CALLS OF DISTRESS
Helpline receives six suicide calls from farmers

Six eastern Ontario farmers have made "serious suicide calls" to a farm help line since mid-January, indicating how severely farm debt is creeping up on some crop farmers.

The "suicide" calls to The Farm Line are made by desperate people in a financial crisis, exacerbated by poor crop yields and no government promise of a safety net program, said The Farm Line’s representative Susan Klein-Swormink. "They have too many decisions to make" but the most important one is — " Do I plant the crops? Do I not plant the crops?"

The Farm Line, which she said is the farmer’s last resort, refers callers to professional counsellors but on the initial call the farmers are encouraged to talk. "One caller talked for two hours. Talking helps an awful lot,"she said.

There were no "serious suicide calls" last year in eastern Ontario, she said, although there were two in southwestern Ontario. Farm Line representatives follow-up the calls to farmers to ensure they get the help they need, she said.

Meantime, an eastern Ontario debt counsellor, who asked that he not be identified, said that he had no farmers as clients last year. This year he has eight.

Off-farm income has become increasingly the solution while farmers wait and wait and wait for a promised safety net program from the Ontario government. Said Iain Gardiner, president of the OFA for Lennox and Addington Counties: "Each year input costs increase, land prices and taxes rise but the price for our products stagnates."

At a recent protest of about 80 farmers at the former Ontario minister of Agriculture’s office, crop farmer Paul Vogel was disgusted: "My honest gut feeling is that 60 per cent of this crowd will disappear and I hate to say that because I’m standing in this crowd. How long that will take I don’t know. It will be a long painful death. We’ll mortgage and we’ll mortgage and we’ll
mortgage to keep farming. We’re doing it now."

Despite the anecdotal evidence, Farm Credit Canada (formerly Farm Credit Corporation) sees few farms missing their monthly mortgage payments. "Our farm foreclosures in the past five years have been less than half of one per cent," said FCC district manager for eastern Ontario, John Gregory. "There are some people who are struggling. Overall, people are doing okay and some are doing very well." However, on the back concessions of desperation, people sell off a piece at a time. The people who are caught were mostly those who expanded and couldn’t pay after two bad crop years.

The anecdotal cases reveal farmers facing the rest of their lives and not knowing what to do. Dairy farmer (add name from Terry’s story) spent 10 years as a truck driver to save enough money to buy a farm. With too little cash he was unable to buy quota to sell milk in Canada. So, he sold his milk on the world market. When prices were 32 cents a litre he could survive. But prices dropped and now he’s sold the farm.