It’s important to listen to stressed, stretched farmers

Being a small farmer in Aotearoa can be a lonely and terrifying business, as Taranaki dairy farmer Kane Brisco explains in his new book Tools for the Top Paddock, out next Wednesday.

The father-of-three wants to help farmers cope with the mental and physical stresses that come with the turf, and to help non-farmers understand how difficult farming can be.

Farmers, in a nutshell, need to keep large numbers of animals wellfed and happy; anyone with a cat should empathise.

Anything which prevents grass from growing, like drought or flood, creates anxiety, and not just for cows.

A plain-speaking advocate for rural mental health – or ‘‘mental fitness’’, as he calls it – Brisco tackles the crippling stoicism New Zealand farmers often demand of themselves – that ‘‘she’ll-be-rightmate’; ‘‘suck it up’’ inner voice.

Brisco has endured more than his share of trauma and misery, including a poorly timed injury, relationship breakups, financial near-disasters, and the loneliness which many farmers experience in a working life spent mostly with cows, dogs and paperwork.

‘‘I had realised that I couldn’t keep enduring what I’d faced,’’ he writes. ‘‘Being tough is necessary in all walks of life, but I’d been relying on year in, year out, and eventually the well runs dry.’’

The author (or co-author – the book was written with the help of Stuff journalist Steve Kilgallon) emerges as a straight shooter, with the skills to help others in dark places. You don’t have to be a farmer to identify with the calamities which took Brisco to the edge, mentally and financially – although there is plenty of detail which may, or may not, be of interest to those who don’t know much about farming.

Dairy farming is New Zealand’s biggest export earner, but with its climbing methane emissions, water pollution and hunger for land at the expense of native species, it has become an ethical quagmire, something which Brisco, perhaps understandably, doesn’t explore.

The old ‘‘backbone-of-thecountry’’ certainties have long gone. To achieve emissions targets, farmers need to find their pride in different places – in smaller herds, in planting native trees, in healthy wetlands and clean waterways.

But the rest of us need to acknowledge the stress systemic change puts on the shoulders of oneperson-band operators like Kane Brisco – and their partners, who often hold down jobs outside the farm. At one point he writes, in genuine desperation: ‘‘Everything I saw on the news or Facebook [about farming] was negative … why was I farming, if everybody hated us?’’

While the daily weather patterns which can make farming so stressful are outside a farmer’s immediate control, the irony is that methane emissions from farm animals are helping to make the global climate more extreme and, in many places, less predictable.

Climate change is causing physical suffering to farmers and farm animals around the world.

Take modern milking cows. They are not good at getting rid of heat, and prefer temperatures under 20C. On hot days (over 25C) they require serious amounts of shade and water; heavy cattle, and cattle in feedlots suffer even more.

Dr Grant Dewell, from Iowa State University’s Veterinary Diagnostic and Production Animal Medicine, has calculated that a 1000lb animal needs about 1.5 gallons (5.67 litres) of water an hour on hot days.

‘‘Shade can be critical in determining whether cattle die during extreme-heat events, especially for black cattle,’’ he says. ‘‘To be effective there needs to be 20 to 40 square feet of shade per animal.’’

In the UK farmers are planning indoor ‘siestas’ for cow herds used to living outside.

‘‘A cow in 25C heat feels like we would in 40C,’’ Wiltshire vet Ed Bailey told the Guardian farming editor, Tom Levitt.

‘‘They are very sensitive to heat because of the fermentation tank inside their bodies – it constantly produces a lot of heat.’’

While Brisco is preoccupied in his book with farmers’ mental health and not climate change, I can’t help thinking about the connection.

Brisco touches on this when he writes: ‘‘There’s so much change and challenge occurring in agriculture right now.

‘‘One of the biggest pressures on landowners now is conforming, changing, and adapting to new expectations, and it is often dictated by people with little or no understanding of the realities of farming.’’ And then, he writes: ‘‘A lot of it needs to happen.’’

We all know what it is like to have some dickhead in management order us to do something impossible – it is a theme of comedies from The Office to Yes Minister. When Brisco says that new regulations are ‘‘dictated by people with little or no understanding of the realities of farming’’, I know he is right.

My late father, a small-scale Taranaki dairy farmer just like Brisco, also used to complain about out-of-touch ministry wallahs in Wellington, and he subscribed to Scientific American for years – so he was no climate-change denier. Dad planted a lot of trees. He rode a bicycle. He grew his own vegetables. I can’t help thinking, though, that if Brisco had spent a few more lines explaining what he meant by the tantalising line ‘‘a lot of [new regulations] need to happen’’,’ New Zealand farming might have gained more ‘‘tools for the top paddock’’.