Farm Family Coping with Stress: The Impact of the 1998 Ice Storm*

INTRODUCTIONIn January, 1998, unprecedented levels of freezing rain coated roads, trees and buildings in Eastern Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and the Northeastern United States with a layer of ice 5.5 cm to 10 cm (2-3 inches) in width (Statistics Canada, 1998). Thousands of miles of hydro poles collapsed under the weight of the ice, leaving an area 1 28,000 km square without electricity for up to 27 days. While most rural residents sought the security of urban shelter, farm families remained on the land to care for the animals and buildings on which their livelihoods depended. The present study looks at how farm families coped with this exceptional weather event. For us, the key questions are how did farm households negotiate and cope with this natural disaster? What were the key resources they called upon during the ice storm? What were the longer term impacts on stress, and on health? These are the issues examined here.Farming has long been considered a stressful occupation, not only as a consequence of variability in markets and workload but also due to the unpredictability of factors such as the weather. A review of the literature on farm-related stress makes clear farmers ' situations in the region and the stresses to which farm families were already subject prior to the ice storm, and also the major factors behind chronic, on-going stress among the farm community, potentially making specific groups more vulnerable to the impacts of the storm.HARDTIMES, MENTAL HEALTH AND WELLBEING IN FARM FAMILIESThe literature on stress in farm families originated largely in response to the farm crisis of the 1980s (Ortega et al., 1994; Murdoch and Leistritz, 1988). Studies identified the linkages between farm financial strain and psychological vulnerability, particularly depression (Armstrong and Shulman, 1990; Belyea and Lobao, 1990). For example, an extensive, longitudinal database was developed in Iowa, following rural families over a twenty-year period, initially demonstrating the impact of financial strain on farm families, and later the psychological impacts of 'losing the farm' (Conger and Elder, 1994; Elder and Conger, 2000; Lorenz et al., 2000). In the 1990s, research expanded to include the internal dynamics of the farm household as an economic unit, and to focus on the close ties between family and business inherent in farming, including the dynamics of multiple generation partnerships, role congruence and labour distribution, in addition to traditional divisions in terms of demographic factors of gender and age (Johnson and Booth, 1990; Jurich and Russell, 1987; Lobao and Meyer, 1995; Zimmerman and Fetsch, 1994). The investigations of farm-related stress suggest that farming populations are significantly different from the larger rural non-farm and urban cohorts in relation to their ability to cope with stress, supporting the view farmers had held informally for years: although farming is stressful, the dynamic of being raised on a farm and being integrated into a farming community results in a resilience to stress above that of the rural, non-farm population (Elder and Conger, 2000). Farmers are exposed to different stressors (Swisher et al., 1998; Walker and Walker, 1987a), have different resources (Van Hook, 1987), different family dynamics (Mertensmeyer and Coleman, 1987), different labour allocation issues (Meiners and Olson, 1987; Lobao and Meyer, 1995), different utilization of coping strategies (Davis-Brown and Salamon, 1987), and different service preferences (Jurich and Russell, 1987; Zimmerman and Fetsch, 1994; Martinez-Brawley and Blundall, 1991 ; Martinez-Brawley and Blundall, 1989). Such differences have been mobilized to lobby for special services and government attention (Thompson and McCubbin, 1987). This study adds to this literature, addressing farm household and community response to an extreme weather event.Factors in Farm Household Responses to Stressful EventsIn this study, stress is conceptualised from a transactional perspective: stress is experienced when the demands of a situation tax or exceed a person's (or in this study, a household's) resources and some type of harm or loss is anticipated (Lyon, 2000, 13). …