Growing up on our small farm in the hills of southern Wisconsin, I learned to love fall harvest. The weather was crisp, the corn was high, and the excitement even higher. Over the years, my riding shotgun in the combine shearing corn from our rolling fields evolved into bouncing in the seat of our John Deere 4250, hauling wagons from field to farmyard long past sunset.

As the work got harder, I began to understand the truth: fall harvest is a time of both happiness and hardship. And the difference between which will dominate a given year – so crucial as we lose farms by the thousands, and more farmers deal with the strain of unacknowledged mental health challenges – is whether a farm family is communicating.

It’s understandable why harvest is both happy and hard. But people who didn’t grow up with it don’t have a way of knowing, and so many farm families are busy keeping their nose to the grindstone that they may not acknowledge the reasons themselves. So, in the spirit of letting communication help, it’s worth unpacking all the strains a farm family is facing each fall:

• All that beauty of bringing the crops in under the purples and oranges of sunset is paired with incredibly long hours – sometimes turning a farmer’s typical 12-hour days into all-nighters or close to it for days on end, depending upon the weather.
• Every farm has a lot riding on the harvest, sometimes everything. If a farmer raises corn or other crops to feed animals, it dictates whether they’ll have what they need. If a farmer raises cash crops, of any kind, it dictates annual income. Both can make or break a farm.
• There’s an incredible loss of control due to weather, just when a farmer has the most at stake. Farm families are used to weather that blesses or threatens, but at harvest moisture levels dictate when you start, an early winter can wipe out a crop, and more.

Add to this all the strain of how easy it is for a farm to slip away, and how that pressure builds with each generation. In my book Land Rich, Cash Poor about our disappearing family farms, our family lives all of these challenges – and acknowledges the toll it can take as we’ve lost 45,000 farms per year for the past century. My own dad, a man who loves farming to his core and has boundless love for family, struggled with mental health and even suicidal thoughts as he saw the farm facing challenges.

I’m grateful to say he’s alive and well, but we learned some things that help us all as he continues to farm, and my sister works to take it over. 

Dealing with challenges alone, he questioned whether we’d make it, and doubted his purpose in life if not. These feelings can pile up quickly, and so many of us who grew up farming tend to put our heads down and get the work done, which is productive but only adds to the strain – both on the farmer and on loving family members. Fights ensue, adding to the strain and the isolation.

But dealing with it by communicating changes the entire dynamic. Suddenly, fears aren’t carried in silence, but shared among family members or trusted friends. Work can be done in a way that accounts for how the other person is feeling – no less fast, just with understanding. And the communication lessens the number of mishaps or misunderstandings, too. 

There is strength, not shame, in speaking up. But it’s hard to do. You can try these steps if you’re struggling, or if someone you know is:

• Remember the importance of talking about how everyone is doing during the hard work.
• If someone doesn’t feel like talking about it, they may well be in the most need of it.
• Find a setting – over a field lunch, or back and forth from the field for the day – to talk a little more without forcing things, if you can.
• If someone is struggling, share with them what you see – their long hours, the challenges they’re dealing with. Observations, free of judgment or argument, can draw people out.
• Offer to help, and understand that it may mean shouldering some extra labour as much as it may mean offering a shoulder to lean on. But it can still open people up.

Tools like these are a good thing when the tractor breaks down in the back field, with daylight wasting and only a few days to get the crop put up. Everyone – the family member trying to get home, the family member picking them up, whoever is working on the tractor, and whoever is picking up the slack – can all be there for one another.

The truth is, there’s no need to go through it alone. And with the help of others, maybe you’ll see that sunset and be able to appreciate those oranges and purples a little more along the way.

It’s what many of us are there for, anyway.

Brian Reisinger is an award-winning American author and rural policy expert who grew up on a family farm in Sauk County, Wisconsin. His book “Land Rich, Cash Poor,” was named Book of the Year by the nonpartisan Farm Foundation. He serves as senior writer for Platform Communications and lives with his wife and daughter, splitting time between Sacramento, Calif. — America’s “farm-to-fork capital,” near his wife’s family — and the family farm in Wisconsin. You can learn more or contact him on X at @BrianJReisinger, on Facebook here, or at www.brian-reisinger.com