Zippy Duvall’s voice quivered as he described his state of mind after his wife, Bonnie, lost her battle to cancer in mid-January.

“For two weeks, I kept it all inside,” the American Farm Bureau Federation president (AFBF) said last week at a press conference announcing Farm Bur­­eau’s expanding efforts to provide mental health resources to the farming community. “I started talking about it. It helped.”

AFBF is taking over Bayer’s Farm State of Mind campaign, an initiative to reduce the stigma surrounding mental health in rural communities and to provide relevant...