Search Site   
Current News Stories
Schaefer’s Farm Market and CSA has grown after humble start
Trump’s tariff pause ends; letters sent to more than 20 trading partners
Farmers may need to find other sources of income in a tough year
Farmer moves to town; city folk move to the country
Farm Foundation Forum examines rural hospital closures
Farm Foundation Forum looks at how agriculture shapes communities
Quarterly grazing seminars will help farmers with peer to peer info
IDNR stocks 12 lakes with striped bass, hybrid striped bass
FFA chapter members share list of tractor uses
Ports of Indiana selects Louis Dreyfus Co. to operate grain terminal
June’s swine inventory is highest since 2020 with 75.1 million head
   
News Articles
Search News  
   
Public and occupational health: closely allied with farming sustainably
 
Farm & Ranch Life
By Dr. Rosmann
Last August, I had the opportunity to address the International Conference of Public and Occupational Health in Sustainable Agriculture, held in Odense, Denmark. This article is a condensed version of my invited talk.
The synergistic relationship of public and occupational health with sustainable agriculture is generating new applications. The behavioral health of people involved in agriculture, fishing, and forestry is becoming recognized as critical to the well-being of humans and our planet as a whole.
Agriculture has come a long way over the thirteen thousand or so years since the purposeful production of crops, such as einkorn wheat and lentils, began in what is now Iran, Iraq and Syria. According to Jared Diamond in his 1997 seminal book, “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” increasingly more advanced immigrants from Africa pushed for better opportunities to live in Southwest Asia because they exceeded the carrying capacity of their native territories.
Domestication of sheep and goats followed a couple thousand years later. Planting crops and raising livestock enabled the former hunter/gatherers to remain in one location, and to specialize in community roles, such as constructing buildings and herbal medicine. Eventually, advances in agriculture contributed to the formation of numeral systems, written languages, the scientific method, the establishment of governments, and many of the precursors of modern disciplines.
Mechanization during recent centuries contributed greatly to making farming easier, but not always better. For example, the plow enhanced crop production, but at the cost of degradation to farmland by wind and water erosion, and decreases in soil organic matter.
Chemical engineering created pesticides that may make agricultural production more efficient, but can have hazardous impacts on the environment and consumers.
Genetic engineering further encouraged agricultural producers to raise only one or two crops on a regular basis. However, the long-term effects of GMOs on biosystems aren’t fully ascertained.
Modern agriculture is now in the age of information technology, and expanding exponentially. Designers of robots and artificial intelligence are gradually changing the roles of humans from gardeners and machinery operators into those of managers of computer-guided farming and marketing.
New knowledge and applications of artificial intelligence are perhaps occurring too rapidly, and raising ethical concerns about possible misuse. Some experts question if artificial intelligence will eventually lead to the elimination of humans as unnecessary.
Like agricultural science, behavioral science emerged as a new discipline about 150 years ago, when behaviors, such as auditory perceptions of sound, were quantified by Sir Francis Galton, one of the first psychologists. He measured how many decibels two sounds needed to vary in order to be judged as different.
Interest in behavioral science spurred the development of statistical analyses. Galton devised correlation as a statistical method of assessing the degree of relationship between repeated measurements of two behaviors.
The statistical technique, analysis of variance, emerged from agricultural science. It was devised to compare the yields of different varieties of crops and different amounts of fertilizer in food plots. The statistical tools created within agricultural and behavioral science were adopted, and advanced, by nearly all the scientific fields.
The original science of behavior, psychology, has broadened to include sociology, behavior genetics, bioinformatics, and many more areas of inquiry and application.
One of the best-known practical applications of psychology is behavioral healthcare, which includes psychotherapy, psychiatry, social work, and any professional field that aims to improve the behavioral well-being of the people served.
A new area of investigation and practice that is impacting agriculture is agricultural behavioral health, which combines behavior science with agriculture. An illustration: Swedish researchers found that the psychological well-being of dairy farmers and workers was positively correlated with the number of required veterinary visits to their dairy operations; when the behavioral well-being of their human caretakers improved, the health of their cows improved, the somatic cell count due to mastitis dropped, and the number of required veterinary visits fell.
Agricultural behavioral health helps farmers manage their behavior to optimize decision-making and profitability. Behavior is one of the few factors that affect the outcome of farming over which farmers have considerable control.
Learning to recognize and manage their own stress, as well as to assist distressed family members and employees, are teachable skills that trained professionals in agricultural behavioral health can provide.
Currently in the U.S., research has identified several best practices that assist distressed farmers, and which are being implemented though the Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network (FRSAN), which is part of the current Farm Bill.  Research and application of best FRSAN practices continues at four university centers, and in occupational health, public health and related fields.
Agricultural behavioral health, like public and occupational health, is here to stay.  Likely, agricultural behavioral health will become integrated into high school, college, and university agriculture curricula, and in business, healthcare of humans and animals, crop sciences and many more fields.
The future holds much promise for the integration of behavioral health and agriculture. A sustainable Earth will depend on it.
Dr. Mike Rosmann is a psychologist and farmer. Contact him at: mike@agbehavioralhealth.com.
 
7/3/2023