New CDC report corrects inaccurate data on farmer suicides

Farmers face many stresses and farm income is continuing to fall, but a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that farmers are not the workers with the highest suicide rate in America.That distinction belongs to workers in construction and "extraction" jobs, like mining and drilling, according to the new CDC analysis. In effect, the new report corrected the agency's widely cited 2016 analysis that erroneously listed farming, fishing and forestry workers as having the highest suicide rate in the American workforce in 2012.The CDC retracted the earlier report, which produced a flurry of media coverage when it was first released in July 2016 and prompted proposed legislation on Capitol Hill to help farmers.The new report, released Thursday, said the mix-up was essentially a data-entry problem that significantly inflated the suicide rate for farmers. When the 2016 report was compiled, based on 2012 suicide data from the CDC's National Violent Death Reporting System, information that had been manually entered mistakenly included farmers in the "Farming, Fishing and Forestry" group.That group, known as the "Triple-F" category, includes farm workers, but farmers themselves are classified under the "Management" occupational group.