All college students have stress. That is pretty much a given. We all suffer from deadlines and having too many tests in the same week or even the same day. As fall comes around it becomes even more stressful for most agriculture students because of harvest.

Fall is the time to harvest the crops so farmers can hopefully make enough money to keep the farm going, feed people and keep some students in school. Harvest time is a race with mother nature so the crops will be ready to harvest and brought to the elevators before the frost sets in. Trying to beat the clock is probably one of the most stressful things a farmer does.

Personally I feel the stress especially when I have to go home and vaccinate calves and have a test the following Monday. The next time I wean calves will be stressful because of the homework I have to do before going home and when I come back.

The work being done when students go home to help on the family farm is hard and lasts long hours. Coming home late during harvest season was the only time my parents seemed to allow me being out most of the night. (Of course they were out with me so it wasn’t that much fun.) After all of the long hours driving a combine through fields, what would you rather do, sleep or study? Sleep would be the ideal thing, but sometimes students have to do their assignments before hitting the hay. And of course everyone knows lack of sleep leads to just more stress.

It isn’t just the work that causes stress, it’s everything that goes wrong. Chains snap, tractors won’t start, wagon tongues break and anything else can and sometimes does. For me, when something doesn’t go right when I am working with my father, I get to relieve some of my stress by screaming obscenities. Sometimes they are directed to my dad but then again he was the one who taught me the choice words. Not all of my anger comes from whatever went wrong, a lot of it comes from what happens at school. That also works in the opposite way. Some people bring their stress from home back to school, which makes it hard to concentrate during their classes.

The hardest part about stress is trying to figure out how to relieve it. For some people it is to relax with a nice nap while they are waiting for the grain wagons to unload.

For some it is to smoke or drink, or both. Even though people say it is not the best way to relieve stress, it must work or there wouldn’t be so many bars in Ames.

After the trial by fire in the fall, you would think it would be easy for farmers and farm kids, but it isn’t. It starts all over again in the spring, which I think is even more stressful because students want to get done with school and that makes concentrating on assignments even harder. And during the winter between the two busy times is when the farmer finds out how well he did.

But for all of the stress during harvest, there are some benefits. Like seeing a good crop come out of a turbulent summer.

Watching the pheasants run through the field and deer hopping the fences. Working side by side with your family members and knowing there is hope for another generation on the family farm.

So whenever you think you have too much stress, think of farm kids in the fall.

Their weekends consist of going home, working their butts off, coming back to school and trying to get all of their homework done so they can go back home and start all over again. But that is the way of life for a farmer, to work hard so he can feed the world.

Wesley Griffin is a senior in agricultural education from Grand River.