Despite caregiving making up a considerable portion of how individuals and governments spend their time and money, its impacts on caregivers’ well-being are not well understood. In this article, we identify the various manifestations of caregiver well-being, test rural-suburban-urban differences, and explore the role of state-level family policy. Drawing on responses from 4,620 caregivers of adults and children to the STAT Caregiving surveys from the North Central and Northeast Regions of the United States, we use latent class analysis to develop a caregiver well-being typology. We identify three latent classes of caregiver well-being: high, medium, and low and describe the composition of each class. Next, we use multinomial logistic regression to test differences between rural, suburban, and urban caregivers in their probability to be in each well-being class, while accounting for individual-level characteristics and the state-level context of care infrastructure. We find that rural and suburban caregivers are overrepresented among the low and medium well-being classes and underrepresented among the high well-being class relative to their urban counterparts. Additionally, caregivers’ own characteristics vary more across well-being than does the state-level family policy context. Our findings speak to the importance of robust family care policies that are attuned to differences in social and built infrastructure across rural, suburban, and urban residence.

This paper offers an overview of research perspectives, gaps, and priorities within the field of mental health and well-being among farming communities in the Global North. Developed by an international working group of scholars with expertise in the mental health and well-being of agricultural and rural communities, it outlines the importance of developing an international research agenda in this subject area by presenting five propositions. Each of the propositions addresses current research gaps and/or highlights potential advancements in investigations into one of the following areas of study: i) who is being researched, ii) what is being researched, iii) geographical gaps in research, iv) informal and formal support systems, and v) methodological approaches and issues. The purpose of this paper is to encourage discussion and present a potential agenda around which new studies might be inspired and developed, as well as to help drive forward more focussed, joined-up research across the Global North to facilitate more effective outcomes for individuals belonging to agricultural communities.

PURPOSE:Agricultural sector crises have historically led to a sharp increase in resources for farmers' mental health. Yet, our understanding of the effectiveness, acceptability, and long-term sustainability of these is limited, and research rarely assesses the offering of programming within a geographic region. METHODS:We conducted online environmental scans in 2019 and 2022 (a period that encapsulates a farm income crisis and the height of the COVID-19 pandemic) in three Midwest states to understand: 1) what the mental health programming landscape looks like, 2) how it has evolved in response to crises, and 3) the progress made toward addressing major stressors and key barriers to care. FINDINGS:The number of organizations providing resources more than quadrupled, and the number of programs and resources more than tripled. Organizations most represented shifted from the farm sector in 2019 to the health sector in 2022. Educational material remained most prevalent, followed by programming to increase health care access. Meanwhile, the share of programming addressing key stressors was halved. Programming was overwhelmingly targeted at the farm population over service providers, with visual representations overall lacking diversity. CONCLUSION:Findings around the sharp increases in programming and organizations involved hint at challenges connected to the coordination and sustainability of programming. The emphasis on addressing the manifestations of mental health challenges in tandem with limited linkages to financial resources raises questions about the efficacy and acceptability of programming. It also hints at the potential (re)enforcement of norms and stigma around mental health and help-seeking.

Rural social scientists have long sought to understand what the structure of agriculture will look like in the future, who is going to do the work, and under what conditions with a focus on family owned and operated farms. Central to the theorization of farm families' ability to continue farming in the midst of on-going changes are the deep inter-connections between the farm household and the farm operation and farm families’ ability to adjust how resources are used within the farm household and operation spheres. Yet in this paper we argue that the interface between the household and operation has largely been treated as a black box and when it has been considered, it has largely been from the vantage point of the farm operation at the expense of the farm household. We substantiate our argument by drawing on insights from our individual research and collective discussions during a three-day workshop around three themes (i.e. gender, life course and farm business cycle, formal and informal support systems). As an invitation for others to join us in opening a new line of research, we propose a research agenda and discuss considerations around research designs, data, funding, and collaborations to tackle this research agenda.

Objective Women have always played a crucial role in agriculture through their work on the farm, caring for the family and the household, and off-farm employment. Yet, like their essential contributions to agriculture, their mental health and well-being have largely been invisible since much of the focus of the mental health in agriculture research has been on older, male farmers. This paper seeks to address this knowledge gap by focusing on the emotional consequences stemming from the expectations of juggling childcare responsibilities, farm work and managing the household whilst keeping children safe. Methods The data were collected via focus groups and photovoice activity with, respectively, 68 and 33 farm women from Ohio, Wisconsin, and Vermont. ResultsThe content thematic analysis first indicates that the juggling of multiple roles along with limited support deeply impacted farm women's wellbeing. Worries that the children could get hurt was a major source of stress. Stress and mental health issues connected to children do not lessen as they age but rather shift and become more complex. Conclusion This article highlights the implications of the lack of investment in farm women's mental wellbeing and their lived realities of caring for children on the farm. Future research should address supply chain and affordability issues, particularly for rural childcare provision.

Despite 40-year-old evidence of childcare challenges limiting women’s participation in agriculture in the United States, it was not until a major societal crisis, COVID-19, that farm organizations and policy makers began to recognize that these challenges negatively impact the farm enterprise. Among farm persistence and farm transition scholars, farm households’ social and economic needs, including childcare, have also been underappreciated despite the constant exchange of time, money, and energy between the farm household and the enterprise. We use survey responses from 729 U.S. farm families to understand how children and their childcare needs shape the farm enterprise and the extent to which childcare arrangements, farm individuals and households, and farm enterprise characteristics interact with these decisions. A high proportion of respondents made changes to adapt to the needs of children with the greatest impact on farm productivity, followed by impact on the structure of labor on- and off- the farm, and impact on the farm enterprise structure. These impacts likely have short- and long-term consequences on the trajectory of the farm enterprise and well-being of the household. Different decisions required a different calculus and the trade-offs that respondents considered were shaped by access to a support system, access to financial resources, and specific needs of the children. Last, the limited variations across the four decisions for a number of farm individual and household characteristics hint both at the universality of being a farm parent needing to constantly adapt amid high rates of childcare challenges and inadequate social safety nets. We conclude our article by discussing the implications of our findings along with future research avenues.

Efforts to recruit and retain farmers have traditionally supported the farm business through a focus on access to land, capital, and business skills. While these efforts are critical, a small body of work indicates that these may be insufficient because they rarely account for the social and economic needs of farm households and how the (in)ability to meet these needs interacts with the development and economic viability of the farm enterprise. Social and economic needs include, but are not limited to access to health insurance and health care, childcare, adequate household and retirement income, affordable housing, and food security. This article introduces a symposium intended to shed light on these underappreciated needs and how they connect to the farm enterprise. We contend that a greater understanding of farm households’ lived realities meeting their social and economic needs could lead to a paradigm shift in how we understand and support farm families’ resilience. We set the stage for the eight articles in this symposium in two ways. First, we present the theoretical and empirical reasons why considering household-level needs is crucial when working towards supporting the agricultural sector. Second, we review the literature on farm households’ social and economic needs. We then thematically summarize the key insights from the eight articles. Despite variations in topics studied, research designs, and geographical contexts, we note a clear pattern in what the authors see as the implications of their findings. Namely, they reaffirm the need to challenge the traditional view that separates household needs from farm enterprise activities and outcomes. Their collective call for stronger social and agricultural programs and policies is noteworthy and may in part be connected to the structural underpinnings of the challenges meeting social and economic needs highlighted across the articles.

Scholars have noted persistent high rates of agricultural health and safety incidents and the need to develop more effective interventions. Participatory research provides an avenue to broaden the prevailing research paradigms and approaches by allowing those most impacted to illuminate and work to solve those aspects of their lives. One such approach is photovoice, an emancipatory visual narrative approach. Yet, despite its broad appeal, photovoice can be hard to implement. In this article, we leverage our experience using photovoice for a farm children safety project to describe and reflect on the ethical and methodological aspects broadly relevant to agricultural health and safety topics. We first contextualize the tensions of navigating between photovoice, the research ethics committees (RECs) regulatory frameworks, and competing views on visual representations in agriculture. We then discuss the sources of risks to participants and researchers, how we addressed these risks, and how these risks unfolded during the research phase of the photovoice activity. We conclude with three lessons we (re)learned: the importance of collaborating with RECs, the need to increase preparation to limit psychological risks to participants and researchers, and avenues to augment the emancipatory power of photovoice in a virtual environment.

In this review, we first assess the state of agricultural health and safety research as it pertains to the dynamic challenges facing automating agriculture on a warming planet. Then, we turn to social science fields such as rural sociology, science and technology studies, and environmental studies to leverage relevant insights on the introduction of new technologies, environmental risks, and associated workplace hazards. Increased rates of automation in agriculture alongside new risks associated with climate change create the need for anticipatory governance and adaptive research to study novel mechanisms of worker health and safety. The use of the PRISMA framework led to the 137 articles for our review. We identify three themes in the literature on agricultural health and safety: (1) adoption outcomes, (2) discrete cases of health risks, and (3) an emphasis on care and wellbeing in literature on dairy automation Our review led to the identification of research gaps, noting that current research (a) tends to examine these forces separately, instead of together, (b) has not made robust examination of these forces as socially embedded, and (c) has hesitated to examine the broad, transferable themes for how these forces work across industries. In response to these gaps, we suggest that attention to outside disciplines may provide agricultural health and safety research with a toolset to examine needed inquiry into the multiplicity of experiences of rural stakeholders, the industry specific problems arising from automation and climate change, and the socially embedded aspects of agricultural work in the future.

Increased attention to suicide in agriculture has led to an increase in interventions in-formed in part by research on who is most likely to die from suicide, using what means, and for what reason(s). However, the limited understanding of how suicide is studied and the limited engagement in previous studies with theories raises ques-tions about the body of knowledge underpinning these interventions. To assess pre-vailing methodological approaches and the implications of gaps in our understand-ing of suicide, we conducted a scoping review of 108 English-language articles. The use of the prevailing health science model to conduct literature reviews also provides a space to reflect on the knowledge that is missed or obscured when using overly positivistic approaches to identify and summarize bodies of literature. We find that the prevailing approaches to studying suicide are methodologically narrow, overplay a limited set of individual-level factors, and underplay key structural-level factors. In line with previous critics, our review hints at the inadequacy of existing interventions given that the existing body of knowledge has not adequately incorporated theoreti-cally important drivers of suicide. Our reflections on current approaches to conduct-ing literature reviews and gaps in the suicide literature provide a roadmap to bridge disciplinary traditions while helping address the knowledge gaps we have identified.

In recent years, the long-standing questions of why, how, and which farm families continue farming in the face of ongoing changes have increasingly been studied through the resilience lens. While this body of work is providing updated and novel insights, two limitations, a focus on macro-level challenges faced by the farm operation and a mismatch between the scale of challenges and resilience measures, likely limit our understanding of the factors at play. We use the example of medical economic vulnerability, a micro-level challenge traditionally confined to the household sphere of the agri-family system, as a way to call attention to these limitations. Focusing on United States (U.S.) farm households, we assess: (1) To what extent are they experiencing medical economic vulnerability when using objective and subjective outcome measures? (2) Which demographic and farm characteristics are associated with experiencing medical economic vulnerability? (3) What is the association between institutional arrangements and medical economic vulnerability? Our analysis of over 900 surveys coupled with a conceptual framework merging complementary insights from three bodies of literature revealed seemingly large differences in the prevalence of medical economic vulnerability across the objective and subjective measures with the subjective measure indicating a general sentiment of medical economic vulnerability in a majority of respondents. Conversely, limited variations were noted in who experiences medical vulnerability on the basis of demographic and farm characteristics, with stronger associations being connected to the households' health insurance arrangements. We conclude with three implications of our findings for the farm resilience literature.

Rural studies scholars have highlighted the important role farm households play in propping up the farm business along the life course. Yet, little is known about how challenges facing farm households impact the farm business and how social safety nets may interact with household and business development trajectories. We use the example of US farm households' access to health insurance and health care to develop empirical insights into these research gaps. We draw on a life course conceptual framework integrating the European and US literature and conduct bivariate analysis using age categories as the dependent variable on a primary dataset of 1,114 surveyed farm families. Difficulties meeting health care needs affected respondents at any age. Variations in trade-offs between consumption, savings and investments as farm households make health-related decisions hint at compounding effects over the life course on farm structure and transition timing. With biggest differences between households under and over 65 years of age (the threshold for universal public coverage), our findings highlight the importance of considering how social policies shape farm families' (in) ability to meet their social needs and the connections to farm persistence.

Objectives: Measures to curb the spread of COVID-19 in the Spring of 2020 immediately raised concerns among farm safety experts about the increase in children's risk exposure due to changes in childcare and schooling arrangements. The goal of this study is to understand how farm parents were taking care of their children in the early months of COVID-19. Methods: I conducted univariate and inductive content analysis on survey data from 134 farm parents from 38 U.S. states to understand. Results: My findings overall confirm experts' predictions. The move to distance learning for about three-quarter of respondents with school-age children and changes in childcare arrangements for over half of those with pre-school-age children led respondents to contend with fewer options and added responsibilities. Most frequently used adaptation strategies reflected lower reliance on the traditionally important social networks, a desire to preserve household income, and greater involvement of children on the farm. As a result, taking care of their children became harder for more than half of respondents with likely repercussions on children's exposure to risk, parents' well-being, and on the farm business. Conclusion: The empirical insights of this study provide descriptive baseline and contextual data for future research on the impact of COVID-19. The conceptual insights expand the farm safety literature by illustrating the need to study underappreciated structural factors shaping how farm parents juggle children with their professional obligations. Finally, findings around the complexity of raising children and connections to farm productivity and farm safety highlight the importance of considering farm women's well-being alongside the safety of their children.

In this study, we seek to illuminate: (1) the ways farm service providers and mental health professionals understand the drivers of farm stress, (2) the strategies, challenges, and opportunities farm service providers and mental health professionals identify for supporting the mental health needs of farm families, and; (3) opportunities for future research and outreach to improve the mental health of farmers in the U.S. Midwest region. We obtained qualitative data from a series of semi-structured key informant interviews with 19 subject matter experts, using content analysis to identify themes across four domains: main challenges, unique impacts by subpopulation, coping strategies, and interventions and recommendations. The key informants we interviewed identified a variety of acute and chronic stressors, including several that are structural, rather than individual and interpersonal, and which lie outside of the control of farmers themselves. They also highlighted diversity within farm populations by socio-demographic and farm characteristics as well as positive and negative coping strategies, with negative being more common. For interventions and recommendations, they stressed the importance of education on mental health, improving access to care, and addressing root causes of stress. While farmer stress is well-documented, less is known about the perspectives of farm service professionals and mental health providers who care for them. The insights from this study add important information on how to best support the immediate and long-term mental health needs of farmers and farm families in the U.S. Midwest and beyond.

Despite long-standing safety recommendations that non-working children be supervised off the worksite by an adult, little is known about farm families' ability to comply. We conducted a review of 92 documents and 36 key informant interviews in three U.S. states (Ohio, Vermont, and Wisconsin) to assess how farm service providers and farm organizations address the intersection of children and childcare with farm work and farm safety in programming. Through their programming, these two groups deeply influence farm families' social systems, affecting farm safety and farm business decisions. Study design and result interpretations were grounded in the women in agriculture literature, which examines the needs and realities of farm women (often the primary caregivers). Most documents reviewed did not address children, and even fewer addressed childcare. Interviews confirm findings of the document review. Despite awareness that farm families juggle work and children, few interviewees explicitly integrated children and childcare topics due to a messy and complex set of individual- and structural-level factors. We identified four possible, overlapping explanations for this tension: valuation of care vs. farm work; farm programming's traditional emphasis on the farm business; alignment of the programming with the agrarian ideal of the family farm; and the mismatch between farm programming scope, resources available, and childcare challenges. We conclude with two main implications for farm safety programs and farm children safety. First, farm programming's reinforcement of the social and cultural expectations regarding children's involvement in the farm operation from a young age could be counterproductive from a farm safety standpoint and miss an opportunity to provide alternative models of childrearing. Second, the invisibility of the lived realities of raising children may lead farm parents to distrust farm programming and deter them from participating.

Over the last 20 years, earth's increasing surface temperature has dramatically altered local climates and risks associated with agricultural work. In parallel, increasing automation has continued to be a hallmark of innovation in agriculture, promising to lower the economic and health externalities of labor in food production by reducing worker demand and hazardous exposure. However, many of these automations neither eliminate labor nor ameliorate climate change pressures on farms. As a result of the confluence between automation and environmental change, empirical studies into the social determinants of agricultural health and safety in rapidly automating industries impacted by local effects of climate change are essential for a responsive agricultural health and safety science. In this commentary, I suggest that looking outside of our disciplinary boundaries to the lessons learned from rural studies (RS), environmental social science (ESS), and science and technology studies (STS) can lend useful theoretical framing for the development of new research trajectories in the areas of automation and climate change as they impact agricultural health and safety.

In her 2020 Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society (AFHVS) presidential address, Molly Anderson outlined three ways to push beyond boundaries imposed on us and by us to work towards addressing global food system and societal problems. In this response essay, I draw on my experiences and my perspectives as a pre-tenure rural sociologist who is not from around here to highlight how I attempt to push beyond boundaries in my own work and to discuss challenges associated with the feasibility of some of Molly’s call. I also build on Molly’s call for boundary work including a broadening of international collaborations through increased engagement in cross-national comparative research, pivoting from interacting with global social movements to interacting with key stakeholders, and deepening of anti-discrimination work through the use of an intersectionality lens. Arguing that Molly’s call for action is bold but needed, I close my essay with a set of questions that I hope can contribute to larger discussions on how we can help one another push beyond boundaries to work towards more fair and sustainable food systems.

While farm safety researchers have seldom considered the association between farm parents' background and their children's safety, researchers who have compared first- and multi-generation farmers have found differences that may shape safety outcomes. We draw on the farm safety and family farm bodies of literature and a survey of 203 United States farm parents to assess the role of farming background in farm children risk exposure. Exploratory in nature, the bivariate analysis revealed no statistically significant differences between first- and multi-generation farmers in children injury, agricultural safety perceptions, knowledge, and practices but revealed differences in key demographic characteristics and parenting styles. A range of factors likely explain these findings with meso- and macro-level factors likely impacting farm parents' ability to adopt safety practices. In contrast to the emphasis on knowledge and behaviors, we call for the integration of lived realities in farm safety research and to do so in a way that connects realities and choices to larger contexts. We also call on the need to expand the toolkit of interventions to address meso- and macro-level factors. A shift towards addressing social and economic conditions in agriculture could reduce farm children's injuries while supporting the sustainability of farm labor systems.