The Clothing Mishaps of Farmers and Ranchers

Ever heard of cowboy/rancher writer Baxter Black?  This is my version of a Baxter Black story. Hope you enjoy it!   

     As farmers and ranchers, we encounter first hand what it takes to rip, snag, splatter, or loose our clothing.  If you are not careful to hold the barb wire down as you're stepping over, you may just split your pants, which your handy sewing wife says is hard to repair.  Climbing under barb wire fences has its own set of circumstances.  If you're casually crawling under the fence as a quicker alternative to the gate a 1/2 mile away, you may just get a small snag hole in your shirt or chore coat.  On the other hand if you're doing this to save your life from a mad stampeding cow, you may just find your clothes nearly ripped clean off or in a condition to cause a mending headache.  Ranchers have found that snap shirts are more practical than button shirts.  If your shirt happens to get caught on the saddle horn, you not only have your buttons pop off, the front side of your shirt becomes shredded, which for lady ranchers is quite disgraceful.  The remedy?  Wear an under shirt or the even more appealing option, a Western shirt with snaps.  These shirts quickly release you when in a bind.  They just snap open and all you have to do is snap them back up.   You and your shirt will be in one piece. 
     Hats are in a category all their own and the ways in which one looses them can be quite humoring.  If you're out working cattle, and a big gust of wind comes along, no matter how hard you've cinched your hat down over your ears, it's guaranteed to fly off at the most inopportune time.  If your lucky, the cows you've just gathered won't spook when it lands in the middle of them. You'll be even more lucky if your prized possession doesn't get trampled, pooped, or snotted on.  My favorite was a story a farmer told who was out raking hay.  He had his hearing protectors stretched over the top of his hat and somehow the wind still managed to flip the hat off his head.  He looked back to see his hat land squarely in the row as the rake buried it with alfalfa.  Grumbling over not having time enough to stop, he retrieved his chaff filled cap after kicking it out of the windrow.  I thought how funny it would have been if he had bailed it and a cow found it one wintry day while eating its lunch. 
    I could also tell stories of clothes being pelted with unmentionable substances while pulling calves, mucking the yard, or nearly doing a face plant while wallowing through knee deep mud when haying the farm animals.  Some things are better left unsaid. 
     Only the things a farm rancher would know!