Manage your market stress By John Field, Counsellor
Know when you are suffering from too much stress
Learn to identify the physical, emotional, mental and psychological symptoms.
Develop your own plan for managing your distress Learn what works for you, and do more of it.
Talk to someone who can listen well
Don’t isolate yourself.
Stop being concerned about what others think
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They don’t really know what it’s like to be in your shoes.
Breathe
Learn to breathe like a relaxed person taking lots of slow, deep breaths, outdoors if possible.
Decide to stay calm
Learn to contain your anxiety and your anger.
Discipline your thinking
Learn not to “horribilize” the future, deal with one thing at a time.
Talk to yourself in a positive way
Learn to focus on the things that are positive.
Focus on what you can do
Learn to let go of what you cannot do anything about.
Avoid isolating yourself from those who care about you
Learn to accept help when it is available.
Avoid excessive eating, drinking, smoking or drug use
It’s essential to maintain good health.
Exercise
Learn to develop a regular program of aerobic exercise.
Put your pickup in park. Fire it up, get it revving, and then just walk away with the truck still roaring.
You’d never do that to your machinery, of course. The engine would never last. But it turns out this is exactly what many farmers and farm families are doing to themselves because of the way they handle — actually, the way they don’t handle — the stress of crop and livestock marketing.
John Field uses the truck image because it grabs the attention of the farmers he talks to. But he insists it’s more than just words. As a counsellor based in St. Mary’s, Ont., he saw the impact of marketing stress when he spent five years working with the Perth County Pork Producers during the hog farm crisis of 1998, and he’s seen it more or less continuously ever since.
Farming, Field emphasizes, is regularly ranked one of the five most stressful occupations. And today, with so much market volatility, the stress has the potential to get even worse.
Start by recognizing the differences between short-and long-term stress, Field recommends. Farmers pride themselves on being able to work through short-term stress, keeping cool in emergencies and figuring out ways to unravel the toughest knots.
Partly because they’re so adept at handling short-term stress, they think they’re good at handling the long-term variety too.
They aren’t. No one is. Chronic stress causes problems ranging from ulcers to alcoholism to marital breakdown, Field says. It leads to a loss of hope and depression and a rash of physical symptoms including sleeplessness, oversleeping, fatigue, withdrawal, irritability, back pain, Crohn’s disease and more.
Market gyrations increase anxiety and stress levels mainly because they seem so far beyond our control, says Field. Then they get worse, because for farmers there’s no escaping the stress. The farm is where you live, after all, and the people you work with — the people whose faces remind you constantly that you’re a farmer — are your own family.
To top it off, there’s also the pressure that farmers put on themselves. “There’s a lot of pressure to stay in the industry,” points out Field. Men personalize it. They see poor marketing outcomes as failures, and somewhere at the backs of their minds, they’re always fearful that they may be the ones who lose the family farm.
In the 2005 mental health survey by the Canadian Agricultural Safety Association, 20 per cent of farmers described themselves as “very stressed” and almost half as “somewhat stressed.”
Marketing obviously plays a huge role in the farm’s finances, says Maurizio (Moe) Agostino, marketing guru for Agostino figures marketing can account for as much as 80 per cent of financial success.
Unfortunately, many farmers don’t like marketing and as a result don’t do very well at it, he states.
Agostino offers two pieces of advice to farmers. The first is to hire a professional marketing adviser. “You should hire a marketing specialist like you would hire a lawyer,” says Agostino.
The second is to create and stick to a marketing plan. “If you develop a plan where you do the same thing every year, with discipline, you take the emotion out it,” Agostino says.
Know your own cost of production is also key, adds John Bancroft, market specialist for the Ontario ag ministry. You’re in a better position to set price triggers if you know your profit margins, Bancroft
