A vicious hail storm turned the sky black, southeast of Kenton, delivering golf ball sized hail on Thursday, August 25.
“It was a nice day,” says Ken Bond who farms four miles south and two miles east of Kenton. But within 15 minutes the sky was black. “I’ve never seen it that dark at 9:30 in the morning. It was vicious,” he says.
Thankfully, Bond was not in his swather at the time. At the time of the sudden storm, the swather was parked in the field south of the buildings, and that’s where lightning struck the implement.
The bolt of electricity “blew the roof right off the cab and melted the wires”. The swather is an insurance write-off. A round bale near the swather was also hit.
Meanwhile golf ball sized ice hammered Bonds’ place and an entire strip of the country. Worsening to the southeast, all the way to Deerboine Hutterite Colony southwest of Rivers, the freak storm took up to 100 percent of crops in the area.
At the farm near Kenton, there was damage to Bond’s house and other vehicles. It was later, while checking the machinery that he found out what the lightning did.
“We had got hail, so I told my son to check the cabs ... and this is when we found it had hit the swather.”
It’s the nature of farming; weather is often hit and miss. “There’s still grain there to harvest.” Bond reports that on his fields, some were 10 percent hailed while others 90 percent and although disease also took a toll he says, “There was potential for a decent crop.”
