Farm debt levels are usually regarded as an important source of anxiety and stress and the survey found debt anxiety is quite significant but as a cause is rated as a lesser factor overall by the 440 farmers who responded.
The survey is part of research exploring and understanding the human variables related to anxiety to see if it is possible to modify them, Professor Peter Nuthall said.
Debt and financial issues were marked at 3.9 out of 10, at the lower end of the 13 factors listed in the survey.
Rules and regulation were 6.21 and environmental regulations 5.94. Splitting them, in second place, were weather worries at 5.97.
In order after that were product prices 5.81, mismanagement 5.04, time pressures 4.86, health 4.78, crop and animal yields 4.53, family issues 4.35, work conditions 4.04, finance and debt 3.9, employee issues 3.78 and isolation at just 2.29.
The survey by Nuthall and colleagues Bruce Greig and Kevin Old in the university’s agribusiness and commerce faculty covered the full range of farm types.
They noted the only real differences in the importance of the various factors involved mismanagement worry, employee issues and environmental regulation.
The rules and weather issues rated top anxiety factors across the sector and are much the same no matter the capital invested and the debt levels. They are also quite consistent among all farmers across the range of farm-equity levels.
The larger the capital and debt amounts, the more important that employee issues became.
Nuthall said anxiety decreases in most cases as farmers get older, suggesting some form of philosophical approach to the problems.
Surprisingly, education levels and gender don’t seem to affect anxiety.
The survey asked farmers about likely remedial actions they would take when faced with financial difficulties over debt payments and the most likely measure would be to refinance and/or increase the loan levels. The least likely actions would be to seek family help and selling up though there was some interest in selling some assets to help reduce debt.
The findings were fairly similar across the various farm types but Nuthall and his group said dairy farm managers are most likely to refinance or increase loan levels. They note that given equity levels are low in some cases there is clearly a limit to how much more can be borrowed.
Their said that primary production is frequently a partnership between spouses and the survey showed spouses are frequently consulted and have an influence on actions.
“While many spouses are thought not to get concerned or influence debt levels, at least according to the manager, there are certainly an appreciable number impacting on the decisions and getting anxious over the levels, which, in turn, no doubt influences decisions.”
An interesting finding was that about a third of farmers believe they seldom experience significant anxiety over debt issues but only a fifth made the same point over general farming issues.
“Clearly the latter are important to the managers: the report said.
It found notable differences in frequent and significant anxiety based on debt and equity levels but not across farm types nor on the number of children in the family. This suggested all types of farming had similar stress but clearly debt levels influenced anxiety quite markedly.
Nuthall said the nature of primary production tends to create more anxiety for farmers and family and employees relative to other occupations because of uncertain and potentially extreme weather and product prices, uncertainty over Government regulation and plant and animal disease risk.
There is also evidence climate change is increasing anxiety by disrupting farmers’ sense of place, particularly as the workplace is frequently also their home.
The group’s hypothesis is that anxiety levels are also explainable through farmers’ personal characteristics – personality, intelligence, farm objectives, age, education and gender.
Nuthall said the theory is that if a person’s inherent and environmental make-up can be changed so reactions to anxiety-creating situations do not cause inappropriate reactions then greater success in achieving their objectives will result.
There is good evidence this phenotypic change could occur through behavioural therapy.
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The full survey report is available at https://hdl.handle.net/10182/8339
