A Mental Health Program Built by Farmers for Farmers

Kyla sits down with Dr. Michelle Pavloff, a registered nurse and researcher at the University of Saskatchewan, to talk about how she built a mental health network for Saskatchewan farmers and ranchers almost entirely from the ground up. Michelle's path started in a rural emergency room, where she was often the only nurse in the building, and where she began to notice that farm culture — distinct from both rural and urban culture — wasn't being served by either. When she set out to research farmer and rancher mental health, her patient partners threw out her plan for a survey and insisted on something slower: showing up at the farm, fixing fence, and earning trust before ever asking a question. That decision shaped everything that followed, from a heifer auction that raised over $20,000, to a therapy network staffed entirely by counsellors who are farmers themselves, to a recent provincial funding commitment putting the network on stable footing. It's a story about what patient-oriented research looks like when you actually hand it back to the people who built it.