This Mental Health Team Hopes To Help Hawaii’s Farmers Help Themselves… Professor Thao Le discusses the experiences of researchers at the University of Hawaii who have been canvassing the ranching and farming community to find the state of its mental health.
Seeds of Wellbeing is a recently launched initiative from the University of Hawaii Manoa, supported by the Hawaii Department of Agriculture and funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The S.O.W. team has surveyed the state of mental health in Hawaii’s farming and ranching community and will soon publish the first paper of its findings, from hours of interviews and hundreds of survey responses.
The results indicate Hawaii’s farmers and ranchers are feeling the pressure of the job, with one-third of farmers suffering depression. Professor Thao Le, project director, shared some of the team’s experiences and impressions of farmers’ mental health. Her interview with Civil Beat has been edited for length and clarity.
Life has been hard for everyone over the pandemic – being cut off from family, losses of jobs and livelihoods and just an upheaval of life in general. What exactly has the farmers’ experience been?
This pandemic has been really challenging for so many on so many levels. But for farmers and producers specifically, their whole livelihoods are filled with uncertainty. And whose livelihood is filled with that level of uncertainty? It’s very resource intensive and capital intensive, being a farmer, and you need to grow things and invest your time. Your time is a resource.
So let’s say for crops: It takes six to nine months from when you put in something. And then for coffee it takes maybe three to five years before you get your crop. Who knows what’s going to happen during those years and during those months? The weather could change, you have a new invasive species, you have inflation – which everybody is impacted by. For farmers, everything is uncertain. So there’s no guarantee that what you’ve invested in will get a return.
