Farmscape for July 15, 2016

Research conducted by the University of Guelph has found Canadian farmers are dealing with significant levels of stress, anxiety, depression and burnout.
Researchers at the Ontario Veterinary College have completed a survey of Canadian farmers on stress.
Dr. Andria Jones-Bitton, a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine and Associate Professor of Epidemiology in the Department of Population Medicine at the University of Guelph, says the study found farmers in Canada face higher levels of stress, anxiety and depression than people in the general population and than farmers in countries where similar studies have been conducted.

Clip-Dr. Andria Jones-Bitton-University of Guelph:
We found that 45 percent of producers met the high stress category.
We need to remember that stress has serious outcomes both on our mental and on our physical health and we need to take that seriously.
In terms of anxiety, almost 60 percent of producers met some level of definition for anxiety.
For depression, 35 percent of our producers met some definition for depression.
We looked at burnout and we found that 38 percent of our producers had high exhaustion and that's emotional exhaustion and 43 percent had high cynicism and these are 2 components of a measure of burnout so it would appear that our producers are also experiencing elements of burnout.
We looked at resilience which, again, is that ability to cope with change and adversity or to bounce back so to speak and we found that 2 thirds of our producers actually scored lower in resilience than the U.S. general population so we might not actually be as resilient as we think.

Dr. Jones-Bitton says data from the study will then be used to create a mental health literacy program and a mental health emergency response program.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork