Bad days come and go. My folks would always say, if we were having a challenge in life or an obstacle to hurdle, “Offer it up.” Good advice, but still, there are things that happen on the farm that cause real frustration, and we just can’t figure out why things have to be so challenging.

Here are a few examples from my own farming experiences:

In a drought, the crops suffer, but weeds seem to thrive. Why is it that the weeds are such survivors? In the driest of dry years, corn and soybeans are stunted and yellowed from the drought, but weeds like kochia, Russian thistle, and any other thistle for that matter, seem to thrive.

I recall interviewing an elderly farmer years ago who told me that in the droughts of the 1930s, most farmers hayed Russian thistle early in the spring, because it was the only forage that would grow. I’m sure cattle did not prefer it, “but when they were hungry in January, they would eat it,” he told me.

The day after you put new tires on the truck, you get a flat tire. It never fails. You spend the money on those new tires for the truck, and after a day or two in the field, you have a flat tire. How can this be possible? Because in my case, I probably ran the old bald tires on the truck for a year or more and had no trouble at all. I should have left them on the truck.

Same with a new windshield. We recently put a new windshield in my wife’s car and my son’s car. Within a month or two, both of them took rocks that made fairly large pits. In the case of my wife’s car, it was a major hit. My old truck has had a pit in the windshield for several years. It is not obstructing my view, so why put a new windshield in the old truck and tempt fate?

The cows only get out of the pasture when you are away from home. I’ve heard farmers make this claim for years, and I’ve experienced it many times. A few years ago, I was preparing for a work trip to Chicago in the spring. I checked all of the fences, chained all of the gates and had a long talk with the cows, explaining that they needed to stay in the pasture while I was gone. They nodded in agreement, so I thought we were good to go.

The minute I landed in Chicago, I got a text from my wife saying that the cows were out. The funny thing was that I wasn’t even surprised. Fortunately, my good neighbor helped return the rascals to their assigned pasture without incident.

When you are fixing creek fences, the hammer or wire you need are always on the other side of the creek. Not everyone gets to experience fixing creek fences, but when I was farming, we had a couple of different pastures that had numerous creek fences to contend with. Every time Bow Creek rose a few feet in the spring or summer months, I spent a day or two fixing creek fences. One summer in the 1990s, I think the creek fences were out four or five times.

That said, each time, I tried to remember to carry the hammer and a roll of wire with me as I tried to prop up the fence, find the wires in the water and remove what seemed like tons of mud, weeds and branches from the wires. Regularly, I waded to one side of the creek without wire and the hammer. The only thing that would have been worse would have been losing my pliers in the creek.

When you lose pliers and go to town to buy a new one, you always find the old one the following day. Speaking of pliers, I consider my pliers part of my body. Without it, I can hardly walk. So, losing pliers is devastating to me. But the quickest way I have found to locate lost pliers is to go to town and purchase a new one. The minute I strap on the new pliers holder and shove the new, shiny pliers into that holder, the old one will pop up, almost magically, right in front of me.

Corn prices are a limit up the day after you sweep out the bins. I have noted here before that my neighbors should have paid me to sell corn when I was farming. That’s because almost like clockwork, the day after I swept out my bins, the corn market would be limit up for no apparent reason whatsoever, except perhaps that I had sold my corn the day before.

While these annoyances that I’ve listed are just the tip of the iceberg of challenges farmers are facing these days, they are obstacles that often put us in a bad mood and set the tone for our days sometimes.

Probably the best way I’ve found to deal with these kinds of annoyances on the farm is to find a little humor in them. Laughing can fix a lot of problems in life, so being able to laugh at frustrations and go on with daily life in spite of challenges is a virtue I probably need to work on.