Last weekend, Jack Patton could drive out in his wheat fields about 20 miles north of Great Falls and the top of the heads would brush against the bottom of the window of his SUV, reported “Kazakh-Zerno” NA with reference to the “Great Falls Tribune“.
A hailstorm from the north raged through the area Monday evening, pounding the prospects of 70-bushels-an-acre wheat into the ground.
“It’s going to be fun getting the (insurance) adjusters in here,” Patton said. “This is a two-day count — bring your lunch.”
Hail hit across the Golden Triangle on Monday. There was 1-inch hail north of Cut Bank and golf-ball-sized hail 15 miles northwest of Valier.
“There was 1-inch hail southeast of Augusta, 3 inches deep,” said David Williamson, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Great Falls. “That was a humdinger.”
The Conrad area was hit with hail up to the size of tennis balls and racquet balls.
“It totaled our company vehicle,” said Ross Hanson of Advance Engineering and Environmental Services, who was in the area working on a project for the Tiber County Water District Office. “It broke our windshield and knocked off a side mirror.”
The crops on either side of where Hanson was parked, 12 miles east of Conrad on Solid Road, were pulverized.
“It was just stalks; there’s nothing left,” Hanson said. “Hail never hits a bad crop.”
The condition of the crop makes this storm’s aftermath particularly bitter, said Barry Newmack, claims supervisor for the Golden Triangle region for the insurance company Rain & Hail.
“If you were ever going to sell the state, this is the year,” he said. “The winter wheat looks like a thick, lush blanket over the fields, right at the soft-dough stage about two-and-a-half weeks from harvest. The wheat is so thick it looks like you can walk across some of it.”
He toured fields north of Great Falls on Tuesday night with Dave Schuler, senior field supervisor of marketing for Rain & Hail.
“It’s heartbreaking when you have what was a beautiful crop,” Schuler said. “Prices have declined so much over the last year, but expenses haven’t, so people needed that crop. This is a big one to walk out the door.”
Insurance adjusters will wait a week or so after a storm before assessing hail damage, said Bill Herbolich of the Montana Department of Agriculture’s Hail Program.
“They have to wait to see the extent of the damage and if there is any regrowth,” he said.
Patton said some of his spring wheat may “suck it up,” but the winter wheat is gone.
“The frost will probably get the spring wheat before it is ready to harvest,” he added.
Up the road, Gary Gollehon had grape-sized hail that didn’t do much damage.
“We didn’t have wind, which is what saved us,” he said. “When you have wind and hail, it can get pretty ugly, cutting the stalks pretty bad.”
Hail actually starts out as snow in a thunderstorm, Williamson said.
“It melts, then it gets caught in an updraft and refreezes,” he said. “It keeps doing that until the hail gets so heavy that it falls down to earth. Usually, the larger the hailstone, the stronger the updraft is in the storm.”
Although it’s doubtful 80 percent of Patton’s 7,000-acre farm will have a crop worth anything at the elevator this fall, he still has to bring in the battered, broken wheat.
“You can’t leave that out there; it’s a mess for seeding,” he said.
Additionally, voluntary plants from kernels knocked to the ground by hail will carry over disease to next year’s crop, so it has to be sprayed.
“We’ve been fortunate and haven’t had much hail damage for four or five years,” Patton said. “On Tuesday, when I went out to look, it was like ‘Oh yeah. This is what this feels like.’ It’s a downer — as a farmer, you work to raise that grain. But this is what you insure yourself against.”
If he is a superstitious man, Patton may put off any new implement purchases for a while.
“I bought new combines this year and whenever I do that, it hails,” he said.
