FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 16, 2026
CONTACT:
Scott Heiberger
scott.heiberger@sanfordhealth.org
715-207-1604
Melissa Ploeckelman Brown
melissa.ploeckelman@sanfordhealth.org
715-240-0900
Research reveals farm parents lack childcare choices
The first national survey focusing on childcare in agriculture, and how it affects farm operations, has produced five new research briefs.
“My hope is that these briefs provide useful information for policymakers, farm organizations and others thinking about how to support farm families,” said project director and co-author Florence Becot, Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University.
“We often talk about childcare as a matter of choice, but many of the parents we spoke with said they did not feel they really had a choice. In some cases, the solutions available to them were not solutions that met their needs — for their farm businesses, their families or their overall family well-being.”
The National Farm Families Childcare Survey included responses from 860 farm households with children under 18 from 47 states. The work was funded by the National Children’s Center for Rural and Agricultural Health and Safety through a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention/National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, U.S. Department of Agriculture and Marshfield Clinic Research Institute. The survey was conducted during the winter of 2023, offering a snapshot of conditions at a specific point in time.
“The research briefs help capture many of the different topics we have explored through this project,” Becot said. “These range from the specifics of childcare arrangements — what people do on a day-to-day basis and how much childcare costs — to the connections between childcare and farm safety, farm business development and viability and farmer mental health.
“To me, the biggest takeaway is that when we look at farms and farm families, it can be easy to generalize,” Becot said. “However, our findings point to the diversity of goals, values and priorities that people have when raising their children. At the same time, we found areas where people tend to meet in the middle and share common concerns. One of those is concern about children getting hurt. Regardless of how people want to raise their children, worries about child safety come up repeatedly.”
Becot said she was surprised at how interested people were in participating in the survey. “I have never led a research project where farmers were so eager to participate and share their experiences,” she said.
Making changes, raising awareness
Some of the information in the briefs is being reported for the first time, Becot said, noting she and her team still are conducting data analysis and will continue to do so over the next year as they dive deeper into what farm families have shared. Becot plans articles with her graduate student examining farm strategies that survey respondents use and the connection between child safety and childcare. Together with Sarah Ruszkowski, a research technologist on her team at Pennsylvania State University, they will develop Extension materials around safety tips and strategies learned from farm parents who participated in the study.
“Our goal with these research and Extension efforts is to share back what we have learned from the farm families who generously shared their experiences of raising children on farms,” Becot said. “It is also to provide evidence that can be used when making decisions about how to best support farm families — may it be through Extension programming, agricultural-member based organizations and policymakers at the state and federal level.”
Policymakers at both the federal and state levels recognize childcare as an issue connected to workforce development, workforce attraction and workforce retention, said Becot, but, “they are often unsure about what actions to take.”
National Farm Medicine Center interns assist
Becot began this project when she was a researcher at the National Farm Medicine Center, Marshfield Clinic Research Institute. Two summer interns, Scotia Schaff and Katherine Morrisey, contributed to developing the research briefs. Schaff was in law school, and Morrisey was completing a master’s degree in food systems.
“They came to the project with very different experiences, particularly in terms of data analysis and the topics they had worked on, and they were both outstanding to work with,” Becot said.
Project history
The project officially started in the fall of 2020 as part of the National Children's Center for Rural and Agricultural Health and Safety, and it has been ongoing ever since. The idea for the research project emerged in 2019, based on the fact that, for many years, farm safety experts have talked about the importance of supervision for the youngest children on farms and the importance of using childcare — whether paid or unpaid — as much as possible. However, there had not been much discussion about what that actually looks like for farm parents in practice, or whether it is even feasible, she said.
“At the time, we already knew that access to childcare, particularly in rural areas, can be difficult. There is often not enough available childcare, it can be expensive, and even when it is available and affordable, the hours of operation do not necessarily align with farmers’ work schedules,” Becot said.
In 2020, when COVID happened, there was suddenly much more attention on childcare and what parents do when they have to work and care for their children at the same time, Becot said.
“The important thing to know is that, for farmers, this has always been a reality. However, the pandemic brought about a broader societal reckoning around the childcare challenges that working families have long faced, including many farm families, as we found through this research,” Becot said.
The briefs, including the original one published in 2023, can be found on the project page, https://www.marshfieldresearch.org/nccrahs/FarmChildrenChildcare.
###
Display in Latest News: Yes