Rural Colorado communities still lack adequate behavioral health services. A new state-sponsored group will help.

Maddy Butcher with her gelding “Table”.  Butcher started Buck the Trend, a therapist-led workshop for ranchers, farmers and horse people to dig into mental health struggles (photo by Beau Gaughran)

Legislators approved Senate Bill 55 to bridge state services and agriculture communities struggling with “a cluster of different potential roadblocks” to mental health care

Robert Sakata appeared to have so much going for him that he doubts anyone knew his real state of mind until he choked up while giving a report to the Colorado Water Conservation Board at a meeting in 2021.  He was a second-generation farmer who grew 3,000 acres of vegetables on his family’s land in Brighton. He was well known and respected, the governor-appointed CWCB board member from the South Platte/Republican Basin. He had a market of 3 million to 4 million people on the Front Range to buy his produce. And he was on his way to becoming the Colorado Department of Agriculture’s first agricultural water policy adviser, a role he has filled since December 2023.

But he was deeply worried — about his father, who was ailing, about increasing regulatory burdens that were driving up costs of operation, about a host of other challenges unique to producers.  He wondered how he was going to house the 400 seasonal employees queued up to work for him. And he was facing other, more surprising problems that he told the board urban farmers in his region face. People were stealing farm equipment. They were dumping mattresses in their fields. They were putting grass clippings in irrigation ditches. And like many others, Sakata had the added stress of losing two entire crops in a single hailstorm. Then there was the guilt of possibly not being able to maintain his father’s legacy.

That’s when Sakata broke down in the meeting. He said the burdens he mentioned contributed to “the depressed mood of farmers and ranchers in Colorado” and he wanted the board to understand how much stress they’re under and how certain policies could affect them.

Organizations like the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union, the Colorado Farm Bureau, Colorado State University’s Colorado AgrAbility Project and the Colorado Behavioral Health Administration have been working to bring behavioral health options to rural communities through programs like AgWell, Colorado Agricultural Addiction and Mental Health Program and Buck the Trend.

Now more help has arrived, in the creation of an Ag Behavioral Work Group, which the Colorado Department of Agriculture announced Tuesday.  The group was formed through Senate Bill 55, which passed in 2024 and is scheduled for a sunset review in 2029. It is tasked with guiding an agricultural and rural behavioral health program within the Behavioral Health Administration, and will have a dedicated administration staff member who will serve as a liaison between the administration, the Colorado Department of Agriculture, behavioral health-care providers, rural community leaders, agricultural communities, and nonprofit organizations that serve agricultural communities, according to the bill.

The group consists of 14 people who represent varying types of experts on agriculture and behavioral or mental health, both as care providers or care seekers, as well as representatives from the state Agriculture, Public Health and Environment and Behavioral Health departments. Sakata has stepped in to lead it for the Agriculture Department.

State Rep. Meghan Lukens, whose district includes several rural counties on the Western Slope, said she worked on the bill with the Colorado Farmers Union because “the lack of mental health support in rural Colorado is a very pervasive issue, and we see study after study and example after an example of how, especially in our agricultural communities, lack of behavioral health and mental health support is leading to an increased level of suicide rates.”

U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet reported in a farmer and rancher mental health study one-pager that the rate of suicide among farmers is 3.5 times greater than the general population.  And according to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, in the five years from 2018 to 2022, there were 102 suicides among people whose careers are in agriculture, forestry, fishing or hunting, making it the fourth-highest rate among all occupations tracked by the department, behind construction workers, mining and oil workers, and managers of companies.

Chad Reznicek, a behavioral health specialist with the AgrAbility Project, said rural suicides led to the creation of the Farm Ranch Stress Assistance Network, which came out of the 2018 Farm Bill that directed money toward addressing rural behavioral health issues across the country. He says other stressors arise from “agriculture, as an occupation,” having “so many variables beyond someone’s control.” Reznicek worked in juvenile corrections for a long time, “and it was super stressful, but my paycheck was predictable,” he said. “I got to leave, even if it was hours later than I wanted. There was a big metal door that slammed shut and created visceral separation between me and the stressful environment I was in. There was no generational pressure to become, like, a second wave therapist. And on top of all that, weather, the market, foreign policy — none of that disrupted my paycheck. “But in agriculture, even under the best circumstances, it can be really hard to make a living,” he added. “And then on top of that, you’ve got that pressure to hold on to land that’s maybe been in the family for a few generations.”

All of this can add up to extreme stress in regions where “you’re trying to deal with stigma, you’re trying to deal with all the rural barriers to accessing acceptable, affordable and available health care,” he said. “It’s just a cluster of different potential roadblocks. So anything that can be tailored specifically to help people get the support they need, I think, is important.”

The new liaison position created by Senate Bill 55 will travel into rural communities, learn about their behavioral health care resources and set up partnerships with existing groups to “help people seek the care they need with people they trust, in a way that is not stigmatizing, and meets them where they’re at,” Lukens said.

The work group will figure out how to get more behavioral health care to farmers, ranchers, other agricultural industry workers and their families by compiling best practices, identifying gaps in services and engaging with other stakeholders, an Agriculture Department news release says.  The group will meet monthly “to discuss the obstacles and opportunities of providing culturally competent behavioral health services to agricultural communities,” and report findings and recommend legislative or policy changes to officials.

Sakata said as soon as he heard about the group, he volunteered to lead it. His interest started last year when he was appointed water policy adviser and started traveling the state listening to farmers’ and ranchers’ stories. It brought him back to his struggles in 2021, when he bottled them up because he felt he had no one to talk to. “But I was lucky, because people reached out and that just helped me so tremendously,”  he said.

Now he wants to help get behavioral health resources into the farthest reaches of Colorado through programs like COMET, developed by the High Plains Research Network community advisory council and taught through the University of Colorado School of Medicine, which teaches people to intervene when they encounter someone who is in a “vulnerable space.” “Let’s get the people trained that are just interacting with the farmers, maybe at arms length, like the seed dealer or the bank or somebody like that, because you never know what may be going on inside of someone’s head” he said.

By Tracy Ross/Colorado Sun