CDC said farmers, fishermen, and foresters had the highest suicide rates. Now it’s not so sure.

The slow sloughing away of good-paying, blue-collar life in rural areas made white middle-aged America's suicide rate tick upward and tipped the country toward electing Donald Trump.

That narrative has been rehashed often since Trump's victory in November 2016, despite evidence that his supporters were not mostly working-class.

One statistic that helped drive home the despair was a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of 17 states from 2016, which showed that those who worked in farming, fishing, and forestry had the highest rate of suicide overall. The study has been cited in hundreds of reports, particularly in connection with farmers and falling dairy prices, plummeting income, and tariffs.

But this summer, the CDC retracted those numbers, saying "some results and conclusions might be inaccurate as a result of coding errors for certain occupational groups."

The CDC's retraction came after a June report published on NewFoodEconomy.org, a nonprofit newsroom. It was titled "How a simple CDC error inflated the farmer suicide crisis story — and led to a rash of inaccurate reporting." That report found that the CDC's study did not include farm owners or even managers, but rather exclusively agricultural workers.

"These laborers tend to engage in repetitive manual tasks like planting, picking, and packing crops," authors Bryce Wilson Stucki  and Nathan Rosenberg wrote. "They make little money — their median household income is between $20,000 and $25,000 a year, according to the latest National Agricultural Workers Survey — and are 80 percent Hispanic. They are often employed by farmers, whose median family income is around $79,000."

With September being Suicide Prevention Month, it's important to ask: Does the CDC error mean everything is fine on the farm?

No. There is real despair in rural America.

"This is very serious, because the retraction has the potential to send out the wrong message that there is nothing really out of whack 'down on the dairy farm,' but there surely is," Brenda Cochran, a Pennsylvania dairy farmer with Farm Women United, told Mother Jones in July. "I find it reprehensible that they issue a retraction but leave us 'hanging' until they [the CDC] get their statistical act together."

Those professions may still rate among the top occupations at risk for suicide, once the data are recalculated. All three are ranked among the most dangerous jobs in the United States, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Last month, the Inquirer and Daily News wrote about workers in building trades having a higher risk for heroin overdoses, often because of the injury rate.

Two stars of National Geographic's reality show Wicked Tuna, which follows fishermen seeking to catch lucrative bluefin tuna in New England, died from opiate overdoses.

Despite the CDC retraction, the nonprofit Farm Aid noted that calls to its farmer hotline increased 30 percent in 2018 and that net income for farmers has dropped more than 50 percent in the last five years.

"Rural families, particularly those in agricultural communities, are suffering no matter which way you slice the data. It is also deeply concerning that farmworkers are so vulnerable to suicide," Farm Aid said in a statement.

In Pennsylvania, the suicide rate in rural areas is 26 percent higher than urban areas, according to the Center for Rural Pennsylvania. Wayne County, in the northeastern part of the state, and Elk County, to the west, had suicide rates of 29.3 and 26.3 per 100,000 population. Philadelphia had a rate of 10.9.

In recent months, the Inquirer and Daily News have written about the plight of dairy farmers who have had to sell their entire herds as prices continued to tank, as well as soybean farmers who feared Trump's tariffs would forever alter the market.

"It's getting harder and harder to find anything easy in farming," one soybean farmer said.