That\u2019s the pitch on the Colorado Department of Agriculture website for a new program aimed at helping farmers facing emotional crisis because of financial strains in their industry.<\/p>\n
Agriculture Commissioner Don Brown says the program, just now rolling out, will train staffers at the Colorado Crisis Center hotline specifically about farming and ranching, so they can better counsel those who call. His department will also promote the hotline to farmers and ranchers statewide.<\/p>\n
Colorado\u2019s wheat and corn farmers, in particular, are struggling as global competition forces prices down below their production costs. Brown says he got the idea for the special hotline service after talking with troubled friends in Yuma, where his family has a farm. He spoke about it with Colorado Matters.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell I think there is two or three things I\u2019d like to talk about and one of them is the fact that I started farming in the late 1970s, my wife and I, right before the ag crisis hit. So I\u2019ve gone through this once personally as a young person and I guess I recognized, maybe what I saw the signs of, we\u2019re headed maybe that direction again. And particularly this winter, we had several neighbors or acquaintances call us and simply wanting to maybe sell us their land because they were under a lot of pressure from the banks and that told me that we\u2019re headed down a road that we don\u2019t like and then consequently emotionally and mentally that\u2019s very, very struggling and difficult for a farmer and a rancher. Very difficult.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cLet\u2019s talk about Pioneer 1157 corn, of the GDUs, of so and so and so. Did you know what I\u2019m talking about? Probably not. We talk about the weather. We talk about livestock. We talk about genetics. We have all sorts of terms and relationships and particularly the bond to the land, which I think is difficult to understand unless one has truly experienced it. And the fact that many of these operations are many, several generations old and that, that\u2019s something that you have to know, I guess, in essence, to speak the language.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, there\u2019s a great deal of independence and resilience. I mean, you have to be that way to stand there and watch a hailstorm wipe out a year\u2019s worth of work in 10 or 15 minutes and we\u2019ve observed that. We experienced that on our farm this summer early.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, I always, you know, I\u2019m an eternal optimist. I\u2019m a lemonade guy. When I get lemons, then all you do it put sugar in it and you\u2019ve got something to consume. This, too, shall change and turn. We\u2019re seeing a growing population and consequently everybody needs to be fed. So there will continue to be demand. There\u2019s always cycles in the weather worldwide. And so we\u2019ll see a rebound. It\u2019ll be slow, or it might quick; you never know. But it\u2019s difficult to realize, too, on occasion that if you\u2019re under financial pressure, it may not be your fault. It probably isn\u2019t your fault. Actually I\u2019d say it\u2019s not your fault because you\u2019re, there\u2019s weather; there\u2019s financial pressures across the world; there\u2019s interest rate, things that are beyond the farmer\u2019s control.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
That\u2019s the pitch on the Colorado Department of Agriculture website for a new program aimed at helping farmers facing emotional crisis because of financial strains in their industry. Agriculture Commissioner Don Brown says the program, just now rolling out, will train staffers at the Colorado Crisis Center hotline specifically about farming and ranching, so they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":103929,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5993,5735],"tags":[120,21,13,265],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-103928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-agriculture","category-news","tag-colorado","tag-cortez","tag-frontpage-lead","tag-politics"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103928"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103928\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103928"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=103928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}