This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.
Josh Dallin spends his workdays talking to Utahns who raise cattle and grow crops, and knew that many were in distress. Everyone from neighbors to fertilizer dealers to equipment suppliers were telling him they were worried that a farmer or rancher they knew was at risk of suicide.
Then in 2023, with money allocated by Congress, Dallin had new help to offer: As executive director of an agriculture center at Utah State University Extension, he had scores of $2,000 vouchers that Utahns working in agriculture could use to get free therapy.
Dallin feared no one in the typically stoical farming community would take him up on the federally funded offer. He was wrong.
Farmers and ranchers across Utah quickly accepted the money, which ran out in just four months — well before he expected — and his office had to start turning people away. It convinced Dallin of the deep need in the state’s agricultural communities, and people’s openness to getting help when cost is not a barrier. “I want you to know,” he recalled one voucher recipient telling him, “that this saved my life.”
“It was heartbreaking,” he said, to have to put “the brakes on the program.”
The money for the vouchers was part of a one-time $28 million allocation sent to states to help Americans producing food handle the extra stresses of the coronavirus pandemic.
With that funding now mostly spent, leaders in some states have tapped state funds or leaned on private donors to ensure mental health support continues.
Utah has not — and, at least according to one legislator, has no intention to do so.
Republican state Sen. Scott Sandall, a third-generation rancher and farmer who is the Executive Appropriations Committee vice chair, criticized Congress for creating a program with a one-time boost of money. “The way they set it up,” he said, “was eventually to have it go away.”
The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica reached out to Gov. Spencer Cox — himself a farmer who has advocated for better mental health resources in the state. In 2022, he acknowledged in a Utah Farm Bureau article that poor mental health was a problem affecting the state’s farmers, and said he hoped investments in rural mental health could better support them. His office did not respond to interview requests for this story.
Farmers in the United States are 3.5 times more likely to die by suicide than the general population, according to the National Rural Health Association. Utah’s suicide rate has consistently been among the nation’s highest, and farmers and ranchers here die by suicide at the third-highest rate by vocation, according to state data, behind miners and construction workers.
Fluctuating market prices, unpredictable weather and a stigma that farmers should be “tough” and can handle their mental stress themselves were constant pressures described by more than a dozen people The Tribune and ProPublica interviewed — farmers and ranchers, their families and those who support mental health programs for them.
The American Farm Bureau has emphasized in news releases the Trump administration’s shifts in policy around tariffs and federal grant funding have increased the uncertainty faced by America’s farming communities. Trump acknowledged in a speech to Congress that tariffs may bring “a little bit of an adjustment period” for America’s farmers but said that he believes they will ultimately help the industry.
Federal funding to support farmer mental health is tied up with ongoing debates over the Farm Bill, a sweeping package of legislation that Congress has been unable to move forward since it expired in 2023.
Sandall, the state legislator, said he knows the stress of working in the agriculture industry can cause mental health challenges. But when he was presented with the data about the high suicide rates in Utah agricultural communities, he said he doesn’t think Utah lawmakers would be interested in funding a program intended to help one specific profession while there is “so much demand” for mental health support throughout the state.
“Whether they’re a mechanic,” he said, “or whether they’re a school teacher, or a doctor, or someone in agriculture, I just think it would be a little hard to start separating out and creating just mental health programs for individual industries.”
"We Carry the Burden"
The stress of owning a dairy fell on Mitch Hancock’s shoulders overnight after his father-in-law died by suicide in 2014. Hancock’s father-in-law hadn’t shared with his family that he was in crisis.
Mental health, Hancock said, isn’t a topic discussed often among farmers. “I think we struggle in quiet.”
He had been involved with the dairy because his father-in-law had been hoping to transition into retirement, Hancock said. Still, “I had never driven a tractor,” he said. “Never driven a semi in harvest, never driven a chopper. Never done any of that. So it was very much, ‘Well, let’s figure it out as we go.’”
That was more than a decade ago. Hancock and his wife have run NooSun Dairy since on 2,400 acres of land in Box Elder County, where the snow-capped Wasatch Mountains stretch to the east and the Great Salt Lake can be seen past acres of fields and homes looking west.
When he speaks, Hancock is taciturn and straightforward, a trained civil engineer who takes a pragmatic approach to running the dairy farm. But he has new insight now into what his father-in-law faced, he said, a weight far heavier than just having a successful business. He has employees who need these jobs and neighbors who count on him to buy their crops to feed his cows.
“We carry the burden to make sure that we can take care of all of those around us like we always have,” he said, “even in times of low milk prices.”
But being able to pay the dairy’s bills can be challenging, Hancock said, because the price he can sell at can fluctuate. Milk price regulations are set by a complex government process that can cause prices to change as often as daily. When prices are volatile, Hancock said, “it’s hard to look past the doomsday.”
In addition, in Utah and the arid West, farmers and ranchers worry about water, said Craig Buttars, the outgoing Utah Department of Agriculture and Food commissioner. In one recent year when rainfall was particularly scarce, he recalled, ranchers scrambled to find enough feed and had to haul water to cattle — many of which graze on remote public lands.
“That just added another level of stress,” he said. “And at some point, producers, sometimes they just feel like, ‘Why am I doing this?’”
Some farmers have also felt villainized by the public for their water use, including by a recent study that suggested that farmers need to cut back or stop growing altogether in order to help stop the shrinking of Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Chris Chambers is an alfalfa and hay farmer in northern Utah who sells his crop to local cattle producers. He said it’s frustrating to read online comments posted in response to news articles about declining lake levels from people who think farmers should give up their water rights or stop farming.
“It’s your livelihood,” he said. “Water is the key, and we’ve got the senior priority rights to use the water from the state of Utah. And now we’re bad guys for doing it? We feel like we’re doing a good service for feeding people.
In Rural Utah, Few Therapists and More Guns
Farmers and ranchers in Utah’s rural areas face unique challenges in getting help. In the two counties that have the highest amount of farmland in the state, each has about one therapist for every 550 people, according to County Health Rankings, which pulls data from the National Provider Identification registry. (The national ratio is one therapist for every 300 people.)
Without that type of specialized care, doctors in rural areas often rely only on prescription medications, said Tiffany McConkie, a rancher in northeastern Utah who also works as a nurse at a clinic in the town of Altamont, in a three-room medical office decorated with photos of sun-drenched farm landscapes.
McConkie said some people hesitate to ask for mental health care, telling her that they are afraid of being medicated or that health care workers will call the police and they’ll be put into a “mental home.”
“And that’s not the case,” she said. “We just want to get them the help they need.”
Where rural Utah lacks easy access to therapists, there is also an abundance of firearms — and a higher suicide rate compared with urban areas, according to a 2018 Harvard study. That study found that the elevated suicide rate in rural Utah is not because people there attempt suicide more often but because they are using guns, which are more lethal than other methods.
In the Uintah Basin where McKonkie lives, the state-run mental health clinic has responded to those statistics by focusing on gun safety, handing out gun locks and secure ammo boxes at gun shows. They also travel to oil fields to do suicide prevention trainings with workers, an effort to meet their most at-risk population — middle-aged men — where they are.
"It has required some creativity on our part,” said Catherine Jurado, who works at Northeastern Counseling Center, adding that being in a smaller rural area allows them better opportunities to create relationships. “Who else in the United States thinks, ‘I need to go to a beef expo to do suicide prevention?’”
Seeking a Way Forward
When Utah received the pandemic-era federal funding it used to create the voucher program, Buttars, the Utah agriculture department commissioner, said he was surprised at how many people sought the help.
His department and Utah State University Extension — the state’s land-grant university — used some of the $500,000 at first for an educational podcast and online stress courses. And in 2023, they paid for therapy for about 240 farmers and ranchers.
“It really did wake me up to the number of people we have in the state, in our agricultural community, that felt the need for this type of program,” he said.
In the absence of ongoing federal funds, some states have locked in state funding or private donations to keep supporting their farmers.
But in Utah, those who ran the therapy voucher program have been hesitant to approach lawmakers for state support.
Hargraves, with the state’s agriculture department, said it can be tough to get state legislators to fund new programs. And Dallin, with Utah State, said his office has shied away from approaching legislators because the money would be earmarked as part of the higher education budget due to its association with the university. Utah’s legislative leadership has cut $60 million in funding from the public higher education system this year — the biggest budget cut to schools here in at least a decade.
Since the therapy voucher program ended, USU Extension has continued to run awareness campaigns encouraging farmers to invest in their mental health care. And the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food has also introduced mental health workshops into some certifications and courses that farmers and ranchers enroll in.
Dallin said his office has also been working with the University of Utah — a health research university that runs its own hospital system — to try to collect survey data to prove the voucher program’s effectiveness as they try to drum up more money in the future.
“I honestly believe,” he said, “that if the government or if some organization were to give us a million dollars a year, I think we could spend it.”
If you or someone you know needs help:
Although Utah does not currently have funds to pay for therapy for the agricultural industry, there is still support available.
You can dial 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. If you live in Utah, it will route you to the Utah Crisis Line, which is staffed by certified crisis workers at the Huntsman Mental Health Institute. The call is free and confidential, and you can reach someone at any time of day.
Another hotline, 1-800-FARM-AID, has staffers who can talk with you about what you are going through and connect you to resources.
Utah State University Extension has other resources available as well. You can listen to its podcast, “AgWellness,” which organizers say is aimed at teaching you to open up about what concerns you and how to help others who feel stressed. There are also free online courses that can teach you how to find relief from stress, or learn what to say and how to help if you know someone else who is struggling.
