Farm stress in Kansas

The state records what the decedent did for a living

The Annual Summary of Vital Statistics, Kansas, 2024, published in December 2025, carries two tables that cross cause of death against what the person did for a living. One is keyed to the occupation recorded for the decedent and one to the industry that occupation sat in^[1]. Suicide is one of the causes both tables break out by name, which means the question this page asks has a published answer rather than a proxy for one.

Kansas recorded 518 resident suicide deaths in 2024, down from 559 in 2023, and the age-adjusted rate fell from 19.2 to 17.6 deaths per 100,000 across those two years^[1]. The department adds that the single-year change in that rate was not statistically significant, because the confidence intervals for the two years overlap^[1]. The 2024 interval it prints runs from 16.0 to 19.1^[1]. Of those 518, sixteen were of people whose occupation was coded to farming, forestry and fishing, and eighteen were of people whose industry was coded to agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting^[1].

Why those two rows cannot become a rate

Sixteen deaths is a count and it stays a count. The volume publishes no population denominator by occupation, so there is no number of working Kansans in farming, forestry and fishing to divide by, and neither table carries a rate column^[1]. The department also prints a warning under both: because the coding of occupation and of industry changed, comparison with prior years calls for caution^[1]. A trend line across editions is exactly what that warning rules out.

The occupation recorded is the decedent's usual one, which is why the farming, forestry and fishing row holds 1,056 deaths in total with heart disease the largest of its named causes at 281^[1]. The row describes everybody who worked in the sector, not everybody who was working in it on the day they died.

The state's other lens is how crowded the county is

Alongside occupation, Kansas publishes mortality through peer groups, which sort all 105 counties by how many people live on a square mile. The technical notes set the boundaries: frontier counties hold fewer than 6.0 people per square mile, rural counties 6.0 to 19.9, densely-settled rural counties 20.0 to 39.9, semi-urban counties 40.0 to 149.9, and urban counties 150.0 and above^[1]. The same notes warn that these are not the Census Bureau's definitions of urban and rural^[1].

A death is recorded to a county of residence, the county carries a density, and the density puts the death in a group. Table E27 splits the 518 that way and Table B4 of the same volume gives each group its 2024 population. Both columns below come from those two tables and from nowhere else.

The rate the department does not print

There is no suicide rate by peer group anywhere in the volume. The one table that gives crude and age-adjusted rates by peer group covers deaths from all causes rather than any single one^[1]. So the comparison a reader wants has to be built, and the arithmetic belongs on the page rather than behind it.

Taking the three least crowded groups together gives 167 suicide deaths among 791,165 people, which is 21.1 deaths per 100,000. The urban group gives 276 among 1,722,376, which is 16.0 per 100,000. Both figures are this publication's division of the Table E27 counts by the Table B4 populations for the same year^[1], and both are crude rates. They are not comparable with the 17.6 above, which is age-adjusted, and no confidence interval is available for either of them because the department did not calculate them.

The frontier group on its own carries 28 deaths in a population of 107,565. That is a small enough count that a handful of deaths either way would move the rate several points.

What the extension service publishes, and where it was written

What the state's land-grant extension service publishes on the subject is a lesson rather than a service. It comes as a facilitator's guide, a slide presentation the guide supplies the notes for, an evaluation form, four optional short lessons and four participant handouts, numbered MF3409, MF3411, and MF3412 through MF3419 in the extension catalog^[3]. The guide runs to twelve pages and its last page prints MF3409 and June 2018^[3].

The credit line on that last page says something worth knowing before anyone treats the material as a Kansas product. The lesson was developed by North Dakota State University Extension and used with permission of the authors and NDSU, and both named authors are described in the document as extension staff at that university^[3]. The note attached to the final slide tells the facilitator that the resources listed provide a starting point for information in North Dakota, and that other states should identify helplines or other resources of use in that state^[3]. Those are the document's own words.

Nothing in that curriculum is repeated here. It is written as instruction to a person under strain, and this publication reports what public bodies publish rather than standing in for one.

What a Kansas farmer in crisis is routed to

The KansasAgStress.org resource site says what it routes to in plain terms. A farmer in crisis, or somebody who knows one, is directed to their local Kansas community mental health center or to 988, and the site carries a separate 24-hour concern line in its header^[4]. Both of those are the site's own statements about itself.

What the site does not do, on the pages that render without scripting, is name the body that operates any of it. Its partners page returned no list to a client without scripting and its footer carries a bare copyright line^[4]. That concern line is therefore described here without an operator, because this publication does not know who runs it. The Kansas Department of Agriculture is the body whose own pages would settle that, and its site refuses automated clients.

The 988 half of that routing is at least measurable. Kansas centers were routed 4,167 calls in July 2026 and answered 3,789 of them^[5]. Those reports carry no county and no occupation, so nothing in them separates a call from a farm from a call from a suburb.

How many farms there are to be stressed

The denominator for all of this is the agricultural census, which the federal statistics service takes of American farms and ranches every five years^[2]. Kansas had 55,734 farms in 2022, down from 58,569 in 2017, working 44,794,702 acres at an average of 804 acres a farm^[2]. The Kansas count has fallen at every census since 2007, when it stood at 65,531^[2]. The 2022 data was issued in February 2024, so the newest published count of Kansas farms describes a year four years gone.

Set the farm count beside the two mortality lenses and the limit of what published Kansas data supports comes into view. Sixteen suicide deaths in 2024 carried a farming, forestry or fishing occupation code, and 167 of the year's deaths fell in the three least crowded groups of counties, which between them held 791,165 people^[1]. Those two figures answer different questions and neither divides into 55,734 to produce anything meaningful, because a farm is not a person and the sector row counts everybody who worked in it.

What can be said is what is measured: the emptiest counties carry a higher crude rate than the crowded ones, the psychiatric program at the state hospital serving the west had 16 of its 90 budgeted beds unavailable on its January 2026 budgeting page^[6], and the summer heat those same counties work through is covered elsewhere in this publication. Every section is listed on this publication's front page.