Agriculture committee  Sorry, I was delayed there. I'm not sure that was a better choice.

Agriculture committee  For anxiety, 58% met the scale's definition for classification of various degrees of anxiety—mild, moderate or severe.

Agriculture committee  Yes.

Agriculture committee  Right.

Agriculture committee  Right. There's a great model that looks at a curve. The middle bit is nice. It's yellow or orange in colour. That's where stress drives us and our production is high. We're focused. We're motivated. We want to get going. There's a green area that's low stress. That's bad. Low st

Agriculture committee  I think there are two sides to that. Farming can be a very socially isolating occupation. In some respects, social media is great for farmers. Ag Twitter is alive and well.

Agriculture committee  People support each other through ag Twitter. In those respects, I think that's great. People throw out a problem, and they instantly have solutions. They throw out that they're having a bad day, and they instantly have support. On the flip side of that, though, is that dark si

Agriculture committee  I think I heard a couple of things there.

Agriculture committee  One is that there definitely is a need for custom tailored supports. We can't just take existing models and apply them to farmers for numerous reasons that have been discussed. The stresses that farmers face are unique. Yes, other small business owners—not that farming is a smal

Agriculture committee  I think what my colleagues have discussed has been very important. I think it's really important, and the way to get farmers involved is through participatory action research. You have them at the table at the beginning, and you develop your priorities with farmers at the table b

Agriculture committee  My team and I have just finished developing a mental health literacy training program specific to agriculture. We are piloting that. In two weeks, we will start the first of five pilot sessions. We believe strongly in evidence-informed programming, so we're doing pre- and post-as

Agriculture committee  Yes, my research has looked at that. Briana Hagen is our Ph.D. candidate, and she's finishing up those analyses. So far we've looked at stress and resilience, and we did look at different commodity types within that. There was one commodity group that was at a significantly gre

Agriculture committee  I think that's because we're not comparing high stress to low stress. It's like the baseline in farming is here, so the differences are not that stark.

Agriculture committee  Yes. One of the leaders in this area is in Australia, the National Centre for Farmer Health. They focus on both the physical and mental health of their farmers. The discussions we've been having around suicide are really important and absolutely need to be included, although it

Agriculture committee  Thank you for the invitation to speak with you today. I'm Andria Jones-Bitton. I'm an associate professor at the Ontario Veterinary College at the University of Guelph, and my area of research focus is farmer mental health. I understand that some of you in the room are farmers.