Developing in the blink of an eye, the storm unleashed pure fury in the night–roaring winds, driving rain and unbelievable, incessant pounding of hailstones, some the size of softballs. The hail battered roofs and walls, crashed through windows and flew through the entire width of houses, carrying comets’ tails of glass shards, rain and debris with it.
Battering rural Cheyenne County in the panhandle of Nebraska, the hail, tornado and high winds left behind staggering damage and destruction. In addition to millions of dollars’ worth of damage to homes, thousands of acres of crops were destroyed–including the crops that my husband, our 16-year-old son and I were nurturing for this year’s income. With commodity prices at or near record lows and continuing to fall, we need every bushel of wheat, every bale of alfalfa, every pound of millet seed to survive.
As the storm raged, my husband quietly went downstairs to the darkened basement and sat in the pitch blackness. He could not bear to contemplate what was happening to a year’s worth of work. He has farmed for nearly all of his 50 years. We’ve endured hailstorms almost yearly, but nothing like this one. He knew, our son knew and I knew that it was not going to take just some of our crops. It was going to take them all.
In a segment of America that is not sharing in the great economic times that this country is experiencing, the storm was the last thing any of us needed. My family, along with other farm families here, has been caught in the squeeze between ever-increasing costs for fertilizer, seed, fuel and equipment and declining prices for our products. The major cash crop in Cheyenne County is winter wheat. Although most farmers here diversify, planting portions of their acres in secondary crops such as millet, edible beans, corn, sunflowers, oats and alfalfa, the backbone of the farm economy here is wheat. Wheat is what pays the bills–wheat that’s planted in the fall, endures the winter here on the plains, awakens from dormancy in the spring, and reaches maturity in mid- to late July. The storm destroyed all hope of the bumper crop that this year’s unusually heavy spring rains and beautiful summer weather had promised.
Morning dawned clear. And that’s when reality hit. As I watched Hurricane Floyd last week, I could sympathize with those who lost not only possessions, but much of their livelihood. It’s one thing to see the destruction wrought by storms like that one on the evening news; it’s another thing to see it happen in your own backyard. Fields that 12 hours earlier were rippling seas of tall golden wheat were now fields of beaten stubble. Where once corn stood two feet tall, the land was barren. Fields of oats and alfalfa were now fields of broken, leafless stalks. Pivot-irrigation systems were flipped upside down, and lay twisted on the ground. Metal grain bins were smashed in, or simply gone–pieces of them strewn across fields for a mile or more. House after house after house had windows on their north and west sides completely blown out. On some houses the siding was ripped off ; on others it was beaten and dented. Walls were stripped of paint. Cars, pickups and tractors had dents pounded into their surfaces.
The buildings and equipment could be repaired or replaced. The crops were another matter. We could only wait impatiently for crop adjusters to show up and assess the damage to our fields. Like most of our neighbors, our wheat was listed as a total loss. With our main source of revenue gone for the year, we had to turn our attention to our secondary crops. We replanted the millet that had been destroyed, and planted additional acres on some of our summer-fallow wheat ground. Our alfalfa, beaten brown, did come back, but we lost all chance at a fourth cutting this fall. Our oats didn’t make it, and we ended up disking them under–another loss chalked up to the storm.
Confronted with the loss of this year’s harvest, the cost of planting replacement crops and declining commodity prices, my husband and I faced some hard decisions as the time for fall seeding arrived. Taking a chance that next year will be better, we are planting our winter wheat. We are taking jobs off the farm (as a trucker and an office worker) for the winter months. In the end we, like other farm families, will do what we can to try to hang on to our farms and our way of life. Our concern right now is how much longer we can afford to hold on.
