Comfort Farms: healing through agriculture

Comfort Farms: healing through agriculture

by LeeAnna Tatum

Jon Jackson of Comfort Farms

all photos in this article courtesy of Jon Jackson

The responsibilities, rhythms and rigors of farm life provide a powerful antidote to the struggles that many veterans face on the homefront. For many, the most difficult challenge of war is coming home: reintegration into civilian life, reconnecting with friends and family members; adjusting to a life that is full of choice and lacking focus.

It’s on the farm that these men and women can learn to set down their weapons and pick up a shovel, trade in bullets for seeds, and re-assimilate into civilian life.

Jon Jackson, a combat veteran who served as a US Army Airborne Ranger, knows first hand about the struggles veterans face on the homefront having experienced them himself. Dealing with depression, PTSD and the effects of Traumatic Brain Injury; Jon was emotionally closed off from his family and loved ones.

“Coming out of the military, they put me on anti-anxiety medications, anti-depression medication,” Jon explained. “They put me on all these medications to combat the reactions of the medications. And you find out you have 20 medications, and you’re taking all this stuff for what?”

“At the end of the day, those medications made me dead to the world, made me dead to my family,” he continued. “I had no emotions. I was just living - correction - I was just breathing. I wasn’t living.”

Jon had always enjoyed gardening and found healing and purpose for himself and others through the establishment of Comfort Farms. Comfort Farms is a program of the nonprofit Jon founded, STAG VETS. It is the nation’s first acute veterans crisis agriculture center and it is named in honor of fallen US Ranger Captain Kyle E. Comfort.

Work and life on the farm not only gives struggling veterans a new mission but it provides a community, structure and routine that may have been missed upon return to civilian life. Farm life also nurtures an emotional awakening. By giving individuals responsibilities and giving them the space they need to work through some of their issues, Comfort Farms can provide an effective therapy that goes far beyond the capability of pharmaceuticals.

“You give a vet purpose, you give him direction, you give him a sense of ownership to solve problems,”

Jon explained. “You put problems on him to critically think even when he or she is in a position where they don’t physically feel like they can do anything. But now, on the farm, all that changes.”

“It’s really unique and it needs to be studied a lot more.”

“We have guys, to include myself,” Jon said, “who want to be left alone. You don’t want to be around your wife, you don’t want to be around your kids, your family members, because they don’t understand.”

“But the farm has a very miraculous way of changing those kinds of things,” Jon continued. “There will be a vet who doesn’t want to be around his own family but he’s looking forward to taking care of chicks everyday or making sure piglets are being fed - things like that. So you may not want to be around family, but there’s this family and eventually those vets start longing to be with their own family.”

“What happens is they’re starting to feel those emotions again,” Jon explained. “You come from an environment where humans are bad - you can’t trust them. So, we put up our guard, we put a 20 foot wall up. Especially when you live in an environment that’s black and white - enemy or friendly. We come back here to America and there is no black and white, it’s all gray. So a lot of folks get frustrated in the gray - vets don’t like living in the gray. They want to know - is this good or bad? But life isn’t that way.”

“When you work with animals and in you’re in an environment where you’re giving and you’re caring and you’re realizing skills that you’ve tucked away. You end up lighting that fire again, getting the coals hot of what it used to feel like. A lot of vets haven’t cried in a very long time and all of a sudden they have a lot of emotion. Like when they have a pig that goes to slaughter. Or they just have emotions of being happy, being around people. Those emotions are good, those feelings of sadness are good - you’re not a robot, you are human.”

There’s a good bit of science that demonstrates how effective digging in the dirt and simply being outdoors is at treating depression and anxiety. Research has shown that there is a bacterium in soil that produces the same effects on the human brain as antidepressant pharmaceuticals by stimulating the release of serotonin. There is also research that shows the benefits of being surrounded by the sounds of nature, as little as fifteen minutes can reduce the effects of stress on the body - slowing heart rates and decreasing the body’s fight-or-flight responses.

Connecting with the earth and with life’s naturalrhythms is in itself healing. But coupling that with purpose, hard physical work, animal husbandry, responsibility for and to others, and the opportunity to serve the broader community makes farming an occupation that is particularly well-suited to veterans.

“There’s a unique statistic shared between warriors and farmers,” Jon said. “In one group, less than 1% protect the rest and in the other group, less than 1% feed the rest.

“There’s this uniqueness in being in service and having that type of service mentality,” Jon went on to explain “... it was a natural transition for me to get into farming - it just felt right.”

Jon is not alone in making this observation and many organizations, including the United States Department of Agriculture are making the connections between veterans and farming. With an aging population of American farmers leaving the profession and a growing number of veterans coming home and needing viable occupations, this pairing could very well be a winning combination.

For more information on STAG VETS and ComfortFarms, please visit their website. You can find moreinformation on the USDA programs and resourcesfor veterans here.

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