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Nebraska farmer loses 800 acres in crops from hail, half of his pasture
An East Central Nebraska farmer says he lost 600 acres of corn and 200 acres of soybeans during recent severe storms. “All of a sudden the clouds came up and then it was like it never even rained and it started hailing and hailing.”
Dale Hanson, a corn and soybean grower near Stromsburg, tells Brownfield Mother Nature brought golf-ball size hail and gusty winds on June 23rd. “Now, I look at it, it’s just like cut in half and it’s trying to recover of course and it just makes a person sick. I could’ve thrown up when I pulled in the driveway that evening.”
Hanson says he’s debating replanting his soybeans after recent population counts dropped from 160,000 to 50,000. He is letting his corn crop recover as best as it can.
Hanson has a small cow-calf herd where the pasture lost half of the grass. “The cows now are kind of like walking around are they’re like what happened to all of my feed. I kind of have to let it grub out a little bit before I rotate them to the other side. I’m a fall calving guy and I put all of them calves out to grass and they’re pretty big calves and I couldn’t see them before. Now, I can see their knees.”
Hanson says he also lost a pivot. He says despite the damage, most of his neighbors have it worse off because one person is replanting his corn.
Dale Hanson:
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