This growing season has presented farmers more headaches than usual, as if typical years aren’t maddening enough.
The whims of Mother Nature can throw curveballs no one could possibly plan for, from the opening of planting season all the way through to harvest.
This year, praying for rain has been a constant refrain, and when rain did fall, it was spotty and unpredictable.
As a result, two of our nearby neighbors have come very close to losing combines to fire while working in the overwhelmingly dry and dusty soybean fields.
In a season such as this, adding insult to injury is the presence of wildlife. “It’s always an aggravation, you know, but you just sort of roll with it,” my nephew said, as he complained about groundhogs and raccoons in his soybean fields. “This year, with a short crop because of no rain, I get really ticked off when I see groundhogs, raccoons and deer taking whole sections of a field.”
My husband has been a coon hunter from the time he was old enough to keep up with his dad and his granddad in the woods. To him, it is a sport of trying to outsmart the wiley bandits by training a young dog to follow the scent of a raccoon. He can recall various hunts with certain dogs over the years, the challenges and the glory of outsmarting the coon.
Numbers of coon hunters are now lower than ever, for a combination of reasons. Raccoon pelts are worthless, for one thing, and young people aren’t taking up the sport for the thrill of the hunt. As a result, numbers of coon are way up, doing all kinds of damage to crops and outbuildings.
Unwilling to see the sport die out, those who have grown up and grown old with this hobby strong in their bones are trying their best to pass the fun of it down to younger generations. My husband is definitely one of those guys.
He has taught my nephew’s sons to enjoy the fun of turning a trained dog loose in the woods after dark, listening for the distinct bark indicating that the dog has run a coon up a tree, just waiting for its handler to come shoot it out.
When young Johnny was hurt in a backward fall two weeks ago, I’m not sure who was more upset to know that several fractured vertebrae sidelined this boy for all of hunting season this year.
There are some challenges that require more patience than we are used to finding inside ourselves. This is going to be a long season for all of us.
