SLATON — Grant Heinrich was working in the office on his family’s farm when he got a text message from one of his closest friends and farm hands.

A suicide note.

Heinrich jumped in his truck and sped to the barn. The West Texas roads seemed like a tunnel with blurred walls of crops curving around him.

“The only thing on my mind was to hurry and get there,” Heinrich said. “I blew a hose on my truck, but I knew if I was late, I would beat myself up about it for the rest of my life.”

Suicide felt like a plague on Heinrich’s family. He lost his uncle 24 years ago. Then one of his cousins, who Heinrich saw as a superhero, died nine years ago. Two years after that, another cousin died by suicide.

“I have witnessed too much pain for the rest of my family,” he said.

During the last two decades, there have been higher rates of suicide in rural communities than in urban areas. And it’s getting worse. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide rates have increased 46% in rural America, compared to a 27.3% increase in metro areas. And rural residents go to the emergency room 1.5 times more to be treated for self-harm incidents.

For farmers, the rate is higher – 3.5 times more than the general population, according to the National Rural Health Association.

Advocates suggest because farmers face multiple economic challenges that are out of their hands and are reluctant to share their problems, they are less likely to seek help. When they do, there can be very few options in reach because affordable care is limited in rural communities.

As a way to close the gaps in access, the Texas Department of Agriculture is asking the Texas Legislature to sustain the Farmer Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Program for $500,000 a year. The money would help pay for a toll-free helpline for all workers in the agricultural industry, their families and people in their communities. The program launched last February with a federal grant and offers mental and financial resources to callers.

“Some people are just wanting to talk, and maybe they’re not in an emotional crisis,” said Trish Rivera, the department’s rural health specialist who oversees the program. “But they need someone to talk about what they’re going through so they don’t get to that stage.”

“The middle of nowhere”

When Heinrich thinks of his three dead family members, he inevitably wonders if he could have changed things. It’s a thought that haunts many people who lose loved ones to suicide: Is there a magical, golden hour to convince someone to stay alive?

That question, along with his grief, burrowed into Heinrich’s mind for years. It was on his mind again as he raced toward the barn in hopes of stopping his friend.

“I was so terrified of what I was going to walk up on and find,” he said.

He found his friend, weapon in hand, and was able to calm him down.

“I was just so thankful he was alive.”

Heinrich is the location manager for Pro-Agri Spraying in Slaton, a town of about 6,000 people 17 miles southeast of Lubbock. He also has become an advocate for mental health wellness and has helped promote the AgriStress helpline to reach the state's rural community. Heinrich’s seeding and spraying business, like the rest of the industry, felt the financial pressure of last year’s bad agricultural season. The historic drought devastated crops all over the state and left farmers to watch as the dry soil on their land blew away.

Part of the problem, Heinrich said, is the sheer isolation that can come with living on a farm.

“You’re so far removed from other people,” Heinrich said. “It’s not like you’re walking down the street and someone stops you to say hello. These people are out in the middle of nowhere, and half the time they’ve already made their decision.”

Grant Heinrich in a field near his Slaton business last November. Credit: Mark Rogers for The Texas Tribune

Heinrich in his Slaton office. Credit: Mark Rogers for The Texas Tribune

First: Grant Heinrich in a field near his Slaton business in November. Last: Heinrich in his Slaton office. “It’s not a weakness to go see a professional, someone who’s not your spouse or best friend,” Heinrich said. Credit: Mark Rogers for The Texas Tribune

The Farmer Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Program was created in 2021 after state Sen. Roland Gutierrez, a San Antonio Democrat, added language to the agriculture department’s so-called “sunset bill,” legislation that authorizes the department to exist and lays out the work it is supposed to do. He plans to support the department’s funding request this year, he said.

“Rural areas just don’t have mental health services,” Gutierrez told The Texas Tribune. “When you look at who lives there, you have people who are farmers or working on farms, and they’re a crop failure away from family devastation.”

It was originally unfunded, but the department won a one-time grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

The state agriculture department partnered with the AgriSafe Network, a nonprofit organization that has helped start similar programs in Connecticut, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wyoming. Rivera said the goal is to both provide care and resources to those in need and to destigmatize conversations on mental health in an industry that typically doesn’t talk about it.

“Agriculture is a culture where you don’t really discuss your feelings, and we want to change that,” Rivera said. “We want people to be comfortable asking for help.”

The department promotes the program where farmers might see it, such as at stock shows and county extension agencies and in local newspapers, schools and agriculture organizations. This will amplify with more funding, which the department is confident will come in the legislative session.

“We’ll have a continued effort to keep that message in front of our producers and really work to change the culture,” Rivera said.

What makes the helpline unique is who is on the other side of the call: Almost 250 mental health professionals have all been trained in the program to understand the various stresses farmers and ranchers are under. This includes weather, crop prices, tariffs and other matters.

“It’s important for whoever is answering to be informed and have the cultural competency to be able to talk about what they’re experiencing,” Rivera said. “It’s a good resource for anybody in rural life.”

Since the helpline’s launch in February, Rivera estimates it has received at least 60 calls. In the wake of the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde last May, Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller opened the helpline to everyone in the community.

Heinrich thinks the program could help farmers be less afraid of seeking help.

“It’s not a weakness to go see a professional, someone who’s not your spouse or best friend,” Heinrich said. “It’s important to just tell someone, ‘Hey, you’re not alone, there’s a lot of people who are hurting.’”

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2023/01/11/texas-farmer-mental-health-helpline-suicide/.

For 24/7 mental health support in English or Spanish, call the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s free help line at 800-662-4357. You can also reach a trained crisis counselor through the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988.

Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.

On the heels of a historic drought that devastated crops from the High Plains to South Texas, a new Texas Department of Agriculture report released Tuesday linked climate change with food insecurity and identified it as a potential threat to the state’s food supply.

The food access study, coordinated by the TDA and the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, notes that “climate instability” is strongly associated with soil loss, water quality, droughts, fires, floods and other environmental disasters.

2022 was one of the driest years on record for Texas, and about 49% of the state was still in drought conditions at the end of December. The drought resulted in failed crops, low yields for farmers and diminished grazing, which forced ranchers to cull their cattle and led to the highest amount of livestock sold — nearly 2.7 million — in more than a decade.

“From the agricultural perspective, concerns were expressed regarding droughts, drying up of artisanal wells, water use restrictions, fire threats and dangerous conditions for farm workers,” the report says.

Extended dry periods devastated Texas’ agricultural production, said Victor Murphy, a climate service program manager with the National Weather Service.

“We’re seeing longer periods without any precipitation, then when it does come, it’s in shorter, more intense bursts,” he said.

In total, Texas received a similar amount of precipitation in 2022 as in 2021, but most of that precipitation came all at once at the end of the summer.

Much of the state went through the worst of the drought conditions from June to August, during the high heat of the summer while plants are still growing. This was a sharp contrast to the torrential rainfall totals that followed. At the end of August, the Dallas-Fort Worth area was hit with a 1,000-year flood that brought 13 inches of rainfall in 18 hours.

“It is very difficult being a producer to have high and consistent yields with this kind of weather whiplash of extremes,” Murphy said. “It’s extremely difficult to prepare for a precipitation pattern that features long periods of near zero rainfall and short periods of extreme precipitation.”

The report recommends several actions, including having farmers work alongside researchers and policymakers, creating more food forests that allow trees to restore soil health and improve water quality, and strengthening bonds between local farmers and businesses to boost the farm-to-school infrastructure.

Food affordability and living wages

The report, which was submitted to the Texas Legislature on Dec. 31, also points to other factors that are making it harder for Texans to access and afford food, such as wages falling behind rising costs of living and lack of access to food in rural areas. Another issue is organizations being unaware of others with similar goals; for example, the report notes that certain grocers are interested in expanding delivery services into rural markets, while several food banks have acquired trucks to do the same.

The study includes suggestions that lawmakers could consider to help more Texans have consistent food access, such as expanding online and delivery options for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program participants and allowing more stores to accept those benefits.

Lawmakers have already filed some bills to address food insecurity during this year’s legislative session. State Rep. Shawn Thierry, D-Houston, filed House Bill 1118, which would offer tax credits to grocery stores that open in food deserts.

The report also recommends raising the minimum wage, citing the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s living wage model, which estimates the hourly rate individuals must earn to support themselves and their families in each state. According to MIT, in a Texas household with two parents and a child, each adult needs to make $17.44 an hour to meet their basic needs. The minimum wage in Texas is $7.25 an hour.

According to the report, meeting the living wage draws the line between “the financial independence of the working poor and the need to seek out public assistance or suffer consistent and severe housing and food insecurity.”

The report acknowledges that raising wages is an energized and politicized topic.

“The important take-away here is that there are significant gaps that need to be addressed between what researchers calculate to be a living wage in Texas, the wages that Texans are actually receiving, and many of the poverty thresholds that determine eligibility for assistance programs,” the report says.

The report also highlights how many families’ incomes have remained flat at the same time they’re having to spend more on food, housing and utility costs.

In 2021, 13.7% of Texas households faced food insecurity, the sixth-highest rate in the nation.

According to a 2021 report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, almost 79% of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program participants in Texas were families with children, and more than 27% of them are families with older and disabled adults.

Disclosure: The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

Correction, Jan. 3, 2023: Due to an editing error, a previous version of this story incorrectly interpreted a Texas Farm Bureau figure related to livestock sales in 2022. Texas ranchers sold 2.7 million cattle, the greatest amount in more than a decade.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2023/01/03/texas-climate-change-food-insecurity/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

"Why the Texas grid causes the High Plains to turn off its wind turbines" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

Sign up for a weekly newsletter on the latest stories about energy and the environment.

LUBBOCK — The state’s High Plains region, which covers 41 counties in the Texas Panhandle and West Texas, is home to more than 11,000 wind turbines — the most in any area of the state.

The region could generate enough wind energy to power at least 9 million homes. Experts say the additional energy could help provide much-needed stability to the electric grid during high energy-demand summers like this one, and even lower the power bills of Texans in other parts of the state.

But a significant portion of the electricity produced in the High Plains stays there for a simple reason: It can’t be moved elsewhere. Despite the growing development of wind energy production in Texas, the state’s transmission network would need significant infrastructure upgrades to ship out the energy produced in the region.

“We’re at a moment when wind is at its peak production profile, but we see a lot of wind energy being curtailed or congested and not able to flow through to some of the higher-population areas,” said John Hensley, vice president for research and analytics at the American Clean Power Association. “Which is a loss for ratepayers and a loss for those energy consumers that now have to either face conserving energy or paying more for the energy they do use because they don’t have access to that lower-cost wind resource.”

And when the rest of the state is asked to conserve energy to help stabilize the grid, the High Plains has to turn off turbines to limit wind production it doesn’t need.

“Because there’s not enough transmission to move it where it’s needed, ERCOT has to throttle back the [wind] generators,” energy lawyer Michael Jewell said. “They actually tell the wind generators to stop generating electricity. It gets to the point where [wind farm operators] literally have to disengage the generators entirely and stop them from doing anything.”

Texans have already had a few energy scares this year amid scorching temperatures and high energy demand to keep homes cool. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates the state’s electrical grid, warned about drops in energy production twice last month and asked people across the state to lower their consumption to avoid an electricity emergency.

The energy supply issues have hit Texans’ wallets as well. Nearly half of Texas’ electricity is generated at power plants that run on the state’s most dominant energy source, natural gas, and its price has increased more than 200% since late February, causing elevated home utility bills.

Meanwhile, wind farms across the state account for nearly 21% of the state’s power generation. Combined with wind production near the Gulf of Mexico, Texas produced more than one-fourth of the nation’s wind-powered electric generation last year.

Wind energy is one of the lowest-priced energy sources because it is sold at fixed prices, turbines do not need fuel to run and the federal government provides subsidies. Texans who get their energy from wind farms in the High Plains region usually pay less for electricity than people in other areas of the state. But with the price of natural gas increasing from inflation, Jewell said areas where wind energy is not accessible have to depend on electricity that costs more.

“Other generation resources are more expensive than what [customers] would have gotten from the wind generators if they could move it,” Jewell said. “That is the definition of transmission congestion. Because you can’t move the cheaper electricity through the grid.”

A 2021 ERCOT report shows there have been increases in stability constraints for wind energy in recent years in both West and South Texas that have limited the long-distance transfer of power.

“The transmission constraints are such that energy can’t make it to the load centers. [High Plains wind power] might be able to make it to Lubbock, but it may not be able to make it to Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston or Austin,” Jewell said. “This is not an insignificant problem — it is costing Texans a lot of money.”

Some wind farms in the High Plains foresaw there would be a need for transmission. The Trent Wind Farm was one of the first in the region. Beginning operations in 2001, the wind farm is between Abilene and Sweetwater in West Texas and has about 100 wind turbines, which can supply power to 35,000 homes. Energy company American Electric Power built the site near a power transmission network and built a short transmission line, so the power generated there does go into the ERCOT system.

But Jewell said high energy demand and costs this summer show there’s a need to build additional transmission lines to move more wind energy produced in the High Plains to other areas of the state.

Jewell said the Public Utility Commission, which oversees the grid, is conducting tests to determine the economic benefits of adding transmission lines from the High Plains to the more than 52,000 miles of lines that already connect to the grid across the state. As of now, however, there is no official proposal to build new lines.

“It does take a lot of time to figure it out — you’re talking about a transmission line that’s going to be in service for 40 or 50 years, and it’s going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars,” Jewell said. “You want to be sure that the savings outweigh the costs, so it is a longer process. But we need more transmission in order to be able to move more energy. This state is growing by leaps and bounds.”

A report by the American Society of Civil Engineers released after the February 2021 winter storm stated that Texas has substantial and growing reliability and resilience problems with its electric system.

The report concluded that “the failures that caused overwhelming human and economic suffering during February will increase in frequency and duration due to legacy market design shortcomings, growing infrastructure interdependence, economic and population growth drivers, and aging equipment even if the frequency and severity of weather events remains unchanged.”

The report also stated that while transmission upgrades across the state have generally been made in a timely manner, it’s been challenging to add infrastructure where there has been rapid growth, like in the High Plains.

Despite some Texas lawmakers’ vocal opposition against wind and other forms of renewable energy, the state has prime real estate for harnessing wind power because of its open plains, and farmers can put turbines on their land for financial relief.

This has led to a boom in wind farms, even with transmission issues. Since 2010, wind energy generation in Texas has increased by 15%. This month, the Biden administration announced the Gulf of Mexico’s first offshore wind farms will be developed off the coasts of Texas and Louisiana and will produce enough energy to power around 3 million homes.

“Texas really does sort of stand head and shoulders above all other states when it comes to the actual amount of wind, solar and battery storage projects that are on the system,” Hensley said.

One of the issues often brought up with wind and solar farms is that they may not be able to produce as much energy as the state needs all of the time. Earlier this month, when ERCOT asked consumers to conserve electricity, the agency listed low wind generation and cloud coverage in West Texas as factors contributing to a tight energy supply.

Hensley said this is where battery storage stations can help. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, utility-scale batteries tripled in capacity in 2021 and can now store up to 4.6 gigawatts of energy. Texas has been quickly developing storage projects. In 2011, Texas had only 5 megawatts of battery storage capacity; by 2020, that had ballooned to 323.1 megawatts.

“Storage is the real game-changer because it can really help to mediate and control a lot of the intermittency issues that a lot of folks worry about when they think about wind and solar technology,” Hensley said. “So being able to capture a lot of that solar that comes right around noon to [1 p.m.] and move it to those evening periods when demand is at its highest, or even move strong wind resources from overnight to the early morning or afternoon hours.”

Storage technology can help, but Hensley said transmission is still the big factor to consider.

Solar is another resource that could help stabilize the grid. According to the Solar Energy Industries Association, Texas has about 13,947 megawatts of solar installed and more than 161,000 installations. That’s enough to power more than 1.6 million homes.

This month, the PUC formed a task force to develop a pilot program next year that would create a pathway for solar panels and batteries on small-scale systems, like homes and businesses, to add that energy to the grid. The program would make solar and batteries more accessible and affordable for customers, and it would pay customers to share their stored energy to the grid as well.

Hensley said Texas has the most clean-energy projects in the works that will likely continue to put the region above the rest when it comes to wind generation.

“So they’re already ahead, and it looks like they’re going to be even farther ahead six months or a year down the road,” he said.

When you join us at The Texas Tribune Festival Sept. 22-24 in downtown Austin, you’ll hear from changemakers who are driving innovation, lawmakers who are taking charge with new policies, industry leaders who are pushing Texas forward and so many others. See the growing speaker list and buy tickets.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2022/08/02/texas-high-plains-wind-energy/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.