Overview: Offered by the CPA-NA Agricultural Workers Committee, this is a two-hour experiential and educational workshop for therapists and helping professionals seeking to deepen their understanding of the specific challenges faced by farmers relating to food systems, climate change and mental health. This will support both clinicians who are already serving agricultural workers and/or rural populations and also those who do not directly work with these communities. Through art-based exercises, storytelling and population-specific climate grief education, participants will leave with a clear understanding of why farmers are on the frontlines of climate change, the serious mental health effects faced by this population and ways to support these critical communities not only as therapists but as eaters.
Background: Within the climate change conversation, farming and the agricultural sector are exclusively seen as either significant contributors to greenhouse gas emissions or idealized vocations where going “back to the land” can be a panacea for the climate crisis. Both of these perspectives render invisible the serious mental health, financial and cultural challenges farmers face. The suicide rate of farmers is 3.5 times higher than the general population and farmers and ranchers often face unaddressed substance use, depression and anxiety. Alongside chronic loneliness, farmers face compounding pressures of a changing climate, market volatility and continued stewardship of family farmland which all add up to a sense of existential loss, threatening not only their livelihoods but selfhood.
Rooted by the stories of two committee members’ lived experience of climate disaster on farms, participants will be able to:
- integrate population-specific recommendations to farming communities dealing with ecological loss and grief into clinical training,
- move beyond romanticizing or maligning farmers in the climate crisis conversation,
regard agricultural workers in their full humanity within a larger ecological and economic system,
- understand how buying power, food choices, and structural forces shape both farmer livelihoods and collective health,
- clarify our collective stake in farmer mental health as eaters by using food as a tangible and relational entry point.
Finally, this workshop will explore how healing in the time of the climate crisis is inseparable from restoring right relationship with the land and its caretakers and the opportunity available to us to make meaningful change not only through our skills as practitioners but through the foods we consume. We hope you will join us!
Meet the hosts:
emily corbiere bates is a third-year Master of Divinity student at Harvard Divinity School studying spiritual care for farmers grappling with the climate crisis. emily has over 5 years of cumulative experience working on small-scale organic farms in both secular and spiritual contexts and made the choice to study eco-chaplaincy in Divinity School after they saw the mental health impacts on farmers during two separate climate disasters in 2021 and 2022: a flash flood in western North Carolina and extreme drought in northern California. They have worked with CPA-NA in many different capacities since joining in 2024, including founding the Agricultural Workers Committee in January 2025.
Maud Macrory Powell works as a faculty member for Oregon State University Extension, runs a small organic farm with her family in Southern Oregon, and produces community theater in the Applegate Valley. Informed by her own experiences in the farming community, Maud developed an Agricultural and Ecological Stress Training for folks working with farmers, along with a recent cohort-based program called, “Rooted Resilience,” which offers training to facilitate ecological stress and grief gatherings with farmers and ranchers. Her debut novel, City of Grit and Gold, was published by Allium Press in 2017. Her essays have been featured in Greenhorns: 50 Dispatches from the New Farmers’ Movement and the Oregon Humanities Magazine.
Becca Manthe, MA, LAMFT, ATR-P (she/her/hers) received her Master of Arts in Counseling at Adler Graduate School (2023), with dual concentrations of Marriage and Family Therapy and Art Therapy. Additional training, including Nature in Counseling, Nature-Based Expressive Arts for Trauma and Grief, and Climate Aware Psychology, informs her clinical orientation. In her therapy practice at Intuitive Therapy & Consulting in Golden Valley, MN, she provides climate-aware, nature-integrating lifestyle support that guides participants toward their core sense of belonging in the natural world as a pathway to harmonize their body-mind-spirit and reconnect their intuition, heart, and head within the context of complex systems thinking. Her special interest in the well-being of the agricultural system is rooted in her family history, participation in 4-H throughout childhood, a zero-waste lifestyle reorientation in adulthood, and the broad decolonization of living and built systems.
Michelle Kenstler is a Clinical Mental Health Counseling graduate student at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania whose path into mental health work grew from her 11 years as an organic vegetable, fruit, and specialty cut flower farmer. Working closely with the land, she witnessed the emotional impacts of climate uncertainty, economic pressure, and isolation on agricultural communities. Her research on ecoanxiety, nature relatedness, and resilience among environmental science undergraduates has been published in Ecopsychology, reflecting her interest in how environmental stress affects mental health and how connection to nature can support resilience. Michelle also holds an advanced graduate certificate in ecotherapy from the Pacifica Graduate Institute and has received specialized training in supporting farmers’ mental health through Western Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE).
Amália Pleasance (she/her) is a queer artist, educator, expressive arts psychotherapist in training, and a certified nature and forest therapy guide based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Her trans-disciplinary research and practice engage with eco-anxiety, intersectional environmentalism, dark ecology, deep play, and embodiment practices for connecting with the natural world. An advocate for democratizing and decolonizing mental health care, Emily works with various populations to help folks reconnect with their bodies, awaken their creative expression, and find their ecological self. Most notably, she founded the Forest Bathing Club in Toronto in 2021.
REGISTER HERE
There are limited complimentary tickets available to those with financial barriers. Please reach out to [email protected] if interested.