The Free Press, Mankato, MN

John Cross

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October 18, 2009

Farmer’s angst is the hunter’s angst

The Farmer, normally absent at this time of the year from our morning coffee klatsch because of a harvest in full-swing, has been conspicuously in attendance on most recent mornings.

And his mood has been as cloudy as the weather.

Most of us who gather nearly every morning to sip coffee and otherwise gossip are town dwellers.

Nevertheless, we’re all aware that to be a successful farmer is to understand the vagaries of the weather — to be able to roll with the punches.

But at a certain point, even the most patient agrarian can’t help but to take personally this recent string of wet weather that has stalled the harvest.

Those of us who hunt pheasants especially feel their pain.

After all, as the farmers’ harvest goes, so does ours.

Anyone who participated in the pheasant opener this past weekend understands this.

All of those vast, untouched cornfields represent thousands of acres of mostly unhuntable cover for pheasants to lurk.

Admittedly, we (and probably most farmers) have been a bit spoiled by the obliging weather conditions of recent years where crops matured early and the harvest season was blessed with dry, warm weather.

Indeed, all but the least ambitious farmers probably had their crops in, bins full, combines parked by late October.

Not so, this year.

A cool, relatively dry summer that kept our electricity bills and mosquitoes to manageable levels also delayed crop maturation. Fortunately, a warmer-than-normal September assisted crop development.

But here we are, already in the middle of October, with cool temperatures and consecutive days of rain and/or snow, with the soybean harvest only getting started and hardly any of the corn out.

As bad as it is around the Mankato area, it is even worse in the southwest part of the state where copious spring rains delayed planting and where crops are lagging even further behind.

On a trip to Nobles County for a Sunday pheasant foray, we discovered that virtually none of the crops had been harvested.

We managed to scratch a few birds that were late moving from their roosting areas into the surrounding corn.

But watching dozens of birds fly from a Wildlife Management Area to a nearby cornfield well before the legal 9 a.m. shooting time, suggested our success would be limited.

I suppose the good news in this was that the WMAs we drove past were strangely devoid of significant numbers of hunters, partly because of predictions of pheasant numbers being down by 27 percent over 2008 levels.

But the lack of hunting pressure also might be attributed to the recognition by some fair-weather hunters that most of their efforts will go unrewarded because of all the unharvested fields.

Like an ever-optimistic farmer, I am going to view the silver lining in all of these rain clouds: While the lagging harvest right now is busting a few roosters, the hunting can only get better and better as the crops do eventually come out.

And by that time, the casual pheasant hunters will have exchanged their shotguns for the television remote, leaving the remainder of the season to die-hard rooster chasers.

In the meantime, The Farmer is awfully tough to get along with.



John Cross is a Free Press staff writer. Contact him at 344-6376 or by e-mail at jcross@mankatofreepress.com.

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John Cross