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August storms will leave lasting challenges

A mid-Michigan farmer says wind damage from last week’s storms will extend well into harvest.

Scott Lonier farms from Grand Ledge to Dewitt where extremely high winds turned into a tornado further east and caused extensive damage throughout the region Friday.

“Our crops a week ago don’t look a whole lot different than what they do right now other than there’s a bunch of trees around the outside that are laying in the fields,” he shares. “That it’s going to make harvest miserable and a little dangerous.”

Lonier plans on starting his harvest from the center of fields to work around what could be within the crops.

“I don’t know how many trampolines we’re going to have out in the middle of our field still, so that’s going to be an interesting harvest,” he says.

He tells Brownfield up to 13 inches of precipitation in the last six weeks has been even more challenging.

“We went from a drought to being flooded out, and so the weather from this storm hasn’t impacted our crops necessarily at all, another two inches of rain in the spots that are drowned out have already been drowned out because we’ve had six inches of rain in 10 days,” he says.

Lonier says he’s still hoping for an above-average corn crop and an average year for soybeans considering the messy weather.