Mother Nature is Mad

Th above downed corn can be picked up by
a corn reel...there have been a lot of these sold in the
past few years and I am sure more this year.

So there are a lot of things that you can't prevent and the weather is one of them...Mother Nature is just plumb pissed off now...nothing we can do about it, just happens. For those of you not in NWMO, particularly Atchison, Holt and Nodaway counties you may not be aware of a couple of storms that came through last Thursday (80-100 MPH straight line winds with hail) and pre-dawn Monday morning (flash-flood induced rain and lots of hail).



 

My family was lucky to not get hit as bad as some did on either storm. Thursday we had some corn laid down and my dad at that point ordered a reel similar to this one because it will help pick up the downed corn and feed it into the the feeder house of the combine corn head (the front part of the combine with the pointy things sticking out). Here is where I got the picture and a good description of what a corn reel can help a farmer with.



Monday morning however we had some fields that did not fare so well near my brother's house. The corn field, hopefully we can harvest in a week or so after it has had a chance to dry down a little. The soybeans are most likely a total loss. There are a few things to be thankful for...insurance, just like people have their cars or homes insured farmers have their crops insured. Since it is so hard to determine what the value of the crop would have been we won't get all the money we probably would have gotten, but it is better than a complete loss which would be completely devastating to a farmer. We are also thankful that we only had a small portion of our crops affected compared to other family friends who are looking at up to 95% of their acres affected. And most important we are thankful everyone is safe.

The photos below were taken by me (the good crop photos) and dad took the others today with his cell phone. The good crop vs. damaged crops are in different fields but they are all less than two miles apart so both affected similarly

Corn field in south west Nodaway County, 8/22/11



Corn field 7/28/11, different field but they all
looked the same up here before the storms



Soybean field 8/22/11...total loss



Different soybean field 8/16/11