Building Farm and Farm Family Resilience in our Communities

Cal l to Action. Many professionals offer information about stress and managing stress. Such education is necessary but insufficient.

Few professionals offer a risk and resilience framework with a socio-ecological theoretical model approach to the physical, mental, emotional, and financial health and well-being of farmers, their families, and associated individuals. An integrated, research-based, and theoretically sound systems-focused approach is needed. A resilience-based intervention is 90% likely to produce positive effects (Macedo et al., 2014). And in an evaluation of an Extension program, 100% of participants thought a risk and resilience approach was worthy of taxpayer’ dollars (Jackman et al., 2015). Therefore, we urge Extension professionals to respond to our call to action by applying a risk and resilience, systems-focused approach to their programming that addresses multiple aspects of thriving farming and farm family living within supportive communities. The premise of this guide is that it will take an integrated, research-based, and theoretically sound systems-focused approach to effectively prevent or mitigate risk stressors and build the resilience of farms and farm families.

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