Do More Ag Launches Walk With Me Mental Health Campaign

Oct 12, 2023

The Do More Agriculture Foundation hosted the Walk With Me campaign on World Mental Health Day according to a release.

The Do More Agriculture Foundation (Do More Ag) launched the Walk With Me campaign, to coincide with World Mental Health Day, which was on Oct. 10. This campaign’s goal is to raise mental health awareness and honour those who have been lost to suicide in the agriculture community. Participants are encouraged invite other to go for a walk, and share their memories and stories to foster a supportive and understanding environment.

“I regularly walk and journal, and created a short poem called ‘Walk with me’ that outlined the many feelings that someone might have when their mental health is low,” said Chris Manley, the founder of the Walk With Me campaign and a beef and sheep farmer in East Devon, England. “I thought to myself how lucky I am to have support, and wouldn’t it be terrible if someone felt alone, particularly on a farm? So, I decided to post a video on social media of me walking and reciting the poem to start the campaign, to encourage people to walk and talk, as a step towards recovery.”

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Video: Wheat Yields in USA and China Threatened by Heat Waves Breaking Enzymes

A new peer reviewed study looks at the generally unrecognized risk of heat waves surpassing the threshold for enzyme damage in wheat.

Most studies that look at crop failure in the main food growing regions (breadbaskets of the planet) look at temperatures and droughts in the historical records to assess present day risk. Since the climate system has changed, these historical based risk analysis studies underestimate the present-day risks.

What this new research study does is generate an ensemble of plausible scenarios for the present climate in terms of temperatures and precipitation, and looks at how many of these plausible scenarios exceed the enzyme-breaking temperature of 32.8 C for wheat, and exceed the high stress yield reducing temperature of 27.8 C for wheat. Also, the study considers the possibility of a compounded failure with heat waves in both regions simultaneously, this greatly reducing global wheat supply and causing severe shortages.

Results show that the likelihood (risk) of wheat crop failure with a one-in-hundred likelihood in 1981 has in today’s climate become increased by 16x in the USA winter wheat crop (to one-in-six) and by 6x in northeast China (to one-in-sixteen).

The risks determined in this new paper are much greater than that obtained in previous work that determines risk by analyzing historical climate patterns.

Clearly, since the climate system is rapidly changing, we cannot assume stationarity and calculate risk probabilities like we did traditionally before.

We are essentially on a new planet, with a new climate regime, and have to understand that everything is different now.