jump-start these efforts and let private industry or nonprofit organizations take over. “Our role is to start something, and I think we’ll just see that continue organically, without government funding,” she said. The Department of Agriculture still offers other services to agriculture families, such as free mediation and succession planning, though these do not directly support mental health.
Preparing for the future
As Montana’s agriculture sector continues to deal with the mental health crisis exacerbated by climate change, farmers like Elan Love are doing what they can to prepare for the future, even with the lack of state programs. While Love acknowledges that some forces of nature are beyond his control, he’s still thinking ahead and focused on adapting his farm to become more resilient in the face of a changing climate. He expects “instability and unpredictability,” with regards to climate change. To prepare, he’s growing crops that are grasshopper-resistant, fast-growing, cold-hearty, and drought-tolerant. He is also expanding his greenhouse and high tunnels — hoop-shaped structures covered with plastic or other materials — to fit more plants, and planting diverse trees to help create a healthy biosphere on his property.
A home burns just north of East River Road during the Pine Creek Fire in Paradise Valley near Pine Creek on Aug. 29, 2012 in Livingston.
Beyond physical preparation, Love is in therapy, which he attends via telehealth. He prioritizes his human connections, which he thinks are the only real way to cope with anxiety about the future. “If you're worried about any kind of ongoing or worsening crisis, human community is the only way out of it, no matter what specific stressors.”
In the end, though, Love says that thinking about how climate change could affect his farm and life is overwhelming. “You're looking at something that is larger than can be addressed with coping mechanisms and then therapies and personal lifestyle and business decisions.”
