For a lot of farm families, the in-laws quickly become the outlaws due to factors you’d never consider.

After a decade of sorting out the direst farm succession and farm debt cases, I have found that dysfunctional in-law relationships are often a key underlying ingredient to these problems. Really good families are hit by landmines of the in-law kind, and everything explodes. If these families knew what those landmines were before they stepped into them, they would have been able to avoid them.

In 2016, the CDC published data on suicide rates by occupation from 2012 to 2015. It was one of only a few articles that attempted to summarize suicide rates by occupation. This data showed that farmers, ranchers and other agricultural managers had a suicide rate higher than the general population.

Editor Walt Cooley visits with Progressive Dairy contributor Andy “Caygeon” Junkin during World Dairy Expo about working with family and succession planning

In 2021, 33% of all workers in the U.S. were exposed to the outdoors while conducting work. One can assume the percentage of dairy workers exposed to the outdoors is much higher than 33%.

We are all familiar with the common stressors in agriculture. It’s easy to point to price swings, government regulations, land competition, weather and disease when we talk about stress on the farm.

Having a clear understanding of debt, whether long-term or short-term, fixed or variable, can help develop a strategy.