A 25-Year Overview of AgrAbility Demographics

ABSTRACT

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) AgrAbility Program was established as part of the 1990 Farm Bill. It functions through partnerships between land grant universities and nonprofit disability organizations to improve the independence and quality of life of ranchers and farmers with disabilities. This article reports on analyses of the first 25 years of demographic data from clients served by funded state AgrAbility projects.

Between 1991 and 2016, State or Regional AgrAbility Projects (SRAPs) provided information, education, and service annually to an estimated average of 490 new clients for a total of 11,754 new clients. New clients’ average age was 52.1 with 75.1% male. Primary causes of reported disabilities were chronic nonincident-related disabilities (41.7%), non-agricultural incidents (32.2%), and agricultural incidents (19.5%). Typically AgrAbility served clients for one to 74 months (M = 14.85 months), because of the severity of their disabilities, the deterioration of their situation, and the years it sometimes took to assist them in reaching their goals. Combining new, ongoing, reopened, and closed case reports, SRAPs served approximately 1,190 clients annually on average. The average age of new, ongoing, reopened, and closed case reports was 52.7 with 78.0% male.

Data collection, analyses, and reporting of client data presented a means of providing program accountability and of helping guide future programming efforts. Findings were used by stakeholders, policymakers, and decision-makers to justify the continued inclusion of the AgrAbility Program in the 2018 USDA Farm Bill.

KEYWORDS:

• AgrAbility
• agriculture
• demographics
• disabilities
• farmers
• ranchers
• rehabilitation

Acknowledgments

Preliminary versions of this article were presented at the AgrAbility National Training Workshop in Knoxville, TN on March 21, 2017 and during a National AgrAbility Training Webinar on May 22, 2017. The authors gratefully acknowledge Carol (Marie) Maus, Director of Rural Solutions Easter Seals, Washington, DC who provided the original 9 years of demographic data for this study. Finally, the authors appreciate all the AgrAbility teams and the thousands of farmers and ranchers from across the country who completed surveys and provided the valuable data for this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The United States Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture funded this program evaluation research under Special Project numbers [2016-41590-25880 and 2012-41590-20173]. The funding sources were not involved in study design, in the collection, analysis and interpretation of the data, nor in the writing of the report, but they did encourage the authors to submit the article for publication. There were no conflicts of interest.