A man with a gray beard leans against a huge tractor tire
Unfavorable economic conditions forced Jeff Corle to sell his dairy cow business. Now he performs and speaks with audiences about mental health issues for farmers. Photo: Courtesy of Jeff Corle

Musician helps farmers open up with ‘Empty Barn’ song

Kara Holsopple·
Food and AgricultureHealthLatest StoriesYour Environment Update

Farmers are 3.5 more likely to die by suicide than the general population, according to the National Rural Health Association. That’s why today is Mental Health Awareness in Agriculture Day. A former farmer is using his life experience and music to raise awareness about mental health in the agricultural community.

Jeff Corle grew up on a dairy farm in Somerset County. He said it’s a lifestyle. But a few years ago, he had to sell the business, and it was devastating. It led to Corle writing and releasing the song “Empty Barn,” which went viral on social media. Now he’s an independent artist, touring and also speaking to the public about mental health in farming in what he calls a “Keynote Concert.” The Allegheny Front’s Kara Holsopple talked with him about it.

LISTEN to the interview

[A longer version of the interview will be posted on Friday.]

This interview has been edited.

Kara Holsopple: You grew up on a dairy farm in Somerset County. What was your life like there growing up and taking over the farm?

Jeff Corle: It was the typical childhood on the farm, helping to take care of calves when I was small. As time went on, I got more involved with fieldwork and making hay. We always grew corn and oats and hay to feed the cows. I always joke and say when you’re a dairy farmer, it’s not all-consuming. You can have an occupation, and you can have a hobby. Your occupation can be taking care of the cows, and your hobby can be growing feed for the cows, or your occupation can be growing crops, feed for the cows, and your hobby can be taking care of the cows. 

Kara Holsopple: Tell me about the moment that led you to write the song, “Empty Barn.” 

Jeff Corle: It’s just become increasingly more difficult for small farmers to survive in the current economic environment. Dairy farms now are getting bigger and bigger and bigger, which tends to suppress the price for the milk paid to the farmers. So in the spring of 2022, the handwriting was kind of on the wall. We realized we were just too small to continue to compete.

We made the very painful and difficult decision to shut down the dairy, which meant having to sell our beloved and beautiful Guernsey cows. My life kind of revolved around those cows. I thought of them as friends and family, much more than I ever did as farm animals. So when the time came to have the sale and say goodbye to them, it was really the single hardest thing I ever felt in my life. 

When the truck pulled away that day, the best way I’ve been able to come to describe this is that it literally felt as though something had been ripped out of me. In the days and weeks that followed that sale, I was heartbroken. I sank into a depression. At a certain point, I realized that pain was just consuming me, and I had to figure out some way to confront it. I had always messed around with playing guitar and writing songs, so I decided to try to adjust as a way to get what I was feeling out. I sat down with the guitar and wrote this song called “Empty Barn.”

Kara Holsopple: It’s a beautiful song. One of the lines that really hit me was “…wish I didn’t have to be the one.”

Jeff Corle: Oh my gosh, you nailed it. That line comes from the fact that farmers in general, but I think especially small dairy farmers, have their whole identity wrapped up in the farm and taking care of the animals and producing a quality product in the milk. In my case, I was fourth generation.

“I literally felt as though I was letting my family down, I was letting the cows down, and I was letting my ancestors down.”

So that line has to do with I wish I didn’t have to be the one who was going to shut it down. Because in that moment, I literally felt as though I was letting my family down, I was letting the cows down, and I was letting my ancestors down. I think a lot of farmers who go through [shutting down their farms] experience similar thoughts and emotions. 

Kara Holsopple: What kind of reaction has the song gotten? 

Jeff Corle: When I wrote the song, it was just for my own therapy. Left to my own devices, that’s probably as far as it would have gone. But a friend convinced me to put it up on my farm’s Facebook page. At the time, I didn’t even have a music page or anything.

So I made a simple smartphone recording, just me and the guitar. I put it up there, made it available for download on that Facebook page, and I was shocked to see that the next day it had been downloaded like 300 times. I said to this friend of mine, well, great, now 300 some people know what an emotional sap I really am. But I can tell you it only went downhill from there because in the coming days, it started to get downloaded thousands of times. 

What’s even more remarkable about this thing going viral was that people just started to write the most heartfelt comments. Love, support, encouragement for me, but then also lots of people writing saying they had gone through the same thing, they were facing going through the same thing.

That was really my introduction to what I’ve come to understand is a larger problem, which is the farmer mental health crisis. Seeing all these people reacting to the song in that way and telling me that finally someone understands what we’re going through and gets us and we feel seen – I never, never in a million years, expected all of that.

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Kara Holsopple: What do you think gets in the way of farmers and people in rural America getting help with their mental health? 

Jeff Corle: I think it all comes from, if you’re a farmer, you learn from your parents, especially from your dad, this kind of grin-and-bear-it mentality. That comes with the territory because farming is a risk all the way around. If you have a bad crop year, you always say, ‘Well, it’ll be better next year.’ If springtime is too rainy, you always say, ‘We’ll get the crops in next week.’ So it’s never that you just fall down and kind of quit. 

You have this grin-and-bear-it mentality. So I think that just holds over to all aspects of life, particularly mental health. Guys will think, ‘I’ll get through this, there’s no sense in burdening someone else with it. I’ll figure it out.’ Unfortunately, mental health is one of those things that oftentimes takes someone from the outside for you to connect with and tell your story.

In my case, I had my guitar and the desire to write a song about what I was feeling. But when other people heard that song, and then were able to lend me their love, support, and encouragement. That’s really what started my healing journey. I have a joke that I say in my talk, which is, ‘It turns out, if you tell other people what you’re going through, they can help you.’ So that’s part of my message: to get out there and say, ‘Guys, you cannot keep this stuff locked inside. It will kill you.’ 

Kara Holsopple: Do you think it’s changing? 

Jeff Corle: I do think it’s changing to some extent. If you notice, just across the board, mental health issues are being talked about more and more. It’s a thing now in the corporate environment, the general category of wellness, where corporations are trying to help their employees be more aware of issues and stress and anxiety.

Unfortunately, most farmers work by themselves, or they work within a family unit. There’s not an HR person on the farm saying, ‘Hey, you know let’s check in.’ So there are a lot of programs out there right now available for farmers to reach out and get help. But I think the step before that is we’ve just got to talk about it and tell people that it’s okay to be vulnerable. It’s okay to tell someone that you’re hurting and you’re not able to grin and bear this one. 

Kara Holsopple: If there was something that you could get across to people who live outside of rural America to understand about the mental health issues in these communities, what would it be? 

Jeff Corle: I think, by and large, the general public doesn’t really understand what’s been happening in the farm economy, especially over the last 20 years. If you take a drive out in the countryside, and you see those old dairy barns, you’re likely to think everything’s fine with this community. But in reality, since the 1970s, we have lost 95% of dairy farms. Farms are under extreme pressure to get bigger and bigger and bigger driven by the low prices that you receive for milk or whatever you produce. Those prices have been stagnant for years. So that leads to many farms having to make the decision to go out of business. 

In many cases, they’re not losing the farm, they’re just going out of business as a farmer. And so that’s why it kind of is unseen. We had a farm crisis in the late ’70s and early ’80s in which there were lots of foreclosures. That made national news.

I say that now we don’t so much have a farm foreclosure crisis as we have a farm closure crisis where, like me, I kept my farm, but my enterprise, my business, came to an end. So, folks outside of the rural community need to understand that farmers are under extreme pressure just to survive. If they’re facing going out of business, oftentimes, that’s their whole identity, their whole way of being, coming to an end. 

Mental health resources for farmers and anyone: