Farms.com Home  › News

Putting on Your Oxygen Mask: Mental Health is Essential to Caring for the Farm and Farm Family

As a pig farmer, taking care of your animals, farm and family is always top-of-mind. But it’s equally important to prioritize your well-being. Caring for yourself means managing stress and recognizing when to seek support.

Mental Health in Agriculture
The upcoming holiday season can house a lot of feelings for the agricultural community. Farmers are hardwired to prioritize the wellness of those around them, especially when it comes to caring for and tending to the needs of animals that help feed the world and ensure food security. However, it is equally as important for farmers to prioritize their own wellness.

Mental health and physical health depend on each other. And, often, farmers can help one another identify when their mental health may need a check-up.

Tips for Mental Health and Wellness
It is crucial for farmers to check in with themselves and others during trying times like the present where the pork industry is facing one of its most difficult periods.

The following Q&A with AgriSafe Network, a non-profit organization representing health professionals and educators to reduce health disparities among the agricultural community, helps remind all of us about the importance of mental health and shares resources that can support agricultural communities.

Click here to see more...

Trending Video

Screening Nursery Ingredients - Kynna Crawford

Video: Screening Nursery Ingredients - Kynna Crawford


In this episode of The Swine Nutrition Blackbelt Podcast, Kynna Crawford, Graduate Research Assistant at South Dakota State University, discusses how Plackett-Burman designs can help screen nursery diet ingredients for early post-weaning feed intake. She explains why low intake after weaning contributes to stress and mortality, how screening trials can evaluate multiple ingredients in a single study, and how the approach can support both research and commercial nursery nutrition decisions. Listen now on all major platforms!

Click here to read the full research article: https://academic.oup.com/jas/article/...

"A single screening trial can help identify which nursery ingredients deserve deeper research for early post-weaning feed intake."

Meet the guest: Kynna Crawford / kynna-crawford-a2610a3aa is a Master's student in Animal Sciences at South Dakota State University, where her work focuses on swine nutrition and nursery pig management. Her research examines strategies to alleviate weaning stress, including dietary approaches and screening tools to identify ingredients that may promote early feed intake. Learn more from Kynna Crawford on The Swine Nutrition Blackbelt Podcast, available on all major platforms.