T
he sky in Onaga is chalk gray,
and for a moment it rains. John
Blaske’s cows are lined up at the
fence; cicadas trill from the trees. It’s
been a year since he flipped through
Missouri Farmer Today and froze,
startled by an article written by Mike
Rosmann: “Suicide Rate of Farmers
Higher than Any Other Group.”
“I read it 12 or 15 times,” John says,
sitting next to his wife, Joyce Blaske, at
their kitchen table. “It hit home some-
thing drastically.”
John is tall and stoic, with hands
toughened by work and a somber
voice that rarely changes in inflec-
tion. He says softly, “In the last 25 to
30 years, there’s not a day that goes by
that I don’t think about suicide.”
Research from the University of Iowa
suggests possible causes for farmers’
high suicide rate, including social iso-
lation and loneliness, access to guns,
financial stress, chronic pain or illness,
and ruinously unpredictable weather—
a problem now more than ever.
“Farming has always been a stress-
ful occupation because many of
the factors that affect agriculturalproduction are largely beyond
the control of the producers,”
wrote Mike in the Journal of
Rural Mental Health.
Loss of land can feel like a
death, something John under-
stands firsthand. On Thanksgiving
Day in 1982, a spark shot out from
his woodstove and landed in a box
of newspaper. The fire burned most
of the Blaskes’ house. Soon after, the
bank raised their interest rate from
7 percent to 18 percent. John raced
between banks and private lenders
attempting to renegotiate loan terms.
Agreements would be made and
then fall through. “They did not care
whether we had to live in a grader
ditch,” remembers John.
Desperate, the family filed for bank-
ruptcy and lost 265 of its 300 acres.
That’s when John began to think of
suicide. “I can’t leave our property
without seeing what we lost,” he says.
“You can’t imagine how that cuts into
me every day. It just eats me alive.”
After finding the article in Missouri
Farmer Today, he decided to contact
Mike. But the article listed a website,
and the Blaskes did not own a com-
puter. So John drove to the library
and asked a librarian to e-mail Mike
for him. A few days later, as John was
driving his tractor down the road,
Mike called him.When farmers struggle, towns feel
the pinch too. Downtown Onaga,
Kansas, is studded with boarded-
up storefronts.76 april 2019