Farmer's Hats

I have been married to a farmer for nearly 45 years and believe me I have learned a lot about farming and farmers in that time.  However, there is one facet of farming that I still don't understand.  The obsession that every farmer has with hats!  There are at this time at least 100 hats on Hubby's closet shelf.  (He swears there aren't that many...and he may be right, since every time I clean in there a few (?) mysteriously disappear. )  There are also hats, sleeved neatly together, covering the seat of his chair in the bedroom.  To complete the bedroom décor, there is a line of hats marching across the mantle.

 

O.K.  I get it that a hat is necessary to protect your head when you are out all day in the sun and weather.  I want him protected, that's why there is sunscreen in every tractor.  So I understand that he needs a hat.  However, this obsession goes much deeper than just a hat.

Farmers collect "free" hats that shout their support of tractors, seed, feed, mineral, fertilizer, pesticides, farm stores, herd sires, farms, equipment and about anything else you can buy for a farm.  The dealers dole them out as a reward for business, a bribe for new business, or just on a whim.  The quality of these hats range from so cheap you'd have to pay me to take them to "man I've got to have it" good.  Farmers will collect both of these and everything in between with the same fervor. 

I once overheard a farmer complaining that he had moved his business from one farm store to another because he never got a hat!  Another reported that he was infuriated to have been repeatedly overlooked for a free hat from a business,  only to see his neighbor's field laborer wearing the coveted hat.  (I suspect the difference in his and the neighbor's farm accounts could be a factor.)  I heard a farmer bragging on a new fertilizer company, not for the success of their product, but because they gave great hats.  While I have never heard of a farmer actually buying a piece of equipment just to get the hat, they certainly consider that part of the "deal"!  (Hubby, who spent more on his last tractor than the original cost of our farm, was thrilled when he received  a bright green hat to wear.  This from the same man who swore he would never drive a green tractor, much less, advertise for them!)

Now, there would be some reason to this mania if farmers wore a fresh, new cap daily.  Not so, I'm afraid.  Hubby, like most farmers, will wear the same cap until it is a sweat stained, battered gray with a bill that is shinny from being grabbed with greasy, dirty hands a thousand times.  The farmer will then hand the hat to his wife and ask that she wash it!  Wives have swapped methods of washing and reshaping favorite hats until it is part of farm lore.  There are even companies that make forms you can buy (for the free hat) that will allow you to place the hat on the top rack of your dishwasher to clean it.  Having seen some of these manure covered, filthy, greasy hats I'm pretty sure I would never eat off my dishes again. 

Meanwhile, the closets overflow and the hats collect all over the house.

I would say it is advertising genius...having grown men fight over getting to wear your advertisement...except for the stacks and piles of hats sitting around going unworn. 

I guess I just never will understand.  It's a farmer thing.