I grew up in Abilene, Tx just east of Sweetwater. We harvested wheat there for over 40 years and I never got bit by one by have seen hundreds of them. It's just a matter of adapting to your circumstances. You folks in Iowa don't run around barefooted and half naked when it's 20 below and neither did we around rattlesnake areas. When we moved from Abilene to Waco I had two cigar boxes full of rattlers that we had cut off and saved.
When you harvest a wheat field that's next to a pasture you'll usually see a half dozen of them on the first round or two because they come into the wheat to catch rats and baby rabbits. I carried a catcher on the combine and would often get out and kill the snake and cut off the rattlers especially if it was a big one. It's not that hard to do. People think they can leap 8 feet in the air and get you, but not so. I went to the Sweetwater hunt one year just too see the piles of them they had caught out of the rocky hills there. They have a cookout every year and I tried it. It doesn't taste like chicken as they try to convince you. It's a snake so it tastes more like a lizard. And they're not bad either. But after you eat it if you're not careful it will feel like it's crawling in your stomach. Not for the wheezy or faint of heart.
