When Tom and Maud Powell bought their farm in Southern Oregon’s Little Applegate Valley in 1998, the region had just been through a wet winter marked by flooding that ravaged the West.

They had a water right to a small creek, and it seemed to provide more than enough to irrigate their small, diversified vegetable and seed operation.

But with a series of debilitating droughts over the next two decades, their fortunes would change – and the family would become familiar with the concept of climate-induced stress and grief.

“We pretty quickly realized that we didn’t have quite as much water as expected,” Maud Powell told Farm Press. “We took steps to save water. We switched everything to drip tape, built several irrigation ponds and lined the ponds so we wouldn’t lose any water to leakage. We saved water off the barn and the house roof. We were trying to be as water efficient as possible.”

The Powells’ creek dried up in 2017, eventually forcing them to sell the property after switching to less water-intensive seed crops and trucking in water didn’t work.

“We were doing our best to stay on the property,” Maud Powell said. “We raised two children there and planted all these perennials … Then during the heat dome of 2021, things really got bad. We had to triage which crops we could keep alive … At that point we decided we wanted to keep farming, we were going to have to move.

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“It was just a really sad period for us,” she said. “We’d been there 23 years. It was the only home we’d ever known as adults.”

Project started

A small farm faculty member at Oregon State University Extension, Maud Powell responded by starting a project at the Southern Oregon Research Extension Center near Medford called Climate Stress and Grief: Building Resilience in Farmers and Ranchers.

The project offers a variety of workshops and trainings to help food producers better identify and understand stress and grief related to climate change. She will join family and community health expert Courtney Olcott and professor Mary Halbleib in the following upcoming webinars:

The presenters will define and describe climate grief and climate stress and explain how they differ from other types of stress and grief, according to the university. They will discuss the impacts on farmers and ranchers, report on initial findings from our qualitative research, and introduce best practices for supporting farmers and ranchers.

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The project, which has been going for a year, seeks to identify strategies for greater mental health resilience, and to help agricultural producers learn about available resources, Powell said. Olcott said the organizers were “amazed” at the turnout for the first few workshops.

“We’re really trying to figure out a population that’s been relatively neglected in terms of mental health,” said Olcott, an assistant professor of practice in Extension’s Family and Community Health Program in the College of Health. “We’re learning about who comes and why so we can figure out who’s not coming and really meet the needs of people who have been underserved.”

Risks increasing

The OSU project comes as the risks to farming are only expected to increase as climate fluctuations continue, according to a recent paper published by a team that included University of California researchers. The paper, “Climate Smart Agriculture: Assessing Needs and Perceptions of California’s Farmers,” dives into what the challenges are, how farmers and working to address them and what should come next.

Of the farmers surveyed, 67% agreed climate change is occurring and requires action, but even more said they are interested in learning more about the impacts of climate change on the agricultural industry, according to the UC. Most said they experience more climate impacts on their farms today than 10 years ago.

Growers were most concerned about water issues, with those in the San Joaquin Valley, Central Coast and Inland Empire areas particularly worried about a reduction in the availability of groundwater. Drought was a big concern in the Inland Empire, Central Coast and southern regions, while North Coast and southern farmers were concerned about damage and impacts from wildfire. Heat-related crop damage was also listed.

“Farmers will need to adapt to climate change in their farming operations,” observed the team of more than a dozen scientists, including UC Merced’s Samuel Ikendi and Tapan Pathak.

Climate-smart agriculture “holds particular importance in California, especially for beginning farmers, farmers with limited resources, and socially disadvantaged farmers who may lack access to technical assistance and often have fewer resources for adapting to climate change,” the scientists wrote in the open-access journal Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems.

More than 60% of the surveyed farmers said they were at least open to attending workshops to learn about adaptation practices. OSU’s Olcott said she and Powell were pleasantly surprised to encounter that same level of interest among growers.

“We weren’t quite expecting this many farmers and ranchers to use the term ‘climate change,’” Olcott told Farm Press. “It’s getting more out there in our culture and people are talking about it more. In the context of climate change, we’ve gone back and forth a lot. We’re not political about it; we have no climate change agenda. It’s just really a way to talk about what’s going on.

“We are going to be asking a question about, ‘Do you believe in climate change?’” she said. “We don’t care if you think it’s (caused by) people or whatever, but we do want to use language that’s appropriate.”

Grieving in different ways

For the Powells, it was the crop-busting heat in the summer of 2021 that finally prompted them to sell their 180-acre Wolf Gulch Farm, she said. The couple considered farming elsewhere, but “we have really deep connections in the community and didn’t feel good about leaving,” she said. The family found another property nearby with sufficient water, she said.

The couple grieved the loss of their first farm in different ways, she said.

“My husband got really busy and had some anxiety,” she said, adding the family’s emotions ranged from sadness and anger to fear. “We just felt afraid for the future, if things are getting hotter, drier and smokier.”

began encountering other farmers who reported feeling emotional stress on top of all the normal stresses of farming.

“A big part of that is the wildfire smoke that’s not only affecting crops with lower yields and compromising the flavor of wine grapes, but also the farmworkers that are out there,” she said. “They have to think about farmworker health and safety issues.” Smoke and heat can also affect attendance at farmers’ markets, which are the lifeblood of many small operations, she said.

Farmers have long faced a variety of stressors, including finances, labor and weather, Powell said. What’s different about climate-related stress, she said, is a feeling of dread and fear about what is to come and a feeling that things won’t get better.

When she and Olcott began conducting the workshops, about 90% of people who took the initial half-hour class wanted more, she said.

“There’s lots of work being done in looking at how to improve production, to make the farm more resilient,” Powell said. “We are specifically looking at mental health and emotional well-being. What research on this shows is people do better when actually talking about their feelings rather than just working harder, so we encourage people in the workshops to start talking about how they personally feel they’re affected by climate change.”