OH HAIL NO!

Well the weather threw us another corn curveball; we got hit with hail on some of our irrigated corn.  Hail is bad for a lot of reasons but the main one is that it destroys the leafs ability to harvest energy from the sun.

It might be hard to appreciate just how bad the hailed corn looks, so below is a picture of one of our healthy corn fields.

A couple weeks after the corn was hit by hail I went back to look at the ears of corn.  Below is an example of a corn ear "tipping back".  Tipping back is when the corn plant aborts some of the kernels of corn because it doesn't have the energy to sustain all the kernels on the ear.  Typically a farmer looks for some tipping back because it shows that the population of corn plants in the field is correct.  In the below example, more kernels were aborted than normal because of the hail damage. 

Hail also directly damages the ears of corn.  You can see below where a piece of hail actually hit the ear and destroyed some of the kernels in the ear of corn.  A secondary problem that occurs is that the damaged kernels begin to rot and will rot out the rest of the ears of corn.

Every year the seed corn companies develop corn that has a resistance to a pest or a disease.  I told my father in law that maybe we should look into hail resistant corn next year...

-Hail Hater Ryan