Rainfall has been hard to come by across the Hoosier state, but storms moved through parts of Indiana over the weekend.
“We’re thankful for a lot of the rain that fell over my two territories that I cover in west central Indiana,” says Pioneer agronomist Nick Hedden. He tells HAT that, unfortunately, golf ball and baseball sized hail also moved through his area Sunday.
“As that storm progressed [Sunday] afternoon around 2pm, as it got east of Linden and kept moving east to northeast, it picked up and created some hail as you got over to that Colfax area. And as it moved further east towards Kirklin, there was quite a bit of hail that fell and roughed up some crops.”
Hedden was asked if those fields hit by hail are a lost cause or if they have a chance to pull through.
“It just kind of depends on how big that hail was and how long it fell on some of those corn and soybean plants. So, the day after, we really don’t want to make any strong assessments. We need to give that crop three to five days really to give it a chance to recover and have some new growth come out.”
Hedden adds that, thankfully, this corn is not tasseling right now. That would be the worst time to incur hail damage.
“We’re still kind of in that earlier-mid part of the vegetative stage on corn. And if we lose some leaf area, that’s not going to be all bad, but you know, the worst that’s going to look is right now. So, we just need to give it some time and reassess here in about three to five days.”
Hedden provided the pictures below of the golf ball and baseball sized hail from one of his customers.
