There’s nothing like a good storm to make you thankful for your current situation. With rain and wet being the theme of spring and early summer, it wasn’t a real surprise to have a severe storm pop up. What was the surprise was how small of an area was affected, the amount of damage in that area and that the tornado passed by about 1 mile to the north of us.
One final blow by mother nature a week and a half ago was hopefully the last big snow of the winter. We did have our snow blower off of the tractor and were forced to re-attach it. These snow photos were taken earlier in the winter but it’s fun to see the steers not really care what’s going on with the weather.
We did find out though that they don’t much care for hail. The stood outside during round 1 but when round 2 showed up, they headed for the shelter as fast as a steer can run! Continue reading
June 17, 2016 will stand out in my mind for many years to come. I have never witnessed such devastation of crops over such a large area. We were told that the hail track was 5 miles wide and 35 miles long. The center of the storm received wind-driven pea sized hail for 35 straight minutes. One of our corn fields is located about 1 mile west of the center of the hail track. We had just spent the first 2/3 of the day building ridges in this field readying it for next year’s bean planting.
My stomach churned then next morning as I drove to survey the damage. The last three miles made me tense up even more. I was seeing badly damaged corn and it was still getting worse as I continued east.
Thoughts were going through my mind like “How bad could it be?”; “Surely it would get better after a couple more miles. Hail isn’t usually that wide”. As I crossed the last intersection, 1/2 mile from the field, I gave up hope. I surveyed the extensive damage and huge ponds of water that first made it look like a complete loss. East-west rows were almost completely wiped out while north-south rows shielded each other from the almost straight north wind-driven hail giving them a higher survival rate. Continue reading
You’ve heard of counting growth rings in a log or tree stump to find out how many years old it is. Well, while clearing snow from our east facing machine shed doors we discovered that you can count how many snow/wind storms we had through the winter by counting dirt lines.
This blog has been rather quiet through the winter. You would think that there’s lots of time to post once in a while but it just seems to fall to the bottom of my list.
Winter started with a bang. All was going well but we still had one more job to do, pull soil samples in the corn ground to test for soybean cyst nematodes. Sounds simple enough but not when you have an impending snow breathing down your neck. November 5, 2013 was the beginning of the end of our nice fall weather. Samples were pulled on three fields and as snow began to fall we scrambled to get the most critical areas sampled of the last field. 
By the time the fourth and final sample was pulled, we already had 1″ of snow on the ground and it was coming down heavy and wet. One of the soil probes gave up working in these conditions. We woke up the next morning to this. Fall was officially over.
Added a April 2013 snow storm album to the Photo Albums.
Most of the snow was gone but no more. We received nearly 1 foot of snow in the past 3 days.
This photo was taken using the Photosynth app on my iPhone. It stitches together a panorama from many pictures. You can move the picture around with your mouse. Try full screen mode for the full affect.
