Retrospect: Hail damaged crops

Thirty years ago this week, local insurance agents estimated that a hail storm caused more than $1 million in damage to crops in Jay County.

Jeff Smith, a local farmer who also worked for Farm Mutual Hail Insurance Company, put the damage estimate between $1 and $1.5 million. He and Jeff Beerbower, director of Jay County’s Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service office, were working to nail down an assessment of the damage.

Weather reports said hail, driven by 50- to 60-mile-per-hour winds, fell in a band about 8 miles wide, with heavy damage from Dunkirk to St. Anthony, Ohio. The worst of the damage was in northeastern Wayne township and northwestern Noble township in Jay County.

As Smith and Beerbower stood on county road 179 (now county road 400 East), they saw a soybean field in which hail had stripped all of the leaves off the plants, Dave Marchand of The Commercial Review reported. To the east, a corn field was full of broken stalks and battered leaves. Most tassels were gone.

“It won’t even make good silage,” Smith said, “because the leaves are so tattered. It’s just stalks.”

He estimated that if bean plants were able to recover, yields would likely dip to about 10 to 12 bushels per acre, down from the normal 30. He added that because of the combination of wet soil and the late date in the planting season, re-planting the soybeans wouldn’t be a possibility.

“People who live in the city don’t realize what happened out here,” Smith said.