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Baseball sized hail demolishes half of farmer’s crop

A weekend storm impaled several west central Illinois fields with 60 mph winds and baseball sized-hail.

“We had hail all the way from half dollar sized to baseball. It was really sharp and ragged stuff too.”

Mt. Sterling farmer Wade Yingling tells Brownfield his agronomist estimates 60-70% leaf and stalk damage to 1,000 acres of their corn and soybeans that were hit.

“Where it is bad, it is very bad and in other places it’s not as bad, but it is still hard to look at. A lot of beans are shredded down to bare stalk with a few leaves at the bottom and that is it. It’s pretty unreal.”

He says about 60% of their acres were damaged by the storm and he considers at least half of that severe.

“There may be some crop left to harvest but it’s definitely going to impact it a lot. I would say it’ll have a 50% yield reduction maybe more than that.”

Yingling says the storm also brought an additional 4 inches of rain on top of several inches last week which he describes as “crazy” for this time of year.