A hailstorm that ripped through southwest Minnesota last week left thousands of acres of corn and soybeans damaged or destroyed —
in many cases too late in the season for farmers to replant their crops.
"We had a corn and bean field down to dirt again," said George Sill, a farmer southwest of Madelia. "You couldn't hardly tell it had been planted there."
Sill said 150 acres of soybeans and 90 acres of corn were leveled by the storm, and another 200 acres of crops damaged to varying degrees.
When he drove out to his fields after the storm, hailstones were drifted up by the road and fog was rolling in off the fields because so much ice was melting all at once.
"There's multiple veins of hail that ran from the Sleepy Eye area down to St. James and maybe even further south," said Steve Michels, an agronomist at Crystal Valley, a cooperative with a location in La Salle. "It's not unusual to have a hailstorm, but this was one of the more severe ones I've seen."
