Farm Dinner Theater: Improving Health and Safety for Farm Families

This article provides a brief overview of Farm Dinner Theater (FDT), a novel intervention that positively influences the health and safety behaviors of senior family farmers and their family. The FDT uses principles of adult learning and engages the audience in conversations about their health and safety experiences. The FDT was developed through interdisciplinary community-engaged research and tested using a repeated measures design with 553 intervention and 317 comparison participants. Significant changes were reported and the FDT is now being used by Extension through the use of a toolkit developed by the project. INTRODUCTION Farm culture is difficult to change, especially when it comes to health and work behaviors (Neufeld, 2005); however, novel learning formats have proven acceptable and effective in addressing community issues (Ingram, 2013; McDonald, Williams, Carter, 2001). The Farm Dinner Theater (FDT) is an interactive intervention intended to change health and safety behaviors of senior farmers, a group that has long suffered the highest farming fatality rates (Myers, 2009). FDT incorporates two aspects of the readers’ theater form of community theater: (1) a readers’ script and (2) a didactic portion following the script. The scripts for FDT, which are based on the experiences of local farmers and literature on health and safety of senior farmers, and the interchange during the didactic portion reflect the social norms of the community regarding health and safety. The FDT provides a “safe place” to begin conversations about sensitive topics, such as farmer stress or changing the way work is performed. THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS The FDT incorporates aspects of readers’ theater, which became popular during World War II when resources to produce plays were scarce (Coger & White, 1973). The focus of readers’ theater lies in the words of the script rather than on elaborate sets, costumes, or actions. One important use of the FDT is to help audiences recognize the importance of certain behaviors and beliefs. This form of theater includes discussion of the theater’s themes among the audience following the presentation. Open discussion allows the audience to reflect on the content, incorporate the information within their own lived experiences and within the social norms of the group (Ajzen, 1991). Through these discussions, new information becomes available, and the participant is empowered to make change. The theater becomes the medium for information sharing and processing. The FDT incorporates all these aspects to move individual and community health behaviors. OVERVIEW OF FDT Working with collaborators, we developed FDT programming and offered it in eight geographically diverse sites across three states between 2015–2018. The FDT was based on research that collected information about how senior farmers and their families view health and safety (Reed & Claunch, 2015; Reed & Claunch, 2017), a larger study of Kentucky and South Carolina farm couples ages 50 and over (Reed, Rayens, Conley, Westneat & Adkins, 2012), and the experiences of Extension staff who have “boots on the ground” experience with farmers and their