
The suicide rate for farmers in the U.S. is more than double that of veterans - liyanage
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/06/why-are-americas-farmers-killing-themselves-in-record-numbers
======
gonzoflip
I have family that farms in Iowa and I also worked in the agriculture industry
there for a while after leaving the military. One thing that increases the
stress on the farmers is the way they avoid income taxes at all costs so they
rarely save any of the profits from good years to help them float during the
bad years. This is all anecdotal but I have personally talked with several
farmers that would rather buy new equipment they say do not even need than pay
the taxes to take the money as income. This mindset causes them to experience
a huge amount of stress every season. The farmers would talk about struggling,
but have a brand new semi-tractor sitting in a barn unused 10 months out of
the year.

~~~
colanderman
Dumb question, as I am neither a farmer nor a businessperson, but is there a
way for a farmer to set up, say, an LLC, which holds money from profitable
years for use in unprofitable years, from which the farmer takes a steady
salary each year?

~~~
InvisibleCities
Wouldn't that just make the overall tax burden worse? You'd have to pay
corporate taxes on the farm profits, then pay income taxes on the salary.

~~~
xojp123
I don't think so. I think LLC's allow one to pass through profits without
double taxation. C corps, I believe, are the type that suffer from double
taxation. Correct me if I am wrong though.

~~~
wahern
Salaries are a deductible expense for any business entity, so that money is
never taxed twice by any reckoning.

The debate about double taxation of corporate profits relates to taxation of
dividends, which are neither exempt nor deductible from a business' taxable
income. Because shareholders are one and the same as the corporation according
to some strains of legal and economic reasoning, by taxing dividends you've
taxed the shareholders' profits twice.

If you control a corporation, you could achieve the same tax treatment as
pass-through entities merely by paying yourself a salary instead of dividends.
But if you did that, pass-through entities are easier because there are fewer
formalities involved. The real gripe is that because dividends are taxed at a
flat 15-20%, paying yourself in tax-preferred dividends is a tantalizing
prospect but-for the supposed double taxation "problem".

The debate is admittedly a little more nuanced when discussing passive
investments, but that's a different context than family farms.

------
outsideoflife
Many 'family farms' even in the dainty UK are multi-million $ businesses, run
by people who know how to shear sheep and bunt hurdles and wurzels. They
complain about the effect of market prices, and the worry they create, but
they are taking on these risks _unhedged_ (and farmers being unhedged makes me
giggle). Similar size businesses would we hedging their FX risk through their
local bank with simple FX forwards. Farmers could directly hedge corn prices
(commodities futures), and indirectly hedge fertilizer and diesel prices with
oil futures. They could virtually remove market risk and concentrate on the
risk inherent in the business (weather, disease etc)

I would offer this advice, but they are all _so_ clever you can't tell them
anything. They are a very insular bunch _in general_ and their tie to their
land is a bit more than the blood sweat and tears mentioned below, its a bit
more like being the Lord of their Manor. I agree with the top post, they would
happily be less profitable to save tax. It is intriguing (but not surprising
to me) that many UK farmers voted to leave the EU, despite it being their main
source of unearned income and the main market for their goods, and despite the
National Farmers Union coming out in favor of remaining. I have noticed the
young generation of farmers be openly aggressive towards foreign people (not
that they actually meet any). It is kind of sad, but when they all lose their
farms after Brexit they will still blame the French for it.

Disclosure: worked a lot with farmers, and have some in the family

~~~
arethuza
In the case of Brexit "Fear of immigration drove the leave victory – not
immigration itself"

[https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/24/voting-
deta...](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/24/voting-details-show-
immigration-fears-were-paradoxical-but-decisive)

Dominic Cummings, architect of the Vote Leave campaign has been pretty open
about what they regarded as the winning factors:

 _" Would we have won without immigration? No. Would we have won without
£350m/NHS? All our research and the close result strongly suggests No."_

Even though I was a Remain voter I have to credit Vote Leave with how dynamic
and data driven their campaign was - they _knew_ what buttons to press based
on large quantities of raw data.

~~~
zimpenfish
> I have to credit Vote Leave with how dynamic and data driven their campaign
> was

Almost all of it was false. There's no credit here.

> they knew what buttons to press based on large quantities of raw data.

Well, they do have a large country backing them.

~~~
arethuza
Note that I am not saying that the claims they made in their campaign were
correct - far from it.

What I mean is that they _managed_ their campaign in a data driven and dynamic
way - even to the point of hiring developers and writing their own polling
platform VICS:

[https://www.flourish.org/2017/02/a-short-walk-around-vote-
le...](https://www.flourish.org/2017/02/a-short-walk-around-vote-leaves-
software-vics/)

Both sides had crappy campaigns full of lies - the Vote Leave lot were
unfortunately much better at it.

[Edit: For the avoidance of doubt, I've always been and will remain a strong
believer that the UK should be in the EU].

------
mc32
There was an article on HN not long ago [1] about professionals leaving their
jobs in record numbers to pursue life as a farmer, producing and living off
the land.

How do we reconcile on the one hand farmers by trade leaving and wannabe
farmers wanting to join a farm life?

[1][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15771168](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15771168)

~~~
cnlwsu
"The grass is always greener". I grew up on a dairy farm, its easy to
romanticize it but the reality of waking up to literally chip and shovel
frozen shit at 5am (almost daily chore to clean barns in winter) gets old
after a decade. I worked hard to get out of farming and never want to go back.
I love my tech job.

~~~
QAPereo
The people leaving tech for farming are not mucking barns, they’re managing
farms and hiring people to do the hard work. Think of more as a new-
plantation, rather than a farm. I worked on a horse farm as a kid, and like
you it was backbreaking, shit-shoveling, hay-slinging work. Now I have a good
friend who owns horses, but she “has people” who do the hard work. She rides,
and grooms a bit... money you know?

~~~
xioxox
As someone else who also grew up on a dairy farm (UK), it's very hard to find
reliable people to do the work. I can understand that as an office job has a
lot of attractions compared to being out in rain in the winter darkness. They
will often leave with no notice and it can be very hard to find someone
reliable to replace them.

I don't see much progress on this, unless farming becomes profitable to employ
staff on top wages or robots can become cheap enough to take over. Therefore,
my family, though managing the farm, will often have to get involved in long
hours manual labour.

------
JoeAltmaier
Local farm services guy had this to say: "Used to buy truckloads of
fertilizer, then the coop would buy train car loads and undercut us. So we
bought a train car - they bought a train. We bought a train - they bought a
barge. The margins are disappearing entirely"

Almost everybody is being squeezed out by 'economies of scale'. And its going
to get worse, when we start making simple foodstuffs electrically (starch,
sugar, protein). Then we'll see the entire farm industry turned upside down.

~~~
claudiulodro
This happens any time your only differentiator is price. The small guy is
never going to be able to compete with a larger company on only price. Never
make your differentiator "we're cheaper"! It's business 101.

~~~
danielvf
Unless that’s a game you can win - see Amazon.

~~~
claudiulodro
I was always under the impression their differentiator is speed, convenience,
and selection. They're marketing is heavily towards how quickly and how
conveniently they can get anything you want to you.

Either way, that's exactly my point. Why would you compete with Amazon on
price? They can get anything in larger bulk quantities than you ever could.

~~~
Domenic_S
I do a substantial amount of personal shopping on Amazon -- 6-7 orders a month
-- and they are _rarely_ the cheapest option. Shipping & hassle-free returns
is the value-add.

------
PrimalDual
There are few places where market forces work as well as in farming. Which is
surprising considering the distortions imposed by subsidies. Still, I think
this is a case where automation will eliminate many if not all of their jobs
and the market is doing a good job at signaling that they probably need to
change professions. This especially rang true when they mentioned how the
price of a wheat bushel appeared to below production costs. It’s really pains
me to see these men having to deal with the dark side of creative distruction
but I also don’t know what’s the best way to help them reinvent themselves for
the future.

~~~
neolefty
What would a good role of government be?

It sounds like subsidizing getting people off the farm would be helpful, but
that's also loaded politically.

One program I've heard of working well is subsidizing fallow land that
eventually just becomes wild and never returns to cultivation.

~~~
PrimalDual
I was reading other commenters mentioning the relatively old age of farmers.
Maybe the only good option would be something like removing/phasing out
existing subsidies so that only right amount of young people choose the
profession coupled with a generous retirement program. Something like social
security plus but with your farmland backing the plus part. Maybe in the
spirit of what you’re describing. I worry about the unforseeable consequences
of paying to leave arable land fallow. You’re essentially raising food prices
and that really affects poor people the most.

~~~
JBlue42
Maybe there's also a concern about losing farming knowledge in local areas.
This is a speculation since my general assumption is that as one of the
oldest, most studied professions, we have more than enough knowledge socked
away on it.

------
jartelt
I imagine that farmers' high rate of gun ownership and social isolation are
the big factors. It's pretty well documented that people with guns are more
likely to successfully take their lives when compared to suicidal people who
do not have guns. Couple that with the fact that there is not really a support
system or general awareness of this issue and you have a problem. Veterans are
also likely to own guns, but at least they have the VA and other organizations
that are readily available to help in the event of emotional or psychological
issues. Farmers do not have an equivalent organization.

~~~
majos
This appears to be an issue for farmers worldwide. In India the same logic is
used with "access to pesticide" substituted for "access to guns" [1].

[1]
[http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/csd/csd16/PF/presentations/far...](http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/csd/csd16/PF/presentations/farmers_relief.pdf)

------
a2tech
Because their way of life is over. You can't be a small farmer any more-
farming unfortunately scales really well so bigger concerns run the show now.
They've got nothing left-they're up to their ears in debt, their way of life
is gone, so whats left to do?

------
rpmcmurphy
I don't want to offend anyone, but could a high rate of suicides on farms have
anything to do with the heavy use of pesticides in these places (which operate
essentially as nerve agents, so it would not be surprising if they caused
higher than normal rates of depression, hoarding, etc). Not trolling, just
curious.

~~~
DanBC
We know that some sheep-dip chemicals have caused problems, but there's very
little evidence that agro-chemicals in general are a causitive problem for
mental ill health.

Suicide prevention talks about access to means and methods.

Internationally agro-chemicals are a problem because they're one of the most
commonly used methods for death by suicide.

But in the US there's easy access to guns, and so restricting access to agro-
chemcials is unlikely to have much effect.

------
curtis
One question I would ask: Has the average age of a farmer gone up
substantially in the last couple of decades? This alone could be a major
contributing factor, because the male suicide rate (at least in the U.S.) goes
up with age.

~~~
bluGill
Over what time? In the last few years the younger generation has been
returning to the farm decreasing the age, but go back farther and the age as
been getting older.

------
rdlecler1
Unfortunately technology is likely going to exacerbate this problem more than
it helps. There will Be platforms like Farmers Buisiness Network of FarmLead,
that will help smaller farms access better information and price but but that
will quickly be arbitraged away and then you’re left with economies of scale.

------
rb808
The amazing thing is the median age of farmers in the USA is ~56. In the next
ten years over half are retire-able. Who is going to take over? Corporations
or the current immigrant workers? Its a huge change for most of the country.

~~~
falcolas
This assumes they are able to retire. Given the financial outlooks presented
in the article, I think retiring is not in the books for these farmers.

~~~
roel_v
Well then what about 10 years later when they start keeling over? At some
point, the music stops.

------
protomyth
The Guardian article on Dec 6, 2017 quotes the stat from Newsweek which has a
date of July 13, 2016 quoting a 2014 study showing the number at 15.2 per
100,000. The other cited source is a CDC Study from 2016 with data up until
2012 that shows Farmers, Foresters, and Fishermen have the highest suicide
rates of any profession in the US. Strangely, the CDC study puts the number at
84.5 per 100,000[1].

I would really like to see a bit more rigor and comparison so I know what is
really going on.

1)
[https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/65/wr/mm6525a1.htm#contribA...](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/65/wr/mm6525a1.htm#contribAff)
table 2

------
arca_vorago
My educated guess (I was a sysadmin in a major north Texas age company) is the
hidden nature of the mergers, acquisitions, and interdependency the huge ag
firms and bankers have fostered on what used to be family farms, and don't be
fooled, true family farms are rarer and rarer these days.

I don't know when it changed so much from my great grandparents days, but when
I see farmers with brand new ford raptors and 500k tractors less than a few
years old it seems to fly in the face of what my grandparents described as
life on a farm.

------
PatchMonkey
Gee, I wonder why - small to medium farmers make just enough to get subsidized
into _almost not_ backsliding into debt and oblivion.

Then a bad season hits, thanks to climate change. Cant afford food, much less
taxes, maybe a mortgage.

Aaaaaaand now we're back to mislabelled sharecropping - or better yet, bottom-
dollar buyouts from factory farms that destroy the land, the jobs, and
probably your colon, dear reader. Another dust bowl, coming soon!

------
sdljfslkjfdsj
I wonder how much prior boom times have an impact on farmers because prices on
the crops have just languished for years now.

2008 had very aggressive price appreciation in corn & beans. Same can be said
for late 2010, all 2011, all 2012, & early 2013. After that prices have
absolutely fallen off a cliff & continue to hover near those lows every single
day.

I suspect it's difficult to be in the "risk management" business which farmers
are by being "long" the crop in the ground & having no price appreciation for
years. Meanwhile all other risk assets continue to explode higher. At some
point it probably becomes challenging to find a light at the end of the
tunnel. Now with rising interest rates the cost of capital is higher & likely
going to accelerate higher.

Higher operating costs (wages & debt service) & continually deperessed prices
of the product you produce. I don't have a solution for any of this but by
putting myself in those shoes it sure does seem horrible.

------
swayvil
Maybe they have been faced with the prospect of moving to a city and working
in an office.

~~~
mywittyname
These people are in their 50-60s. That's not a likely transition. A few might
be able to get into sales or traveling trade work.

But most of them are going to have a difficult time finding any sort of work.
Agism and the stigma of being a bumpkin/luddite will absolutely work against
them.

~~~
alistairSH
_stigma of being a bumpkin /Luddite_

Which is a terrible assumption to make.

Many farmers (at least here in the mid-Atlantic) are college-educated
absolutely not bumpkins/Luddites. Unsurprisingly, agricultural programs have a
useful blend of business/economics and science.

~~~
roel_v
That's why it's called a 'stigma' \- a reputation, not a fact.

~~~
alistairSH
Yes, I was agreeing with you.

------
gozur88
The amount of acreage it takes to be profitable goes up every year, and as a
result people get squeezed out of the business. That's going to be tough on a
guy in his fifties who never wanted to be anything but a farmer.

------
Animats
How does this suicide rate compare to small business owners overall? It seems
that _owning_ a farm is the suicide risk. Not working on one.

------
JoeAltmaier
I'll guess: depression, isolation, uncertainty, one paycheck a year (when the
harvest comes in), physical danger and health risks.

~~~
tresil
Yeah, I'm curious if isolation isn't a key here. As technological advancements
have enabled farmers to manage more and more land, they are getting more and
more spread out. Social isolation has psychological and real physiological
impacts on wellbeing.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
and hardly any hired hands any more - they work alone

------
agumonkey
It's not only America. Same story in France (as just one example). More
interestingly there was a documentary about the 40s in France, and a farmer
interviewed said the exact same things as a farmer today about the struggle of
surviving in this "field"... nothing's changed.

------
simlevesque
The same thing happens in Canada.

~~~
criddell
For some farms.

I have relatives that are dairy farmers in Ontario and they seem to be doing
ok. There's some kind of collective in place that establishes production
quotas and you have to pay for the right to produce. Maybe more commodity
products could benefit from this type of planning.

~~~
slavik81
It makes Canadian dairy products rather expensive. Helping businesses collude
to drive up prices and increase profits really should not be the role of
government. Cartels are good for their members, but not for the rest of
society.

See also, [https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-
comme...](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-
commentary/canadas-supply-management-system-for-dairy-is-no-longer-
defensible/article36029788/)

~~~
criddell
> Helping businesses collude to drive up prices and increase profits really
> should not be the role of government.

Well, that's one way to look at it. Another way is to say it stabilizes a
strategically important sector and establishes a minimum wage for dairy
farmers. I'd rather pay more for milk than have desperate farmers killing
themselves at record rates. There's a societal cost to that as well.

------
happy-go-lucky
Farming is irreplaceable as of now. I don't want it to be replaceable, do
you?.

~~~
Crespyl
Replaceable with what?

Some lab-based process that produces the same products at the same volume with
less impact on the land?

Would that be such a bad thing?

------
benevol
Same thing happens in Switzerland.

~~~
s3nnyy
I would say farmers are quite happy in Switzerland being the most subsidised
farmers in Europe / the world?

On top, some of them own land, which makes them into multimillionaires the
moment the land is turned from farm-land into land that can be used to put
houses on.

~~~
dejv
Subsidising farmers is double edge sword, it do inflate the prices of
everything you are supposed to buy with that money, be it tractors, land,
fertilisers and such. Dealers know how much you are going to get from
government and they want some of it.

~~~
s3nnyy
Sure but the Swiss are the most risk-averse people on the planet. In case
again a world-war breaks out they need to be able to feed the country without
relying on imports. That an important main reasons for subsidies. If somehow
it could be guaranteed that there will be no war in Europe ever, my best guess
is that the Swiss would immediately drop this "inefficiency" (they love to be
efficient).

~~~
dejv
Sure, but my comment was about the effect of subsidiaries to profitability of
given farms. What I see, as a small scale farmer myself, and as having family
members having executive roles in big industrial farm conglomerates, is that
those subsidies have effect on pricing of farm inputs.

------
perseusprime11
new topic but I am noticing a new trend where rich people have started owning
farm land. Not sure why but I hope it is not contributing to this problem in a
weird way.

------
baldfat
> but the most extreme anti-government/anti-tax ideologies. It's the very
> definition of cutting off your nose to spite your face.

That sadly isn't an extreme ideologies. Every wonder why Republicans are all
for tax cuts? Its the simple idea that if the Government has less money it
must be smaller. So lower the taxes of the rich and corporations = smaller
government. This is why we have problems all the time with tax talks. Both
sides talk with different worldviews. You might say "Trickle Down Economics
Doesn't Work," they simply don't care, "There is nothing that Government does
well." "Government is the problem" \- Ronald Reagan 1981 Inauguration
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1sGN6J9Tgs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1sGN6J9Tgs)

Though I love throwing Reagan into the face of today's "Conservatives" they
really would HATE Reagan today and his liberal ways.

~~~
dang
This triggered the sort of low-rent political thread we don't want here.
Please don't do that.

We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15862439](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15862439)
and marked it well off-topic.

~~~
EdSharkey
I thought everyone was very respectful.

~~~
dang
It's way off topic.

~~~
EdSharkey
Yes, it is. Thanks for your moderation.

------
dekhn
Mild shock that the conclusion isn't "Monsanto"

~~~
mywittyname
That's in the article about why farmers are killing each other.

[https://www.npr.org/2017/06/14/532879755/a-pesticide-a-
pigwe...](https://www.npr.org/2017/06/14/532879755/a-pesticide-a-pigweed-and-
a-farmers-murder)

