Contents:
But two years ago, at age 82, as a series of mounting health issues forced him to step away from the work he loved, he didn't have the same kind of language or strength to ask for help.
Darla is the director of student health services at Montana State University Billings. She is trained to spot depression and suicide ideation in students. But in her own father, she couldn't see what was coming.
He took his own life on the very farm where he was born and raised. Afterward, his daughter struggled with guilt. She's now determined to take her family's anguish and use it for good by advocating on behalf of other farmers who may be in crisis. Her motivation is to honor his memory -- and because she knows that her family isn't alone. A more recent CDC report said Montana's suicide rate leads the nation , coming in at nearly twice the national average.
A third long-touted CDC study, currently under review , listed farming in the occupational group, along with fishing and forestry, with the highest rate of suicide deaths. That occupational study was based on data, when farming was strong and approaching its peak in , says Jennifer Fahy, communications director for the nonprofit Farm Aid.
Fahy says farmers are facing more stress now than they have since the farming crisis of the s, when hundreds of farms were auctioned on courthouse steps across the country each month and thousands of farmers faced financial ruin. That's why now is the time to talk, Darla says. By sharing their own story, she and her older brother, Randall Tyler, hope others can be spared their -- and their father's -- pain. The 1,acre farm is nestled in the serenity of rural north central Montana, where crops stretch as far as the eye can see beneath an expansive blue sky.
The summer breeze casts waves across seas of wheat. Nicknamed for the grain that thrives in this region, Randall refers to the area as "the breadbasket of Montana.
Starting A New Life In Rural America: 21 Things You Need to Know Before You Make Your Move [Ragnar Benson] on bahana-line.com *FREE* shipping on. Starting A New Life In Rural America: 21 Things You Need to Know Before You Make Your Move by Benson, Ragnar (1/1/) [aa] on bahana-line.com *FREE*.
Unlike his sister, who left for college and took a job in the big city of Billings, Randall is pure country and was born to farm. He can quote the exact time he graduated from high school and was free to do what he loved: Best day of my life, because me and school really didn't get along that well. Randall Tyler says he runs on diesel fuel. Farming, he says, "just gets in your blood. As a small child, he tagged along with his dad to the fields. He could identify whose land they passed in the pickup and the tractors each man drove.
He took every chance he could to ride on the combine and watch his dad tinker with equipment.
He was pint-sized when he took apart his green pedal tractor so he could "overhaul its engine," he laughs. By age 5 or 6, he was steering a real truck between rows of bales. Each morning, he tunes his radio to the Northern Ag Network to hear reports on the markets and the weather. Like all farmers, he says, he's at the mercy of both.
He used to work with his dad, growing and harvesting barley and wheat. Now, Randall is on his own to manage it all. Darla sees their dad in Randall in the way he talks, moves and fixates on projects. Randall misses the conversations after he and his dad each devoured the Trader's Dispatch, a monthly publication catering to farmers, ranchers and the like that he calls the "farmer's bible.
His thoughts turn to his father when he sprays the fallow field and passes the two knobs where they took a break a few years ago, field glasses in hand, and watched a herd of antelope. He holds onto the good memories: When Randall faces a predicament -- questions like when to sell or where; what and how much chemical to spray -- he says to himself, "Darn it, Dad, I wish you were here to make this decision. But he knows what his father would say: Gotta take care of the farm, keep it active, do what you think is right. Just as coyotes and cats mark their territory, Michael Rosmann says, so do humans -- but with tall fences and legal paperwork.
Rosmann is a longtime farmer and Iowa psychologist who specializes in agricultural behavioral health. He's referring to the "agrarian imperative," a theory related to the territorial nature of animals that also applies to humans. Any danger of losing that territory, of losing that farm, heaps on pressure, he says -- especially when the land has been passed down across generations.
Dick Tyler's parents purchased the family farm from the original homesteaders in , during the Great Depression. An old wooden homestead wagon, eventually purchased by Tyler to celebrate the history, remains parked near the house between the gravel driveway and a long row of bright red poppies. The place is about 10 miles from the itty-bitty town of Big Sandy, a crossroads that's home to people. Darla Tyler-McSherry helped her mom garden as a girl and still does so during trips back to the farm. Tyler was born in the house his parents built. It's the same house where Randall and Darla grew up.
Their year-old mother, Lenore, still lives there, and someday, Randall expects that the home will be his -- hopefully, by then, with Mrs. For now, he holds onto his own place 30 miles to the north in Gildford, an even-smaller town where he knows everyone and they all know him. Randall, 54, often stays with his mom during the busy season, which begins in April and runs through mid-October. The days are long and the weekends rarely free; whatever it takes to get the work done.
Darla, 50, who helped her mom garden as a girl and still does during visits, reads from a poem her grandmother Marion Tyler Lawrence wrote. It's a love note to her late first husband -- Dick Tyler's father -- and the farm they cherished. Rest well my love In heaven above This farm is kept well As I do tell This land of the sand Is cared for by loving hearts and hands.
Thank you dear children For the love and the care That you give there God shall bless you for your love and care And will keep you safely in His arms Free from all harm. There are a number of explanations for why suicide rates are higher in rural America: For farmers, there are particular economic stressors too, including an existence in which crops -- and one's livelihood -- can be wiped out with a drought, infestation or minute hailstorm. Costs for fuel and fertilizer climb while prices earned per bushel plummet.
The President introduces tariffs, adding uncertainty to a life that's already plenty uncertain. The solitude of life in Montana's vast open spaces can add to the emotional challenges facing farmers. The very psychological traits that make farmers successful -- the ability to toil alone, rely on personal judgment and take risks -- work against them if they're struggling emotionally or financially, says Rosmann, the agricultural behavioral health expert. Of Montana's 56 counties, 45 have a population of fewer than six people per square mile, and 10 of those have a population of fewer than one person per square mile, according to the US Census Bureau.
And most counties have a mental health care professional shortage, state figures show. In a place like Montana, where the winters are long and dark, a man is taught to "cowboy up," be independent and not be a burden to others, says Karl Rosston, a licensed clinical social worker who serves as the suicide prevention coordinator for the state's Department of Public Health and Human Services. The stigma attached to mental illness looms large, he says, and depression is "seen as a weakness. It's also a gun culture -- "If you're from Montana, you grew up with guns," Rosston said -- which means access to the most lethal method for suicide comes easy.
Nearly two out of three suicides in Montana are by firearm, compared with half for the United States as a whole, he says. Plus, Montana is home to a large number of military veterans and seven Native American reservations -- two groups with disproportionate suicide rates. Add to this, studies have shown increased rates of depression and suicide linked to factors like pesticides and high altitude. Seven of the top 10 states for suicide rates, according to the CDC list , are in the Mountain States. Like his mother before him and his son after him, he had a rare hereditary eye disease called lattice dystrophy.
It can make the eyes feel like sandpaper beneath the eyelids and spawn the kind of sensitivity to light that can require days in darkness, Randall explains from experience. It causes intertwining deposits that cloud the corneas. Although there's no cure, corneal transplants often help. Tyler had at least eight transplants over the years, his kids say.
In the summer of , his left eye needed another transplant. At the same time, an unrelated infection in his right eye had been giving him trouble. He was struggling to see, and he couldn't drive or work the land he loved. He went to Missoula for the corneal transplant, Darla says, and it was successful.
Given his age, however, the doctor warned that it would take longer than before to heal. And then gastrointestinal issues hit him, requiring several trips to the ER in Great Falls, more than an hour from home.
He'd been offered temporary relief but no answers, his kids say, and a doctor's appointment that was further out than he liked. Dick Tyler wasn't willing to wait. Ten days after his surgery, he was dead. Their dad had weathered his share of challenges. On top of the corneal transplants, he'd had a hip replacement and emergency bypass surgery -- not to mention that mangled toe from the auger accident.
He was the sort who bounced back and looked forward. Plus, Darla had always taken comfort in a conversation she'd overheard decades earlier. It was during America's farm crisis of the '80s, when losses, debts and foreclosures skyrocketed amid overproduction and a grain embargo against the Soviet Union. He was talking with a friend about the farmers who'd taken their lives. Her dad looked down at the floor and shook his head, she remembers, and said, "What could ever be so bad that would make a person feel like they had to do that to themselves?
The relief she felt then, coupled with a more recent comment he'd made to Randall about the burden that suicide places on those left behind, allowed her to believe that for him suicide "would never be the answer. After a year of looking, they finally decided that building their own home made more sense. One of Kempton's co-workers at the hospital, a nurse, is commuting 50 miles one way from North Platte because she can't find a small home to buy in Ogallala. The hospital's director said the lack of adequate — or even available — housing is the main impediment to attracting and retaining quality workers.
The easiest answer for a town like Ogallala is to just build more, right? But small towns like this are still considered risky investments by most outside developers. They can make a lot more money in cities where land and home values are even higher.
Ogallala is learning this the hard way. Recently, the town struggled to find capital to redevelop a shuttered middle school into condos and apartments, to help ease the shortage. Hovendick's extended family is from Ogallala and he jumped at the chance to move here five years ago from Lincoln and raise his young family. The shortage of adequate or even available homes has clearly led to some soul searching. As he sees it, rural America is close to rebounding but is stymied because there are so few places to live. So Hovendick and other business leaders are behind a plan to ask voters this fall to approve a reallocation of local sales tax.
The money would be used to build more workforce housing and offer incentives for developers to come here. We have to start helping ourselves. Nationally, rural housing experts say the same thing.
You have to have a well-organized local group of leaders committed to raising money and getting things done, in this era where federal funding for rural development is trending down. Mary Wilson, director of the local economic development office in Ogallala, Neb. To that end, Mary Wilson, the local economic development officer, is eager to show off a new subdivision sprouting up on the prairie north of town, near the hospital, which she says could serve as starter homes for nurses and other professionals there.
The developer saw the need and decided to come in and build four new duplexes on his own.
Even this project is way behind schedule, because of the labor shortage. Wilson, who grew up in an even smaller town in western Nebraska, says rural America has suffered from a confidence problem for too long. If you hear over and over that you're withering away, you start to believe it.
To hear people in Ogallala tell it, the national housing shortage is more a wake-up call than a crisis for rural America. In the audio of this report, as in a previous Web version, we state that voters would consider a small sales tax hike. In fact, the proposal is to reallocate existing sales tax funds. Accessibility links Skip to main content Keyboard shortcuts for audio player. Local leaders say it's hard to expand the tax base without more homes.
Facebook Twitter Flipboard Email.