Be strong; ask for help

Jan 23, 2025

As a society we’re learning about variants in mental health – and consequently how to treat the diseases as well as the stigmas associated with depression and anxiety. Every facet of our culture is prone to mental illness, but the agricultural and farming communities are an at-risk segment.

Karen Endres is the Farmer Wellness Program coordinator at the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection. She looks for ways to help Wisconsin farmers with their mental health. She’s not a psychiatrist or therapist. Rather, she said, she likes to consider herself a bridge between farmers and mental-health connections. Her job requires a lot of public speaking to farmer organizations as well as speaking at expos.

“I’ve been in the agricultural industry since I graduated college,” she said. “I worked at a dairy co-op for 10 years as head of communications.”

Her husband is a farmer; she said being around farming every day has helped her recognize how the industry provides increased stressors. Farmers work long hours. And they face the complications of working with a family business that has passed farms down through generations. Sometimes one sibling is picked to inherit the farm, forcing other siblings to figure out other options.

“A healthy farmer is a healthy farm,” Endres said. “Financially we’re constantly in a fluctuating market. Farmers are at the mercy of the weather. (They) work around big equipment and safety hazards.”

And there’s the fear of losing the farm. People in rural communities often feel isolated and cut off from assistance. Endres said there are fewer farmers than in previous generations, with a resulting breakdown of communities.

“I essentially go out and educate people,” she said. “A farmer may wake in the morning and find it difficult to get out of bed.”

Depression may have set in but the farmer isn’t fully aware of the symptoms.

“Some may not know there are better ways to cope,” she said. “A therapist can help them look at their life through a different lens.”

Endres hosts a podcast called “Rural Realities” where she talks about topics like stress in farm transitions, obstacles in life and suicide. She refers to what she calls the “four As” – affordability, accessibility, awareness and acceptability. She’s identified a pool of mental-health providers. They can meet with clients online, something many farmers appreciate because of the confidentiality and easy access to help.

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Video: Why Your Food Future Could be Trapped in a Seed Morgue

In a world of PowerPoint overload, Rex Bernardo stands out. No bullet points. No charts. No jargon. Just stories and photographs. At this year’s National Association for Plant Breeding conference on the Big Island of Hawaii, he stood before a room of peers — all experts in the science of seeds — and did something radical: he showed them images. He told them stories. And he asked them to remember not what they saw, but how they felt.

Bernardo, recipient of the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award, has spent his career searching for the genetic treasures tucked inside what plant breeders call exotic germplasm — ancient, often wild genetic lines that hold secrets to resilience, taste, and traits we've forgotten to value.

But Bernardo didn’t always think this way.

“I worked in private industry for nearly a decade,” he recalls. “I remember one breeder saying, ‘We’re making new hybrids, but they’re basically the same genetics.’ That stuck with me. Where is the new diversity going to come from?”

For Bernardo, part of the answer lies in the world’s gene banks — vast vaults of seed samples collected from every corner of the globe. Yet, he says, many of these vaults have quietly become “seed morgues.” “Something goes in, but it never comes out,” he explains. “We need to start treating these collections like living investments, not museums of dead potential.”

That potential — and the barriers to unlocking it — are deeply personal for Bernardo. He’s wrestled with international policies that prevent access to valuable lines (like North Korean corn) and with the slow, painstaking science of transferring useful traits from wild relatives into elite lines that farmers can actually grow. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But he’s convinced that success starts not in the lab, but in the way we communicate.

“The fact sheet model isn’t cutting it anymore,” he says. “We hand out a paper about a new variety and think that’s enough. But stories? Plants you can see and touch? That’s what stays with people.”

Bernardo practices what he preaches. At the University of Minnesota, he helped launch a student-led breeding program that’s working to adapt leafy African vegetables for the Twin Cities’ African diaspora. The goal? Culturally relevant crops that mature in Minnesota’s shorter growing season — and can be regrown year after year.

“That’s real impact,” he says. “Helping people grow food that’s meaningful to them, not just what's commercially viable.”

He’s also brewed plant breeding into something more relatable — literally. Coffee and beer have become unexpected tools in his mission to make science accessible. His undergraduate course on coffee, for instance, connects the dots between genetics, geography, and culture. “Everyone drinks coffee,” he says. “It’s a conversation starter. It’s a gateway into plant science.”