June hailstorm wreaks havoc on southeast Weld

PROSPECT VALLEY – For wheat farmer Jerry Cooksey, the June 11 hailstorm that struck southeast Weld County was one for the history books.

“We had hail that was golf-ball and racquet-ball size,´ said Cooksey, who farms about 9,000 acres south of Roggen. “You seldom see a hailstorm with hail that large. I haven’t seen anything like that in a long, long time.”

Cooksey said the storm punched holes in his tractor and planting equipment as it rampaged across a miles-wide swath of winter wheat, corn, bean, sunflower and sugar beet fields between I-76 near Hudson nearly all the way to Wiggins.

Two weeks after the hailstorm, Cooksey was still reeling from its effects as he surveyed the damage to his crops, which he estimated at between $250,000 and $500,000.

“It’s not a pretty sight,” he said with the laconic understatement of those who spend long days nursing a crop they’ve invested thousands of dollars in only to see it destroyed in one stormy day.

Cooksey, whose Cooksey Farms grows winter wheat, sunflowers, beans and pumpkins, said his just-emerging corn crop was also severely battered.

“It chewed up the corn and took it down to the nubbins,” he said. “It will definitely set it back at least two weeks and we’ll see a yield reduction.”

But it was the winter wheat – standing tall and just weeks from harvest – that took the worst beating from the storm. Cooksey, president of the Colorado Association of Wheat Growers, said the crop was shaping up to be one of his best.

“We were looking at a bumper crop,” he said. “It was looking better than a year ago, which was the best crop we’d had after about 10 years of drought.”

But it wasn’t just the hail. The following weekend, June 12 and 13, rain fell almost without interruption across the region, flooding low-lying fields and sending the Poudre and South Platte rivers over of their banks.

Rainfall was measured between four and seven inches in southeast Weld County, taking a further toll on fields just beginning to show summer growth.

Mowed down by hail

But Gary Maack, a crop broker at Roggen Farmers Elevator, said the worst damage by far was from the hail. “It pretty much mowed down that whole (wheat) crop for about two miles wide from I-76 almost to Wiggins,” he said.

Maack said the storm was definitely a bad one. “It’s probably about the worst I’ve seen in just mowing things down,” he said. “And it wasn’t just the fields – there were lots of houses that had all their windows busted out and the siding ripped off.”

Joe Westhoff, an insurance adjuster who traveled through the area meeting with farmers with damaged crops, estimated the storm completely destroyed between 3,000 and 5,000 acres of crops and damaged an additional 15,000 to 20,000 acres.

“Everything that was under that storm is pretty much gone,” he said.

Westoff said the storm was erratic in its damage, completely obliterating one field and barely touching the next one to it. “It was almost like it was bouncing from field to field.”

Most of those hit by the storm had crop insurance, but that usually only covers about half of the financial loss.

Cooksey estimated the storm may have wiped out about 1.5 million bushels of winter wheat in the region. But a June 21 crop assessment by the USDA showed the state’s crop with 73 percent still rated “good” to “excellent” and an expected nearly 90 million bushels expected to be harvested in July.

“It’s looking good,´ said Glenda Mostek, a spokeswoman for Colorado Wheat. “It’s possible we’ll have an above-average crop for two years in a row.”

Wheat production contributes nearly $400 million annually to the state’s economy, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service. Last year, Colorado was No. 2 in wheat production, its highest rating ever. Ironically, the USDA announced a 3 percent increase in its forecast for winter wheat production in the state, based on conditions on June 1, on June 12, just before the storm hit.

Cooksey said his losses and those of his neighbors will have an effect on the local economy. “The losses we had here will affect not only these rural areas but also Greeley, Fort Morgan, Denver and Brighton because we do business in all those areas,” he said. “It will definitely have a ripple effect.”

Insurance adjuster Westhoff said he’s seen worse storms over the years, recalling monster hailstorms that wreaked damage from the Front Range and across the eastern plains.

“In the grand scheme of things, it was not such a big deal,” he said. “But if you were one of the guys under it, it was a pretty big deal.”

Steve Porter covers agribusiness for the Northern Colorado Business Report. He can be contacted at 970-232-3147, or by e-mail at sporter@ncbr.com.

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