Anne Montgomery, Ph.D., received funding through the 2026 Southern Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Young Scholars Enhancement Grant Program to support a new project focused on farmer mental health education and sustainable agriculture.
The project, titled “Participatory Development and Cognitive Testing of an Evaluation Instrument for Farmer Mental Health Education in Sustainable Agricultural Communities,” will engage student scholars in the development of an evaluation tool designed specifically for agricultural outreach and farmer mental health training programs.
Dr. Montgomery is an associate professor and program director of the Rural Health Sciences Ph.D. Program at Mercer University School of Medicine and a biostatistician at the Georgia Rural Health Innovation Center. She will lead the initiative in collaboration with student scholars from Mercer University and Fort Valley State University. The project will provide hands-on research training in survey design, participatory evaluation and cognitive interviewing while also exposing students to issues affecting agricultural communities.
The research focuses on improving how mental health education programs for farmers are evaluated. Farmers face a range of ongoing stressors, including economic uncertainty, labor shortages, weather-related pressures and social isolation, all of which can affect long-term agricultural sustainability. The project aims to create an evaluation instrument that reflects the experiences and perspectives of farmers, helping organizations better assess the effectiveness of mental health outreach efforts and support programs.
Over the course of the project, student scholars will attend farmer-focused mental health training sessions and set up evaluation instruments. Under Montgomery’s guidance, they will create interview guides for follow-up interviews with participants and develop survey instruments for workshop participants. In addition, they will organize and conduct “cognitive testing” of the evaluation instruments to improve the clarity and relevance of the evaluation materials. Final deliverables will include a refined evaluation survey instrument, a summary of cognitive interview findings and an electronic research poster outlining the project’s methods and implications for sustainable agricultural outreach.
The project is funded through the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program, supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. The grant is an extension of the existing Georgia Rural Health Innovation Center grant from SSARE, “Empowering Rural Georgia: Mental Health Support and Education for Rural Georgia Farmers,” led by Montgomery and John McElveen, director of the Georgia Agricultural Wellness Alliance at Mercer University School of Medicine’s Georgia Rural Health Innovation Center.