UK Centers Successfully Train Agricultural Community Members to Recognize Signs of Mental Distress

Oct 13, 2021

By Katie Pratt

Agricultural work can be a source of stress, anxiety and depression due to its unpredictability and physical and mental demands. University of Kentucky College of Agriculture, Food and Environment researchers are helping train Kentuckians to recognize signs of mental distress in members of their local agricultural community. The program is seeing great success.

Through the college’s Southeast Center for Agricultural Health and Injury Prevention and the Central Appalachian Regional Education and Research Center, Kentuckians who regularly interact with farmers and rural health care providers are learning Question-Persuade-Refer. QPR is a nationally recognized suicide prevention program that helps individuals recognize when someone is facing mental hardship and connect them with health care professionals. UK researchers took the existing QPR program and developed additional materials to help participants identify farm-related stressors and agriculture-specific behavioral clues that may indicate a farmer is going through a difficult time.

“When the 2018 federal farm bill appropriated money for mental health services for farmers, it really opened up the conversation about mental health in the agricultural community almost overnight,” said Joan Mazur, professor and deputy director of the Southeast Center for Agricultural Health and Injury Prevention. “People really seem to appreciate the opportunity to talk about mental health, use the word suicide and have conversations about struggles they see in their communities.”

During the summer of 2020, with support from a U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agrisafe subaward, the Southeast Center trained 17 certified QPR Institute trainers who, in turn, used those skills to train 415 Kentuckians as part of their Agricultural Community QPR for Farmers and Farm Families program.

“We really wanted to leverage this important policy ‘moment’ and develop a community-based support network to address this difficult issue,” Mazur said. “We asked people to participate who we knew were already embedded in rural agricultural communities, working with farmers on a regular basis and who really cared about farmers’ mental health. We wanted to find ways to break down the boundaries that farmers can put up.”

Alethea Bruzek, UK Cooperative Extension Service agent, was among the UK and Kentucky State University extension agents and faculty members initially trained in QPR. Since being trained, she has trained others.

“I have a unique opportunity to reach farm families through my work in extension,” said Bruzek, Boyle County family and consumer sciences extension agent. “This training gave me the tools that I need to start a conversation with someone in my local farming community, who may be struggling. It was a great chance for me to try to help.”

The centers received additional support from the 2020-2021 Kentucky Legislature through an effort championed by Kentucky Rep. Brandon Reed. The legislature’s allocation provided funding for 40 more QPR trainers to train an additional 300 Kentuckians in the Kentucky Rural Mental Health and Suicide Prevention pilot program. The second cohort of participants are located in counties with high needs for these services. They live in areas with high rates of morbidity and mortality and a large number of farms.

“It is extremely rare to have support from a state legislature to address rural mental health, and we are so appreciative that our legislators have made this issue a priority,” Mazur said.

The centers are also studying the effectiveness of the trainings. In the first group of participants, UK researchers surveyed them three days before and one month after the training.

“Our findings show that the training had a statistically significant impact upon trainees. After the training, participants were twice as willing to intervene with someone who needs help,” said Carolyn Oldham, director of continuing education for the Central Appalachian Regional Education and Research Center. “In our first group of trainers, two had actually intervened with a producer within the first month after learning QPR.”

The second cohort of participants is in the midst of training. Researchers will survey this group at one month, six months and one year after they complete the program.

The researchers are also working with the Kentucky Injury Prevention and Research Center to upgrade the state’s suicide hotline so when a Kentuckian calls it, a fellow Kentuckian answers the phone. Callers to the Kentucky hotline are also asked if they are a farmer or member of a farm family, which will allow researchers to track mental health issues in rural communities.

The Southeast Center for Agricultural Health and Injury Prevention and the Central Appalachian Regional Research and Education Center are funded by the National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety and directed by Wayne Sanderson, a professor in the UK Department of Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering.

Plans are underway for the project to build on the Kentucky model and extend and expand their agricultural community-based QPR train-the-trainer model to other Southeastern states the center serves.

Source : uky.edu

Video: Can Gene Editing Give Seeds a Stronger Start?

Reagan Reed has a way of describing his research that might make a plant breeder pause.

“I’m the sort of person who likes to break things to understand them,” he says.

What he breaks are genes involved in seed germination. Reed, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Davis, is investigating whether changing those genes can help seeds establish healthy plants under a wider range of conditions.

Reed recently attended the National Association for Plant Breeding meeting in College Station, Texas, as an NAPB Borlaug Scholar. His work speaks to a question that matters well beyond a research lab: what does it take for a seed to get a crop off to a strong start?

A seed that germinates quickly, alongside the others planted with it, spends less time vulnerable to stresses before seedlings become established.

“If you’re able to bridge that gap between germination to stand establishment, then that’s going to give you the highest probability of having a solid yield that year,” Reed says. “There’s a bunch that can go wrong after that, but it maximises your yield from the start, at least.”

Reed works in Dr. Imtiyaz Khanday’s lab at UC Davis, where his research focuses on seed quality in tomatoes and potatoes. He brings an unusual academic background to the work: at Skidmore College, he studied both biology and Latin.

Reed believes that combination prepared him for research. Translating an ancient text means studying each word, weighing its possible meanings and using context to reach the best interpretation. There is rarely a way to know with complete certainty what an author intended. Science, he says, requires a similar willingness to work through uncertainty.

“Attention to detail and comfortability working with uncertainty,” is how he sums up what Latin taught him.

In the lab, uncertainty can produce a surprise. Reed describes changing one gene and seeing little effect. Changing a second gene also appears to do little. Put both changes in the same genetic background, though, and the result can be substantial.

“I break this gene, nothing really happens. I break this other gene, nothing really happens. I combine them into the same genetic background, and now there’s a massive effect,” he says.

Those interactions matter as researchers gain the ability to edit multiple genes at once. They also complicate any simple account of how a trait works: improving a seed may depend on understanding what several genes do together.

For Reed, the question is whether that knowledge could help seeds germinate reliably when conditions are difficult. Some of the genes he studies prevent germination under certain conditions. That response may serve a plant well in one setting while limiting its usefulness in agriculture. He wants to learn what happens when those genes are changed, and whether the result improves establishment.

Yet a discovery that works in a lab still has a long way to travel before it reaches a field. Reed argues that agricultural biotechnology faces an economic challenge as well as a scientific one. New tools can create value for farmers, he says, but developing them requires a way to support the work in an industry where margins can be thin.

His fellowship with Flagship Pioneering gave him a view across AI, agriculture-related work and human health research. It also reinforced the importance of bringing people with different expertise into the same conversation—a benefit of gatherings such as the NAPB meeting.

“You need to have a team of people with different backgrounds who are willing to work together and approach the same problem in different perspectives and different ways,” he says.

That thinking connects the different parts of Reed’s path. Latin taught him to examine details without expecting a perfect answer. Gene editing lets him test what individual genes do—and what happens when their effects combine. Working with people beyond his own field helps him ask what those findings could become.

He came to agriculture because of its reach: the possibility that work by a small group of researchers could eventually make a difference on a much larger scale. His immediate focus is smaller and more precise. He wants to understand what helps a seed get through its first days and become a healthy plant.