Sixth-generation farmer David Meister and wife Christina Caldwell operate the Bar M Ranch farm in New Ross, N.S. Originally, they worked with David’s father Karl. Now they’re in transition, gradually taking over the day-to-day work. The operation is diverse, including Christmas trees and wreaths, hay and cattle, vegetables, and on-farm events including a farm-stay option. They also both work full time and remotely in other careers, David with Nova Scotia Community College in human resources and Christina as an environmental project manager.
COVID sent them back to the farm, which was a benefit. “We don’t know how we ever commuted,” David says. “We talk about mental health and wellness, well not spending 10 hours a week in the car on top of the jobs meant we could focus a little on ourselves and on the farm.”
David became involved with the We Talk We Grow program as an agricultural ambassador. While many of the farmers in the province are men, the number of women ambassadors is significantly higher than the men. “We work to champion a lot of the work from the program," David says. "We share a lot of our own experiences with mental wellness, too.”
He observes that many men in farming don’t feel they can speak about how they’re feeling, perceiving such conversations as a sign of weakness. “There are times when things are going great and times when things are difficult and we’re struggling, and we must take care of ourselves,” David says. “We tend to share that lived experience, through our social media and in different venues.”
It’s challenging to get off-farm for events and meetings, something non-farmers don’t always understand. “We do a lot of on-farm tours and farm stays, and we’ll have people who offer to help with haying, for example,” David says. “And then when we’re actually haying, we invite them and they’re on vacation or they have something else on. They don’t understand that we literally must make hay while the sun shines. We just can’t do what we want when we want to.”
One of the bigger mental health challenges that David has faced has been the transition to taking over the farm. He says, “We had a lot of conversations, we found it really stressful. My dad and I get along really well, but there is a lot of paperwork, so much to consider, meetings with accountants and lawyers.” As a result of his own succession planning experiences, he recently led a men’s mental health workshop through We Talk We Grow, and succession planning was one of the topics. “Some families don’t want to talk about succession planning,” he adds, “while others want to do it all the right way but not get taxed to high heaven.”
Asked how non-farmers can support agricultural professionals, David says, “Farming is an allyship, between those who grow your food and you who purchase it. When you’re buying local at a farm market or visiting a farm, talk to the farmer. We need to change the stereotype of the farmer with the rainbows over the farm all the time.”
Expanding and handing over
Berwick, N.S., carries the title of Nova Scotia’s apple capital, with farms around the community that have grown fruit for generations. Janice and Larry Lutz of Lutz Family Farms took over their family farm in 1988, turning it into a fruit operation (apples, peaches, pears, and, more recently, strawberries) while also both working full time off farm. Fourteen years ago, they had no idea they would need a succession plan.
“Now we have two sons and a son-in-law working the farm with us,” Janice says. “We saw that we’d need more orchard for more families and so we bought several more local farms.” She and Larry are thrilled to see the legacy carry on. “We have grandchildren playing on the farm who may one day also want to work on the farm.”
Janice became involved with Farm Safety Nova Scotia (FSNS) a few years ago. She was always passionate about farm safety, and in her role as administrator and human-resources support at a nearby cranberry farm, her role included ensuring that all aspects of physical farm safety were up to date. “When the Federation and FSNS began talking about mental health, it seemed like a natural fit. I’ve lived the challenges of my generation and see the challenges facing the next generation and so, I volunteered.”
Social interaction can be a huge help to farmers, who often work in isolation. “Even on a farm like ours with a few family members and our employees, there can be isolation, spending all day in a tractor or doing books or helping to harvest the crops,” Janice says. Organizations like the various agriculture federations can help with that with meetings and conventions, when time permits.
Janice brings a different angle to the whole farm stress issue. “My husband and I are trying to step back a little from the farm, and we are lucky that we have kids that want to take over. But unlike many careers, there isn’t a pension and retirement at the end of 35 or 40 years. Your business and workplace is your home, your land, which like ours has been in the family for generations. There’s no dinner and gold watch and you’re out of there! And the next generation may have different expectations and plans for their career on the farm. But we can’t afford to just give them the farm, and they can’t afford to just buy it outright. This isn’t an uncommon situation in farming, either.”
She adds that We Talk We Grow helps break down the isolation that many farmers face even when working with family members, to provide the support and tools needed for these aspects of farming so that they don’t have to feel overwhelmed and like they’re dealing with it alone.
Janice is particularly proud of the training of mental health professionals to be agriculturally informed in their mode of care. But even with such supports there are big issues to resolve. “Farmers need a living wage, and we need more farmers,” she says. “I’m very privileged to be able to grow food. Yes, it’s a huge obligation and difficult, but still a privilege.”
Generations of farm heritage
For more than 200 years, the Bishop family has lived and farmed in Greenwich, N.S., in the Annapolis Valley. Patricia Bishop is rooted in the family farm along with several sisters and their husbands, plus her father Andrew. With husband Josh Oulton, she also operates TapRoot Farms in neighbouring Port Williams, a certified-organic operation where they practise sustainable agriculture, leaving as small a footprint on the Earth as they can. Noggins is known for its expansive farm market at the home location, but the Bishops also have other standalone markets around the province, plus sell at the Seaport and Halifax Forum markets weekly.
Patricia is frank about the challenges of farming. Her life took a turn in the last couple of years. In 2023, she had a serious on-farm injury that led to a concussion, and then got Lyme disease. Both health issues take their toll on the 49-year-old, but she loves what she does and wants to help other farmers dealing with mental health issues.
“I got involved because I had been sharing some of the realities of the mental and emotional struggle we experience on the farm, and my own personal struggle,” she says, adding that awareness of the struggle and willingness to speak about it and be unashamed is what the organizers of We Talk We Grow look for in their agriculture ambassadors.
Most people go to work for a set number of hours a day, then have downtime. With farming, the job never stops. The work that many farmers do is year-round — “people need to eat year-round,” Patricia says, — and there really is no time to rest.
Although still younger than the average age for farmers, Patricia says burnout is more likely as she approaches 50. “In my 30s I was just go, go, go, all the time, and there is a younger cohort of farmers with that energy, but I also see the ones around my age who are tired.”
Patricia says their three children, all young adults, aren’t interested in taking over the farm, although they do help.
She has high praise for the We Talk We Grow program. “It’s important to bring understanding to the fact that everything on the farm is not going well all the time,” she says. “Agriculture is in trouble in our province and elsewhere, and I don’t know how to solve the problem. A lot of people don’t want to say those things out loud so they’re sitting in fear or ignoring it. We must find a way to help. We need policy change, and financial assistance that allows farmers to thrive and not just survive.”
Patricia says appreciation of what farmers do goes a long way to help. Choosing locally produced food and other products is so important, too. And choosing whole foods, and learning to cook with them, rather than always going for value-added which are more expensive because they require more handling. And “20 people may buy our food and say it’s great, and the 21st complains about the prices, and that one voice will stick with the farmer where the others don’t.”
Going solo
Amy Hill always knew she wanted to work with animals, but also that she wanted to farm. For years after attending the Dalhousie Agriculture Campus in Truro, she did wildlife rehabilitation and worked and lived on a dairy farm. She also had an eating disorder when she was younger, which resulted in a lot of distrust around food, but while going to Dal, she realized how important it was to eat properly. “I wanted to have a part in growing that good food, so I went full time into farming,” she says.
When Amy and her husband David started Snowy River Farms, he worked off-farm. Amy grew it until it was big enough for the two of them to work it full time, and David came back onto the farm in 2017. Things went well for a few years, as they were providing a range of products to local markets, restaurants, and stores. Then COVID hit, and “we lost all of our restaurants and stores within a week, and the comeback to those places took years.” As of 2024, they were still trying to recover, and David returned to off-farm work in 2023 with his contracting company.
Amy found herself in a no-win situation. She has been paring down the operation over the past couple of years to make it less of a burden for her to operate. “The only reason we aren’t in the red anymore is because I stopped growing a lot of food; the cost of having employees to help on the farm, and attending to markets and deliveries, and all the financial and mental demands were overwhelming.” Currently, the farm is viable “in this moment” but Amy is sad to be growing less food for hungry Nova Scotians.
Today Amy raises hogs, plus has up to 2,000 broiler chickens on pasture, 100 laying hens, and a market garden with four greenhouses, doing it all on just under four hectares. Still, she’s at the mercy of factors beyond her control. After the floods of 2023, she pulled more than $10,000 in rotten produce from her fields. The spectre of avian flu affected the farm’s chick supplier, and they lost access to a whole batch of birds because that year they couldn’t free range the poultry due to the infection risk.
Despite the challenges, Amy loves farming, and when someone at the Federation of Agriculture asked if she would participate in the We Talk We Grow program as an ambassador, helping to champion mental health to other farmers, she was happy to do so.
“I talk pretty openly about the good and the bad parts of farming, the realities of growing food,” she says. She doesn’t want to paint a rosy picture that attracts new farmers without giving them warning about the challenges: time management, family/work balance, and financial responsibilities. Of the We Talk We Grow program, she says, “it is lending a voice for something people know is happening but don’t necessarily know much about it or what to do about it. We don’t want to look like we’re complaining all the time.” Farming is quite isolating by times, and many producers may be going through similar things. Learning that you’re not alone with issues, that other farmers are having struggles too, is a help.
“I do not want to stop farming,” Amy says. “I want there to be more farmers growing more food, but it’s not right for farmers to be doing this at a loss, or such high mental, physical and financial stress.” She wants to pay her staff and herself fair wages, yet expenses are so high, the climate is changing, and people remain concerned about food costs. “It’s being produced as cheaply as we can.”
To help balance the work and home life, she now works with another farmer who takes her products to markets. Amy and David’s daughter Ayla, 12, is into dance and neither parent wants to miss events such as rehearsals. Their son Ezekiel is six and helps, along with Ayla, doing farm chores. “If either of them is going to take over the farm one day, it’ll be because they love it too,” Amy says.