“Farming you don’t learn from books,” she once said. “It’s not taught to you by a professor in a college. It’s taught by sitting in your father’s lap on a tractor. Or between your mother and father in a field. It’s from birth up, and it’s a part of you.”
And so when the farm crisis of the 1980s swept across the nation’s fields and plains, when bankruptcies and foreclosures soared and crop prices fell, and when many farmers, who saw no way out, took their own lives, Brock was moved to act.
She assigned herself the job of ad hoc emergency counselor to farmers. As someone who had grown up on farms and had lost her own family farm, she was sympathetic to their plight. She took thousands of calls around the clock, talking despondent farmers down from the ledge and devising strategies to try to save their farms.
Sometimes, while she tried to coax a farmer into staying alive for his family’s sake, she would hear the cylinder of a revolver turning, or shells being slipped into a shotgun. Sometimes she heard a gunshot. Rushing to the scene, she was often the first to find the body.
But she also talked many into not giving up, averting perhaps hundreds of suicides.
Word of her work spread, and it coincided with the beginning of Farm Aid, in 1985, the first year of the annual concerts that continue to raise money for farmers. Willie Nelson, the country singer and driving force behind Farm Aid, called Brock “the angel on the other end of the line.”
Brock died at 87 on March 19 at her home in Durant, Oklahoma. Her son, Ron Brock, said she had congestive heart failure.
Mona Lee Bruster was born on Jan. 1, 1932, to Floyd and Ada Bell (Robinson) Bruster on their wheat and bean farm in Madill, Oklahoma, not far from the Texas border. According to family lore, one ancestor was a passenger on the Mayflower, whose descendants eventually settled in Oklahoma when it was still Indian Territory.
Mona grew up in Madill with her eight siblings. She graduated from Kingston High School, received her bachelor’s degree in education in 1964 at Southeastern State College, now Southeastern Oklahoma State University, and her master’s in education at the University of Oklahoma in 1967. She went on to teach school and serve as a school principal and a family guidance counselor.
Her future husband, F.M. Brock, lived on a farm nearby and gave her a ride home one day on his tractor. They married in 1947 and went on to farm together in Lincoln County, Oklahoma.
By the early 1980s, several factors had led to the farm crisis. Brock said it started with the federal policy that lowered the prices farmers received for their crops in order to make American grain more competitive worldwide. Falling prices for commodities along with the rising costs of production made it hard for farmers to stay afloat.
Meanwhile, interest rates on loans were soaring and land values were plummeting, forcing thousands of farmers into foreclosure. The nation was losing more than 2,000 family farms every week.
In 1985, the Brocks lost their farm too, although they eventually recovered it. And a few months later, her husband died of a heart attack.
Around that time, Mona Brock, who knew most people in Lincoln County from her work in the public schools, invited many of them over to her farm one night so they could talk about how to survive. Farmers soon began calling her at home when they were in trouble, starting her on her accidental career of counseling them.
At the time, farmers were killing themselves at alarming rates — 100 deaths in less than two years in Oklahoma alone. Support resources like hotlines were rare in rural America, David Senter, the historian for Farm Aid and president of the American Agriculture Movement, said in a telephone interview.
Her son said the suicide calls to his mother seemed constant, and often chaotic.
“It was just wild beyond description,” Ron Brock said. “Farmers were going in and shooting the lenders and turning the guns on themselves. We were eating supper one night and Mom was on the phone with a farmer, and we all heard the gunshot over the phone.”
She deployed her sons in what she called her ministry. “She made us memorize all 77 counties” in Oklahoma, Ron Brock said, “so when a farmer called in who was suicidal, we knew where they were and who to contact to get help.” His mother kept the caller on the phone while others drove to the home.
She would reassure the callers that they were not failures and that they had not mismanaged their farms.
“They have been told that they have borrowed too much and have overextended,” she told the newspaper The Oklahoman in 1988. “This breaks their ego. This breaks their confidence and their spirit.”
She would tell them not to give up, that laws could protect them and that she would work with them and stand by them.
“When Willie Nelson heard about her, he called her up and talked to her for at least three hours,” Ron Brock said. “We were in shock that he called. And then, it seemed like the next day, he sent a check for $5,000 or $6,000 of his own personal money, and a week later he sent her some more, and he kept talking to her. And then Farm Aid came about.”
When the Oklahoma Conference of Churches wanted to set up a suicide intervention hotline, it contacted Brock, who moved her counseling operation from her home to Oklahoma City and established a statewide hotline there. She took informal notes on her calls, and those notes have since become one of the most extensive catalogs of farm suicides in the country.
At the same time, people in other states were doing similar work, and they evolved into a grassroots network of farm advocates. A 2015 Farm Aid documentary about the advocates, called “Homeplace Under Fire,” featured Brock.
“She led the way in terms of how to counsel people,” Carolyn Mugar, executive director of Farm Aid, said in an interview. “People could relate to her and unburden themselves. She was on the same level as they were. She was very calming. She was a farmer.”
In addition to her son, Brock is survived by a sister, Barbara Robertson, two granddaughters and four great-grandchildren. Her son Gary Don died in 2003.
Asked what kept his mother going, Ron Brock said, “The Bible and the Constitution.” A Baptist, she often prayed with her callers. And, he said, she cautioned those who were suicidal to think about their families and what it would be like for their children “if they sat down at the supper table and there would be an empty chair.”
Her overarching goal, said Senter, the Farm Aid historian, was “to make sure the family survived, even if the farm didn’t.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.