LARNED, Kansas — Tom Giessel vividly remembers growing up in the 1960s as a Kansas farm kid on the High Plains.
In his memories, this place that some refer to as “the middle of nowhere” was teeming with life. It was a place where nature and his family interacted directly.
He viewed farming as integrated. There were different kinds of livestock, siblings and grandparents and neighbors. There were native wildlife and other critters that also played a role on the farm.
“I always said the health of a farm is directly related to how many beating hearts are on that farm,” Giessel said. “That translates into creating community.”
But that’s not what a lot of Kansas farms look like today.
Kansas farms are more specialized, sticking to large-scale farming of one or two commodity crops. There are government incentives for these crops, and bigger farms get more federal dollars.
That economic efficiency might actually be hurting smaller towns, exacerbating some of the health challenges rural Kansans already face. Larger farms push out smaller farms and lead to less people staying in a community. With less people there’s less resources for them like hospitals and schools.
The changes have happened over years, a period that also saw death by suicide rates rise in rural areas
Mental health access is already hard to come by in western Kansas, but suicide rates are even higher if you work in agriculture.
Agriculture to Agribusiness
At Giessel’s secluded farmhouse, he and his wife Cheryl are miles from town, and without each other it could get lonely. Giessel walks down his narrow hallway where he has collected historical farming mementos.
After farming most of his life, Giessel is starting to ask himself and others why Kansans farm. He fears that the shifting answers have been detrimental to rural communities.
After taking over pieces of his parents' land, and renting some land, Giessel and his brother formed a partnership and expanded their operation, wanting to see it grow. He remembers the feeling of competition, wanting to keep up with the changing environment around him.
But now, he is more concerned about the health of farmers, and sees them more as an exploited worker. Even down to the language used to refer to them as “producers.”
“That’s why my business card still just says ‘Tom Giessel, Farmer’ because now we just say producers, which is really impersonal,” Giessel said. “It desensitizes you to what you do.”
As Kansas has embraced grain production and beef production, the costly equipment needed to farm at such a large scale tends to make the distance between your neighbors further.
A study by the Journal of Agromedicine found that in Kansas, farm workers are three times more likely to die by suicide than other professions. The financial pressures, stress, and social isolation are driving factors.
Tim Davis, rural mental health expert at Fort Hays State University, said this is one of the aspects that has undermined mental health in rural communities.
“What we have today is not agriculture, what we have is agribusiness,” Davis said. “It's a much different mindset, because it's no longer kind of that ‘we're in this together’ mentality."
Davis also grew up on a farm in northwest Kansas. He thinks that outside of access to mental health services, the culture surrounding farming also stresses other rural mental health challenges.
“People are more focused on the individual. There's good in that. There's perseverance, but our communities have atrophied,” Davis said. “One of the reasons is because we have kind of lost the interdependence that we have on each other.”
Why farms have expanded
Farm consolidation usually refers to the term “corporate farming” which is when ag corporations buy up farm land. But Kansas actually has had laws that prevent corporations owning land since 1931.
The law prohibited corporate farming for the purpose of growing various grains and the milking of cows. But today more small dairies are going out of business. So what changed?
The law has since seen heavy amendments. In the 1990s, “family farm corporations” and “family farm limited liability agricultural companies” could own and acquire farm land.
Before the dust bowl, there were over 166,000 farms across the state. Today, there are about 55,000.
The average size of a farm has increased by 40% since Giessel first started farming his own land.
This has allowed farms to focus on fewer things, going from raising multiple types of livestock and growing different crops, to growing mostly commodity crops at a large scale.
But large farms are more of a byproduct of the current farming system.
Mark Nelson is the director of commodities for the Kansas Farm Bureau, which represents small and large farms. From a business perspective, he said farmers operate on a margin, and it makes sense to get bigger.
“That farmer who can increase acres,” he said, “the ones who can better do that succeed.”
Farming in Kansas comes with huge costs. Nelson said there is some pressure to expand your farm operation to keep up with the costs of equipment like tractors and weed management.
Larger farms make more money, and if you want your business to succeed, you will need to produce more grain.
According to a report from the Economic Research Service, federal subsidies to farms are increasingly going to larger farms, thus supporting the cycle of the big getting bigger.
“The big get bigger, the small get smaller or they get pushed out,” executive director for the Kansas Farmers Union, Nick Levendofsky, said.
Levendofsky’s priority is supporting farmers, especially disadvantaged ones like small, new or minority farmers.
The average age for farmers in Kansas is almost 60, and as large farm operations pop up around aging farmers, the pressure to compete or sell your land can weigh heavy.
Levendofsky said giving up land that has been with you for multiple generations can feel like losing a member of your family.
What this means for rural Kansans
In western Kansas, counties with the largest farms are projected to see population losses in the next 70 years according to economists at Wichita State University.
Social isolation has been linked to serious health conditions like depression, dementia, and increased risk of heart failure.
Mary Hendrickson is a rural sociologist at the University of Missouri. She has spent the last 25 years studying the effects of food production consolidation on small towns.
Some of the other negative mental health impacts come from how workers engage in their operations today, sitting alone in a tractor or studying spreadsheets.
“It's different now, when you have much more repetitive work,” Hendrickson said. “It has its roots in what happened with the consolidation of agriculture, with the structure of agriculture.”
Hendrickson said that the consolidation of food production leads to fewer choices for farmers.
According to a study she was a part of, just four companies control the market share of major aspects of the industry including beef production, seeds and fertilizer.
Hendrickson also thinks a loss of relationships is inevitable with this kind of consolidation.
“The economic relationships start to span larger distances, and so you start to also lose some of those social relationships,” Hendrickson said.
In order to slow the expansion of farms, both Hendrickson and Nelson agreed that communities need to be more present in dictating what their local agriculture looks like. Supporting local farmers, both with business and with providing health services would make a difference.
Especially since a lot of children are no longer inheriting the family farm. Kansas State University estimates that about half of Kansas farmland is rented. When land is rented, the health of that land usually comes second to its profit.
But Hendrickson and other policy analysts say that local communities can only make a limited amount of progress. Long-term changes would need to come at a federal level like the farm bill.
Those policies can change what is incentivized, and how smaller Kansas farms could thrive. It echoes the words that Farmer Giessel wrote.
Back at the kitchen table in Larned, Giessel’s wife, Cheryl, lovingly read from an essay he’d written years ago.
“We are not called to isolation, rather, we are called to be good neighbors and cultivate connections,” Cheryl said.
Calen Moore covers western Kansas for High Plains Public Radio and the Kansas News Service. You can email him at cmoore@hppr.org.
The Kansas News Service is a collaboration of KCUR, Kansas Public Radio, KMUW and High Plains Public Radio focused on health, the social determinants of health and their connection to public policy.
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