Help for farmers managing their mental health

By Lisa Foust Prater

Marshal Sewell grew up on his family’s fifth-generation fruit and vegetable farm near Plant City, Florida, between Tampa and Orlando. They grew strawberries in winter and mixed vegetables in spring and fall.

When Sewell was in high school, he planned to study ag business and ag economics at the University of Florida, then come back to the farm. “My family had talked about my brother, Marc, working on the agronomic side, doing more of the producing,” he says. “I was going to develop the sales and marketing portion of our farm business and work to get more of our produce directly into the retail market.”

During his senior year, everything changed.

“We were in some difficult economic times,” he says. “We’d had a couple of not-so-great seasons in terms of overall pricing and yields, and then we had a disease outbreak in our crop that season, leading to a significant crop failure. We had all of our costs sunk, and we hadn’t even begun to harvest strawberries. All of our money was out on the table, and we had no money coming in. And my dad made the decision to end his own life.”

That was just before Thanksgiving.

“We went into the holidays trying to navigate not only the crop failure that we were experiencing,” Sewell says, “but the grief from the loss of my dad. And then my mom and my brother and I, trying to understand how to piece everything together and run this family business, and maintain it, and keep it going for the next generations, like every farmer wants.

“I didn’t know exactly what it would look like then, but I realized if I wasn’t going to be farming, I wanted to work in a capacity in which I could support farmers, because I had seen what had happened to our family and our business.”

Using Pain for Good
Sewell credits his mother, Marie, with helping him and his brother move forward. “Right there, around the holidays, I was not necessarily wanting to get back in the groove of going to school and everything. And she said, ‘We can sit here in the muck and let this keep on building up around us, or we can get up and keep going.’

“That has always resonated with me,” he says. “In our family, we believe that the Lord isn’t going to waste pain, so throughout the loss and the grief, we choose to believe that it can’t have been for naught, and if there’s an opportunity to try and use it for some sort of good or to positively impact people around us, that’s what we need to do.”

Forging a New Path
After sticking to his original plan for college, Sewell chose a different career path.

“I was faced with a decision of going back and farming with my brother, with our family, or pursuing a field where I could continue supporting farmers,” he says. “Right now my brother is mainly running our historic family farm. My wife, Taylor, and I help when we can, but we are both more in supporting roles within the industry.”

Taylor is a technical agronomist for Yara Crop Nutrition, working with fruit and vegetable growers throughout the Southeast. Sewell works in the vegetable seed division of Bayer Crop Science. “I’m working with growers not just in the Southeast but all throughout North America, working on trying to identify opportunities and resources to bring them better genetics and better traits,” he says. The couple have a young daughter.

Sewell and his brother look at their children as the sixth generation, he says. “It’s really cool to look toward the future,” he says, “as we continue to see the evolution of the business and the evolution of the industry, and to see this next generation coming up.”

Sharing His Story
A few months after Hurricane Michael devastated farm communities throughout the Southeast in October 2018, Sewell was invited to attend a Georgia Farm Bureau event to talk about farm stress and life after loss. That was a turning point; he had spent almost 10 years not talking about what had happened.

“I interacted with these folks and realized there was such a significant need in terms of stress and mental health,” he recalls.

“I didn’t go out seeking to be an advocate; I just wanted to better understand what my dad had gone through,” he says. “I wanted to learn more about resources to better care for myself. I wanted to be a better resource for people I loved and for people around me. So I spent years really trying to dig deeper into this area of stress and psychology.

“I want to lead a purposeful life and, as part of that, I want to help contribute positively to people within our ag community in the hopes of avoiding situations like we experienced. Ultimately, that led to this passion project, which is the advocacy work that my family does now.”

A New Chapter
In 2022 the Sewells created a nonprofit organization, Mind Your Melon. They share their message through speaking engagements, workshops, and articles.

Another way they promote mental health is through the Mind Your Melon podcast, which is available on their website. Topics have included disaster response planning, hardiness and financial well-being, finding the balance and enjoyment of food, stress 101, and turning failure into success.

“We bring people on who we believe are going to be useful or good resources for people in the ag community,” Sewell says, “and we want to provide a platform for folks who are willing to share their own stories.”

Building a Toolbox
While Mind Your Melon focuses on mental health, Sewell notes they are not healthcare professionals. “We are focused on stress management and we really try to advocate for proactive preventative maintenance,” he says. “We definitely want to stay in our lane. There’s a lot of value to the clinical resources that are available, but I am all about having access to more tools in the toolbox.”

Sewell says the ultimate goal is to bring people together.

“There are so many people within agriculture who are dealing with a lot of really similar issues,” he says. “Maybe some of the finer details vary. When we really get a little bit deeper into the conversation of how we’re doing or what we’re dealing with, and we’re willing to open up with one another, I think it just strengthens that sense of community.”

He acknowledges that those conversations can be difficult. “But I try to have a spirit of optimism and hope,” he says. “I don’t want anybody to get too bogged down by the topic of farm stress and mental health. We live and work in an amazing industry surrounded by fantastic people.”

Learn more at mindyourmelon.org.