Storms rolled through again yesterday, the first about 3:00 pm. We watched it coming, and it veered north. We had a few drops of rain and A LOT of wind. Shortly thereafter our neighbor to the north called about borrowing a trailer and mentioned that there had been some hailstones at his place. M decided we should go crop checking so off we went. The rain began about two miles north of our house where we have mustard and lentils. There was water standing in the low spots and damage to the mustard and lentils with pods on the ground. The lentils are very close to being ready to desiccate so we can harvest. We continued north and west where it was very wet and then south again to some of our other land. It's a place you don't really want to be when it has rained but we ventured on (in 4-wheel drive). Again, there was damage to the lentils, but we were unsure if it was from hail, heavy rain or wind or a combination of any of those. We ended up back in Richland and stopped at the station. C was there and while we were there P called and said there was hail damage to the north on the land that we farm for another neighbor.
Off we went to check on that and discovered nearly a total loss on 600 acres of wheat. In the first area the wheat was standing, for the most part, but the heads were blown out. In the area farther east there was pretty much nothing left. Some of it looked like it had been eaten off down to the ground. We suspect that it had been hit during the storm on Monday and again during the current storm. When P had been up there, he had seen banks of hail. There is some chem fallow in that area and the furrows from last year were flattened. The CRP grass was also laid down.
As we headed home from there we stopped to get the tractor and baler and move them home. We saw in the west another storm building. As we went to get the loader tractor off a hill and down to a safer location, M said "I've never seen anything like it", meaning two storms in one day. I actually laughed at him and reminded him that we deal with weather every year and nothing should surprise him.
On the way home it looked like we were driving right into the storm with lots of lightning. I was a bit nervous to get out of the pickup and get to the house. When we got in the house we discovered that we had no power. It was about 8:00 pm by that time, and we hadn't had supper. We opened the garage door manually and moved the grill inside so we could make some burgers. The rain hit about then, and we received about 3/4". M is a weather spotter and the weather service called us twice. We always feel that's a bad sign that something nasty is heading our way. The power came on sometime after 10:00 pm, and we had more rain about that time.
R had over an inch of rain at his place but no hail, and there were power lines down near there. Our land west of him was okay, too, although there was hail around Opheim with damage that we noticed today on our way to Fort Peck Lake.
The good thing about having land spread out for miles is that you don't usually lose everything in one storm. The bad thing is that several storms can get you in different places. We didn't have any hail damage last year and were pretty sure we couldn't go two years without any. The law of averages just hasn't been that good to us, and after all, we live in "next year country."
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