Relief Funds Offer Help for the Mental Health of Farmers with Land Poisoned by ‘Forever Chemicals’
In Maine, state agencies and nonprofits are working to help farmers distressed by the discovery of PFAS – better known as “forever chemicals” – on their land.
For decades, the chemical industry knew about the dangers of PFAS, chemical compounds linked to cancer, hormone disruption and other serious health problems including, new research suggests, neurological and mental health conditions. Known as “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down, they’ve been used in consumer items from non-stick pans and takeout food packaging to personal care products. Now PFAS are being found in farmland across the U.S. that used sludge from sewage and wastewater treatment plants as fertilizer.
In Maine, the discovery of PFAS on farms where sludge was used starting decades ago has led to depression, anxiety and despair among many organic farmers after testing revealed their fields and orchards were contaminated.
“For the folks who have found contamination on their land, this has certainly been extremely stressful to the point of devastating for some who have lost their farms, their livelihoods,” Sarah Alexander, executive director of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, told MindSite News.
Responding to these needs, state agencies and nonprofit groups have allocated funds to buy contaminated land and to provide acccess to resources and support for affected farmers, including mental health services.
For Johanna Davis and Adam Nordell of Songbird Farm in Unity, Maine, finding out that PFAS had infiltrated their organic farm plunged them into a crisis. Their soil, water and even their bodies were all severely contaminated.
“Sludge-derived PFAS has upended our farm business, thrown our livelihood into question, devalued our land and created an enormous amount of stress about potential health consequences for us and our 4-year-old child,” Davis told the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association.
In 2022 the couple hired a private laboratory after learning that their land had been fertilized with municipal sludge decades before they purchased it. It turned out that the water they and their toddler were drinking contained 400 times more PFAS than the state considers safe.
Davis and her husband Adam recalled their shock and disbelief. “Just devastated. Heartbroken. Really angry…(It’s) terrifying.”
“At least we know and we can stop drinking our water. But who still doesn’t know?” Davis said. “Who is drinking water right now that’s as high as ours? Who is about to have a baby? It’s so too late, it’s so too late to be telling everybody this. And it can’t be soon enough.”
The couple asked stores to pull their produce from the shelves while they did further testing. Two years later, Davis and Nordell became the first to have their contaminated land bought by the Maine Farmland Trust – as a research center for the study of PFAS, with an emphasis on soil remediation.
The other good news is the relief funds that aim to aid farmers, and help address their mental health needs. Thanks to a first-of-its-kind government relief fund, Maine farmers impacted by PFAS contamination can apply for emergency aid, and by the end of 2024, the PFAS fund expects to launch additional programs, including a program to provide access to mental health services for eligible individuals.
In addition to state funds, the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association and the Maine Farmland Trust set up a private fund. So far they have raised a million and a half dollars to help cover income replacement, mental health support and other services.
“One of the first things we heard as a need from our community and from our farmers was to provide mental health support and wellness support to be able to help address the stress, the extreme stress that people were feeling,” Alexander told MindSite News. “So we provided a round of initial mental health wellness stipends that folks could use in whatever way felt most supportive, whether that was seeking counseling or seeking other wellness support that might help them get through this.”
Two years into the crisis, the stress of dealing with these issues has not abated for farmers, and is prompting many questions, Alexander said. “They’ve had two years of uncertainty of the unknowns: ‘Is my business going to make it? Am I going to be able to figure this out? Are we healthy? Did we get all the things in place that we need to do to protect our own health and our family’s health?’”
The association has expanded its funding and is providing mental health support and wellness stipends for farmers that have been dealing with the impact of “forever chemicals” for longer periods of time, Alexander said.
“Whether organic or not, farmers want to provide food for their communities,” she said. “ The idea that you might be growing something that you thought was perfectly safe for your community, but may not be, adds another level of stress. You feel just that you’ve let folks down, even though this has happened without you knowing about it. But I think the other piece of stress that came for everybody — in both the agricultural system and the food system — is that after this discovery there was so much fear and uncertainty about what is out there. And that still does exist to an extent.”
The first PFAS contamination on state farms was found in routine water testing in 2016, which was traced back to a dairy farm in southern Maine, Alexander said. Since then, at least six farms shut down entirely before relief funds were made available.
A heavily forested state, Maine has only 7,000 farms, and some licenses to spread sludge on 700 of them date back at least 30 years. The state’s Environmental Protection Agency, which is planning to test all 700, has so far found 70 farms whose soil contamination exceeds the current thresholds. And stricter standards for some ‘forever chemicals’ mean more will be added to the list.
As the state works to rid farmland soil of PFAS, Alexander said, it’s a natural reaction for some farmers to wish they had never heard of them.
“We don’t want PFAS in our food system. We don’t want PFAS in our water,” said Alexander. “I think the initial stress response of uncertainty and what may happen if we do find them almost makes people wonder if it’s better not to find out.”
“But it’s better to know. What we’ve really tried to encourage and build the support around is that knowing is important. Because then there are steps we can take to address it together.”
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