Farm stress - self-esteem

When self-esteem is dependent on factors beyond a farmer's control

by Hal Brown, LICSW
Rural Mental Health Psychotherapist

Updated 6/24/00

The perfect farmer, is there is such a person and I really doubt it, never makes a mistake. But nobody can control every factor that affects crop yield. I'm even less of an expert on feed corn than I am on cranberries, even though for ten years we lived in rented farm houses surrounded by hundred of acres of corn. What I am about to write is based on simple observation, so if anybody knows different, please email me. Corn is a flat-land crop. If a farmer's yield is down, it is down on every acre. Cranberry farming in Massachusetts is different. We have micro-climates from bog to bog because even when bogs are constructed in fields, they are built at different levels so water can flow from bog to bog. Older bogs conform to the lay of the land because they were built before heavy equipment could easily clear away the hills.

Each bog has its own climate. Frost night temperatures vary greatly from bog to bog, and on any bog there may be coves or low spots where small areas may even be a few degrees colder than the rest of the bog.

In southeastern Massachusetts, where no cranberry bog is more than twenty or thirty miles from the ocean, our weather comes from all directions. We have hurricanes coming up the coast and nor'easters swirling down the coast, we have storms moving in from the Midwest and up from the south. Some farms a few miles apart have drastically different amounts of rainfall. Cape Cod, which might as well be an island, has its own weather. A dreaded hail storm, which can destroy a crop, can hit only a few square miles.

In addition to the effects of weather on crop yield, there are still the unsolved mysteries of why pest infestations can vary from year to year and farm to farm despite all the scientific IPM utilized in pesticide applications. The same goes for fungus and weeds. Some years bees don't seem to work as hard as other years, and in a given year pollination can be down on some farms and not on others.

It's fairly easy to look at a field of corn and see that all the rows are the same height and each stalk has the same number of ears. We used to take rides in the country in central Michigan where we lived, and could easily tell what kind of a year all the farmers were having. Everyone knew that corn should be "knee high by the Fourth of July".

When I wrote this some years ago, about halfway through harvest, I knew from our own bog and from talking to other growers, that there was going to be quite a variation in yield from farm to farm and on some farms, from bog to bog, and even from parts of one bog to parts of another.

We all knew it would not be a good year for some growers, and this meant that some members of the sub-species Homo cransapiens would not be happy campers. This was all before the current disaster.

If you experienced periods of depression only on years you had a bad crop, and especially on years where farmers you know had better crops, you probably tend to base your self-esteem on factors you can't control. If you are also depressed now, there is certainly a rational basis for this. However, if you are also blaming yourself, unless you had a part in decisions that contributed to the crisis*, that is as irrational is it was when you blamed yourself for having a bad crop in the past. You'll keep doing this unless you figure out why you, a usually rational person, are reacting so irrationally. Ask yourself whether this goes back to childhood.

We live in an extremely competitive culture. The notion that "it's not whether you win or loose, but how you play the game" is a joke. Children are often more influenced by peer pressure and expectations than they are by parents, teachers and coaches combined. Professional and amateur sports, even the Olympics fosters the idea that winning is everything. Children see the best athletes in the world heart-broken because they only won a Silver Medal. Being second best just wasn't enough. "Go for the Gold" has become an advertising slogan. Exhibition figure skating, more like ballet than sport, has given way to competitive skating events. What next, ballet competitions?

Are cranberry growers competitive?

Apparently Boston Globe staff writer Lynneley Browning thinks so:

A few years ago, competitive rivalries were afoot in bogs across the country. For proof, look no further than the red royalty that traveled all the way from Wisconsin to check out Carver's (CCCGA Cranberry) festival in 1998.

"In Massachusetts, the proceeds from this festival go to the growers (my note: there is no admission fee although a $1.00 donation is asked for parking and what is left after the entertainers and other fees are paid goes to the Growers' Association), but we take money from our festivals and give it back to the community," said June Potter, a cranberry grower from Warrens, Wisc., pop.400. And the marshes here (in Mass.) are much smaller and more irregular," she said. "ours are straight and laser leveled."

A fresh faced teenaged girl standing next to her nodded solemnly. "ours are perfect," said Amy Nemitz, 17, the Warrens Cranberry Festival Queen, who sported a diamond tiara that attracted inquisitive looks."

The Boston Globe, Sunday, October 11,1998

Now cranberry growers in Massachusetts and on the west coast are hearing that the large growers in Wisconsin have little sympathy for them, that they call them "hobby farmers" and believe that if they go out of business it is because they were too inefficient to begin with. This is an example of basing one's self-esteem on an irrational belief in your superiority. If you believe you are a better farmer, or a better person, because you happen to grow cranberries where the typical yield is twice what it is in other parts of the country, you are engaging in self-deception. If those who are feeling their own self-esteem damaged, and and compare themselves to you and believe these equally irrational messages, they are needlessly and illogically exacerbating their own pain.

Most adults do their best to set a good example for the younger generation. But some, who are parents, have a negative influence. In order to fully understand why your self-esteem is dependent on your crop yield, or on surviving this crisis, it is necessary to ask yourself these questions:

Were your parents critical of you? Were they difficult to please? Did you ever feel that you had to live up to their expectations for them to love you? If, for example, you always got B's in English, and then got one A+, did they forever expect you to get A's in English? If you took over the family farm and had one extraordinary yield, an A+, and you then found you always felt you were failing when you had a smaller crop, you are holding yourself to the same standards your parents did.

If you can honestly look back at your childhood and say your parents were non-judgmental and gave you unconditional acceptance, there's a good chance you just grew up as a child of our times. You developed a personality where your self-esteem was dependent on whether you could meet a self-imposed standard. Unfortunately, as a farmer, this depends not only on your ability; but on factors you can't control.

There's nothing wrong with striving for excellence. But if you beat yourself up when you fail, even in the slightest way, you will be unhappy much of the time even if you aren't a farmer. This is because, except for the rare genius, everyone has a learning curve. Remember, three steps forward and two steps back will always get you where you are going unless there are factors involved that you simply can't control. Now your fate depends more on others than it does on yourself. You can, and should, do what you can to be involved in decisions that will effect your future. If you do that and are still are one of the casualties, your self esteem should remain intact and you can be proud that you fought the good fight.

* The is a place for self-blame, and that's when you truly did something you ought to regret because your motives were selfish, because you lied, or because you didn't follow through on a promise. This is sometimes called "guilt in good faith" and should be a part of one's code of personal ethics and morality.