Navigating retirement for farmers vital for mental health

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. — Although Illinois Farm Bureau has worked to provide mental health and awareness resources to its members for several years, the statewide group is focused on expanding that commitment.

“About a year ago, our president, Brian Duncan, came back from an American Farm Bureau meeting where he heard about a survey that was done by a state Farm Bureau,” said Evan Hultine, vice president of IFB.

“Over half of the respondents in the survey said they had considered or thought about self-harm,” said Hultine during a presentation at the 2025 Rural Mental Health Summit, hosted by the Southern Illinois University Center for Rural Health and Social Service Development.

“Brian called the management team to the table and said, ‘I don’t think we’re doing enough, so we need to expand the conversation and the resources,’” he recalled. “‘And even if we can’t get people to come and talk, at least maybe they can hear the message and we can provide some help to our farmers.’”

Farmers have a lot of challenges to navigate going forward.

“We know a lot of stressors are not going away and some of them are going to get worse,” Hultine said. “And some of them are going to get harder.”

Those stressors include increased farm consolidations due to the average age of farmers, the cost of farming, the market outlook, political and cultural pressures and regulatory pressures.

“We’ve been seeing more drastic and severe weather,” the farm leader said. “So, we need to help our farmers when they are flooded and they can’t get their crop in the ground.”

Hultine, a sixth-generation farmer, knew from a very early age that his career goal was to farm.

“I spent more time in a tractor cab than on a ballfield,” he noted.

After studying ag production in college, Hultine worked off the farm for a couple of years.

“My dad was in his early 60s and he had a little bit of a health scare that was enough of a trigger for him to say it is time for Evan to come back and manage the farm,” the said.

This farm transition, Hultine said, went about as smooth as it could go.

“I think that was because my dad and I have real strategic differences,” he explained.

“The things my dad hated about farming are the things I actually really enjoy,” he said. “So, it was pretty easy for him to hand off some of the administrative, management and business-oriented parts of the farm.”

Even the farm families that have the hard conversations about estate planning and have done the business planning, Hultine said, can still struggle with mental health challenges.

Helping farmers navigate into retirement is a shortfall that needs to be addressed.

“My dad’s generation is a large part of the retiring group of farmers that farmed through the ‘80s,” Hultine said. “A lot of farms survived the ‘80s because the farmers went to town and got a job Monday through Friday and during the evenings and weekends they did the farm work.”

As a result, these farmers didn’t have time for hobbies.

“Now when they have time, they don’t want to do anything else but farm,” Hultine said.

This situation puts stress on marriages, families and the active farming generation.

“They get asked daily, what do you want me to do today?” Hultine said. “There’s stress when you have to decide how many small dents, dings and oops are too many.”

There is a lot of information and people available to talk about developing financial retirement plans.

“I don’t know why we’re not talking about emotional and wellness advisers for retirement,” Hultine said. “Our farmers should be hearing from the time they are 20, 30, 40 and 50 about what they are going to do when they are no longer farming.”

Many farmers have not thought about their plans once they retire.

“Now they are slapped with it and they don’t know what to do,” Hultine said. “So, with every ounce of their will, they are clinging to every little bit of still being an active farmer that they can and that is hard.”

It is a challenge, Hultine said, to determine when how many accidents are too many accidents.

“If you work for a company and you have enough accidents, they say, see you later,” he said.

“You are not going to fire your dad — that’s not an option,” he stressed. “That’s not what a farm family does.”

Hultine is unaware of any materials that focus on how to have the talk about hanging up the boots, stop putting the pliers on the belt or giving up the keys.

“These are real situations,” the IFB vice president said.

“We talk a lot about farmers’ mental health in context of the active farmer,” he said. “But there’s a host of other issues affecting the farm family, so we have a lot of important things to address.”