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Families Coping: Illness, layoff impede efforts to save farm

By Jerry Anderson - email | bio

Posted by Lisa Strawbridge - email

WILLIAMS COUNTY (WTOL) - When last we checked in with the Coys of Williams County, they'd begun planting -- not only this year's crop, but seeds of hope that they'd be able to save the family farm that had gone into bankruptcy protection.

Already pushed back by wet spring weather, Butch told us they really needed a good year, both good yields and good prices. "In a way, your future's reliant on these little puppies down here. Yet it is. That doesn't feel too good to me," Butch told us. There's a whole lot riding on little seeds in big fields around Stryker.

Illness

Butch Coy and his mom and dad own a few hundred of the acres and are fighting to save them. Even when we met Butch and Carmen back in March we learned of other worries such as the toll this battle was taking on Butch's dad, Walt. "It's taken its toll on him. He's not watching his health. He's diabetic. He's not watching that."

But then, we learned of more daunting news for the Coys, one of the families featured in our series called Families Coping.

By mid-May, Walt joined us watching Butch prep soil for planting and admitted he's just not as gung-ho about the Spring as he used to be. Then, an admission. "Well, yeah, it gets a little rougher, plus I ain't been feeling good. I've got something wrong with me. They've been doing a bunch of tests, and they ain't figured it out yet," Walt told us.

What Walt does know is give himself shots now, and, yeah, there are the pills. But does he think the stress of fighting foreclosure is part of the problem? "Oh yeah. It'll aggravate your sugar, I know that."

Layoff

And then a bombshell.

We mentioned that there's a third owner in this business. Carol is Butch's mom and Walt's wife. She worked for 30 years at a nearby rehabilitation facility. "She went in Monday, and they told her job had been eliminated. The 29 is her last day."

That was last Friday, and in a Spring already full of challenges, this was a turn the Coy's didn't need. "That's the biggest income we've got is her paycheck."

Hope

So maybe we're back to corn seeds. The corn planted in early May was sprouting eight days later. Tiny sprouts carrying big hopes and dreams for a family fighting to carry on a way of life -- one of America's families coping.