MAINE TALES. “Protection From Ravage and Ruin.” Bridgewater, Maine. Circa 2006.
Simultaneously, I experienced a dizzying, sinking feeling of impending doom, and yet also a perverse thrill at the fortuitous timing which allowed us to witness a hailstorm assault on our Potato crop.
Thankfully, hail is a rare occurrence in the locality of our farm. The mention of hail evokes fear among Potato farmers because it’s known it can cause catastrophic consequences for Potato crops. Back ten years ago, an enormous percentage of one Summer’s Montana Certified Seed Potato crop – 10,000 acres’ worth – was savaged by hot-headed hailstorms. Maine is not immune. Just last month, fifty miles northwest of us in Northern Maine’s Eagle Lake, tennis-ball-sized hailstones pounded through the Town.
In our 47 years of living and working on Wood Prairie Family Farm, we have experienced hail no more than five times. We have had close calls, but never a growing-season hail disaster.
One of those close calls came in 2006 when we had Seed Potatoes growing in the ‘Shaw North’ Field adjacent to Kinney Road. Scott, our hired hand, and I were in a pickup, heading back to the farm from Town. It was about 10:30 on a mid-July morning. The sky was dark and it began to hail just as our pickup siddled up to the Potato field’s halfway point. This hail was pea-size and it came down hard.
The pounding on the truck cab and hood offered deafening confirmation. I shut off the truck and rolled down the driver’s window to gain an unobstructed view looking east. What was most odd was the total absence of any wind to accompany the hail. Without being egged on by the wind, the blinding hail fell serenely from the heavens but it did no harm. Potato leaves were tickled by the hail but there was absolutely zero leaf damage. This organic Certified Seed crop had just begun to bloom, sufficient indication that tubers were only about ping pong ball size. Disaster averted. However, as this storm cell forged eastward, it reorganized and caused crop damage in town three miles to our east.
About ten years earlier, our area was engulfed by a tremendous thunderstorm cell which came at us from the West. It was the middle of August, a Friday afternoon and the sky had darkened forebodingly. Witnessing the storm from the safety of our Packing Shed, we experienced ferocious winds along with a heavy deluge of rain. Our farm was drenched with almost 3 inches in just a fraction of an hour. Always backed up with work to do, after the torrent passed, we went on about our farm work, never to venture off the farm or speak with a soul.
The next morning, our farmer-friend Terry Emery stopped by for a visit from across the line over in Canada. The first words out of his mouth were, “Did ya get hit?” We explained that we got strong wind and heavy rain but had no crop damage. Terry commenced to give us a blow-by-blow account of what turned out to be a catastrophic localized hail storm. The hail swath had just spared our farm and our Potato crop by a mere quarter mile.
The impacted farmland of this hailstorm was a rectangle about three-quarter-mile wide north-to-south, and eight miles long west-to-east. Most of the damage was in the north half of Bridgewater and adjoining land in Blaine, but the hit extended some into Canada as well.
We took Sunday afternoon off and decided to drive around to survey for ourselves nature’s devastation as described by Terry. Potato-rotation-crop Oat fields which had been ready for combining instead had been abruptly totally shredded to ground level.
Potato fields which prior to the thunderstorm were verdant green with big bushy plants had been pulverized as though a steel-knife Rotobeater had gone through. No color remained in the fields and the defoliated, lacerated Potato stems limply lay defeated in the furrows on the east side of each Potato row. Now, even though forty-eight hours after the intense hail event, the shoulders of roads were still piled thick and white with accumulated hail which had not yet melted. Every single tractor-trailer parked pointing west at Smith’s Truck Stop along US Route 1 in nearby Blaine had their windshields broken. East of the Truck stop, every west-facing window in every house in the Blaine village of Robinson (‘Rob-a-sun’) had been broken and then hastily covered over with plywood.
The total damage to Maine farm crops suffered by local farmers in the compact hail havoc rectangle was $5.5 million. Because USDA had previously established a minimum threshold of $6 million crop damage to trigger disaster aid, local farmers took all their losses on the chin. Potato tubers themselves were undamaged in their soil-cocooned berths. However, the early involuntary vine-kill took a huge toll on yields, especially late varieties like Russet Burbank whose tubers had looked forward to a lot more end-of-season sizing.
In this neck of the woods, Summer storms arrive from the Northwest, West or Southwest. Thirty years ago, our old State of Maine Seed Inspector, Wayne Allen, still lived among his clan in a house on fairly high ground along US Route 1 at the south edge of Bridgewater. Wayne’s picture window faced west out across Danny Corey’s Potato field and offered a perfect, unobstructed panoramic view of Number Nine Mountain. Wayne had related to us the many times over the decades that he had observed a powerful storm coming from the West which would hit Number Nine Mountain and then split in two: with one part veering north up towards Mars Hill, and the other part heading south down to Monticello. Our farm is six miles away from Number Nine Mountain and lies directly east. As the first farm closest to Number Nine, we often find ourselves in the Nine Mountain’s rain shadow. In the case of that ferocious Go-Ahead-and-Take-It-On-the-Chin hail storm, Nine Mountain had protected us from ravage.
We’ll take the bet that year-in, year-out, the big reason we see so little hail on our farm is that Number Nine Mountain is standing guard, keeping us safe from ruin.
Jim
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