Climate Changes, Trade Wars, and Farmer Suicides

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PLATTE, S.D. — Amber Dykshorn stood at her kitchen window and watched the storm come in.

It was a very dark Saturday night in the middle of the summer in the middle of a year that is on track to be the wettest in more than a century. The wind blew over the farm, the rain came down and she heard the ominous pings on her roof — pea-sized hail, striking the still-fragile stalks of the only corn her husband, Chris Dykshorn, was able to plant before he took his own life in June.

Did their crop insurance cover hail damage? She had no idea. That was something Chris would have taken care of, if he were here. Instead she was alone, with nearly $300,000 in farm debt, three kids ages 5 to 13 and a host of grief-fueled questions. Why hadn’t she been able to save him? What would happen to them now?

She scrolled through his final texts, rereading his words, leaning on the kitchen counter next to a whiteboard with the kids’ chore list — Kahne: dishwasher, Kalee: dust living room — and a book someone gave her titled “Through a Season of Grief: Devotions for Your Journey from Mourning to Joy.”

Chris had been despondent over the couple’s finances, crippled by surplus grain he couldn’t sell because of the trade war and flooded fields.

“I’m struggling so bad today. I don’t know what to do anymore,” he texted on May 31. “I seriously don’t know how we r gonna make it.”

On June 1: “I just want to sit in the house and cry.”

And then: “What am I supposed to do. I am failing and feel like I’m gonna lose everything I’ve worked for the past how many years.”

She was still asleep the morning of June 13 when he went to the utility room to get his gun.

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Here in South Dakota, the trade disputes and extreme weather have devastated farmers and ranchers — often isolated in rural areas, with little access to services — said Gov. Kristi L. Noem (R), a lifelong rancher who is working to expand the state’s suicide prevention efforts.

Calls to the statewide suicide hotline were up 61 percent last year, and South Dakota’s largest regional health system, Avera Health, launched a special hotline in January to help farmers and ranchers.

Chris had received counseling through Avera’s farming program and thought of reaching out again before he died. The last Google search on his phone was “farmer crisis hotline.”

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