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Storm system devastates wide area of fields
Corn growers in Nebraska are reporting anything from minimal to extensive hail damage from storms that passed through the state Tuesday night. Dave Bruntz at Friend, Nebraska, 40 miles west of Lincoln, woke up to devastation.
“It’s more than just spotty, it’s big areas,” said Bruntz, describing for Brownfield Ag News what his corn fields look like. “In some areas the corn is just completely cut off at the ground; the fields are just brown in some areas this morning, there’s nothing left standing.”
Meanwhile, Tim Scheer, who farms at St. Paul, Nebraska, says hail was in each of two waves of severe weather that rolled through his community. What was most remarkable, however, was the rain that came with it.
“We were very dry, we had been missing out on a lot of the rains in the last two, three, four weeks,” said Scheer, from his farm in Nebraska. “We received anywhere in the neighborhood of an 1.5 to 2, 2.5 inches, so the net gain from the moisture is going to be more than the yield potential loss from the hail.”
Scheer, who is also a crop insurance adjuster, says corn at its present growing stage, between eight and eighteen inches tall, can survive hail if the damage is confined to stripped leaves.
“Although it makes [the corn] look really crappy for a few days, once the new leaves start to grow out, they tend to take off and in a few days you probably won’t know that it’s been hailed [on],” said Scheer, “so as long as you don’t kill it, I think we’re going to be ok.”
That’s not the case with Bruntz’s corn. The corn that stood 18 inches tall when it was being sprayed on Tuesday, was flattened to nothing by Tuesday night.
“It just basically just pounded it into the ground,” said Bruntz. “You can hardly tell in some areas that there was even corn out there.”
The same system extended through Iowa and into Missouri.
“We took a direct hit right here in Mercer County [Missouri], and boy, it was packing a punch when it came in,” said Gary Porter, who farms just below the Iowa line in north central Missouri. “It had four to seven inches of rain and up to baseball-size hail.”
The storm spared much of Porter’s home place, but following a track just to the south of where he lives, left a wake of stripped stalks.
“There was corn that was almost knee-high, which is almost the V-5 to V-6 stage, and it just stripped all the leaves off of it, and all there is is a stub of stalk sticking up out of the ground,” said Porter.
Porter’s fields are at a critical growth stage where the plant’s growing point is just coming out of the soil. He says once the growing point is damaged, there’s no saving it, but his agronomist will survey the damage with Porter to determine what the next step is.
“We don’t know for sure whether the leaves will grow back on that corn and it’ll be ok,” said Porter. “I know it’s hurt, but will it still survive, or is that growing point dead?”
AUDIO: Dave Bruntz (5 min. MP3)
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