Suicide

In India, over 300,000 farmers have taken their lives between 2005 and 2020, a suicide rate approximately twice that of the general population. While climate change and mental health issues have been blamed by some media, in India everyone knows that the real reason for this massive, new rash of suicides is that farmers were encouraged to go into debt to purchase GMO seeds and other crop “inputs,” being promised that their yields would be much higher — and they could bank on it.

This was a new way of farming, and for most who tried it, their crop sales turned out to be insufficient to pay off their debts, let alone feed their families. As they faced loss of generational land holdings, suicide seemed the only way out.

Now the same factors have hit American farmers, who face a suicide rate 3.5 times higher than the general population, a stark indicator of the intense stress in agriculture, according to the National Rural Health Association. From 2000 to 2020, rural suicide rates rose 46%.

The “stress” in farming is due to the simple fact that farmers can no longer reliably expect to make a profit off the land, no matter how hard they work.

In 2025, there is a bumper corn crop in the U.S. — possibly the largest corn crop ever. What effect did this have? The price of corn dropped precipitously to $3.90 per bushel, and farmers have reported they will lose $100 for every acre planted in corn. Only 3 years earlier, corn fetched $8 per bushel.

U.S. farmers are in crisis. The following video illustrates the critical situation for the small farmer today: