In minutes a hailstorm can flatten a season's crop, and no summer worry weighs heavier on the plains grower than the ice that falls from a towering cloud.
Of all the summer hazards the plains grower faces, none strikes so fast or so total as hail. A single storm, passing over in ten minutes, can strip a field of standing wheat to bare stalks, shred a canopy of sunflowers, and turn a season's labor and hope into a ruined mat of green — all under a sky that may be blue again within the hour.
A Season Lost in Ten Minutes
Hail forms in the violent updrafts of a strong thunderstorm, where raindrops are carried high, frozen, and coated in layer upon layer of ice until they grow too heavy for the updraft to hold. The plains' powerful summer storms are prodigious hail-makers, and the stones can range from harmless pellets to the dreaded lumps the size of golf balls or worse.
From the almanac's reckoning:
- Hail forms in the violent updrafts of strong thunderstorms.
- A ten-minute storm can destroy an entire standing crop.
- Crop insurance is the grower's only real defense against hail.
There is no defending a field against it; the grower can only carry crop insurance and watch the western sky with dread when the afternoon turns dark. The almanac counts hail among the cruelest of the plains' weathers — the killer that falls, without warning, from a summer sky.
Elsewhere in the Almanac
The Harvest Sky and the Weather That Brings the Crop In
The success of a whole year can turn on the weather of a few autumn weeks, when the plains grower prays for the dry, breezy days that let the combines run.
The January Thaw and the Midwinter Reprieve
Deep in the heart of winter, the plains often enjoy a brief and welcome softening, a spell of milder days that the old-timers have long marked on the calendar.
Hoarfrost and the Morning the World Turns to Crystal
On still, cold mornings the plains wake transformed, every twig and grass blade and fence wire furred in white hoarfrost, the countryside briefly made of crystal.