According to the National Rural Health Association policy brief, farmers are three and a half times more likely to die by suicide than the general population.

That's part of the reason why the University of Kentucky has formed the Building Bridges to Farmer Mental Health Project.

The program seeks to address the mental health struggles of Kentucky's farmers and break down the barriers to treatment.

More into night segments we call Rooted that focuses on agriculture and small family farms.

We call our initiative the Building Bridges to Farmer Mental Health Project, and it's really all about supporting the well-being of farmers and farm families here in Kentucky.

And we try to do that in a couple of different ways.

When you look at the statistics, the suicide rate in the US has risen over 30% in the past 20 years, which is certainly alarming across the board.

But we also know that agricultural workers and farmers are disproportionately affected.

And among one of the groups with the highest suicide rates.

And here in Kentucky and in a lot of the rural communities, those rates are even higher.

So farmers tend to deal with a mix of stressors that most people don't face.

They have to be thinking about their farm and their business and their family on a daily basis.

And so they are facing things like unpredictable weather, which we have certainly seen our fair share of here in Kentucky over the last few years.

You know, changes in markets and policies, and that's all on top of working long hours.

The financial strain of running a farm, regardless of your size.

And so I think those are some of the key risk factors when you're thinking of the farm business.

But the other thing is farming can be isolating.

There's still a stigma, you know, just still feeling like especially in rural areas, that you don't talk about mental health.

You know, you kind of power through it and you need to figure out what you need to do to get to the next day.

As we really got into this project, we quickly learned that every farmer and farm family has slightly different stressors, slightly different needs, and we wanted to make sure that we were being responsive to that in our communication and our messaging.

But we've been really inclusive of reaching out to farmers, ranchers, agriculture workers across Kentucky, big farms, small farms, family farms, urban farms.

Because I think impetus for change is an engaging community network so that we're all working together.

We have a couple of things that we use for our strategies.

We are training what we call mental health advocates, really trying to focus on rural communities here in Kentucky.

But we are also open to others participating because we know that the farm sector cuts across many of these different regions and we try to support them in suicide prevention, training, communication and training and just general connection to available resources to support mental health and wellbeing.

The other thing that is has really been unearthed with some of our conversations with farmers is the time and money pressure so that you're not really thinking about putting your own health first.

You're putting everything else first, including the health of your farm, including the health of your family, the health of your, The others in your community know they tend to be very selfless individuals.

And so I think that is another barrier that we have to keep talking about.

You can sell the project currently has 12 trained community health advocates spread across the state, with the majority coming from a farming background.