Rural Colorado communities still lack adequate behavioral health services. A new state-sponsored group will help.
Legislators approved Senate Bill 55 to bridge state services and agriculture communities struggling with “a cluster of different potential roadblocks” to mental health care
Hugh Carey/The Colorado Sun
Robert Sakata appeared to have so much going for him that he doubts anyone knew his real state of mind until he choked up while giving a report to the Colorado Water Conservation Board at a meeting in 2021.
He was a second-generation farmer who grew 3,000 acres of vegetables on his family’s land in Brighton. He was well known and respected, the governor-appointed CWCB board member from the South Platte/Republican Basin. He had a market of 3 million to 4 million people on the Front Range to buy his produce. And he was on his way to becoming the Colorado Department of Agriculture’s first agricultural water policy adviser, a role he has filled since December 2023.
But he was deeply worried — about his father, who was ailing, about increasing regulatory burdens that were driving up costs of operation, about a host of other challenges unique to producers.
He wondered how he was going to house the 400 seasonal employees queued up to work for him. And he was facing other, more surprising problems that he told the board urban farmers in his region face. People were stealing farm equipment. They were dumping mattresses in their fields. They were putting grass clippings in irrigation ditches. And like many others, Sakata had the added stress of losing two entire crops in a single hailstorm. Then there was the guilt of possibly not being able to maintain his father’s legacy.
Read more from Tracy Ross at ColoradoSun.com
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