THE wild weather at Kalbar in the first week of January has cost the Moore family more than $60,000 in damages to equipment and crop being ripped away hours before harvest time.
Mulgowie Farming suppliers Keith Moore and his son Scott lost 50 acres of soy beans and sweet corn when hail and rough winds hit their Kalbar property.
Despite losing two paddocks of crop, shed rooves and a grain silo, Keith shrugged it off and said it must have been their unlucky day.
“It’s part of nature,” he said.
“It upsets you when it happens – when you see six months work gone, it’s tough.
“There’s no handouts for little storms like that when they only hit one property.
“Everyone gets hit occasionally and it looks like it was our turn.”
Scott, who lives on site, said the last few minutes of the wind picked up and he feared his house’s window luvres would be ripped off.
“I couldn’t see anything outside so I had no idea how much damage there was,” he said.
“There was a lot of devastation.”
Scott said he had not seen anything this bad on the property since the floods in March last year when the farm was inundated.
“Last year the corn was also ready to harvest the next day but the flood happened overnight and we were wiped out,” he said.
“Just as we were replanting and putting in the hard yards since then and building up to the summer season, we get hit by this.”
Keith said he was baffled when he saw neighbouring farms with some or no wind damage compared to one section of their property.
“There is a section of the farm which was hit with a lot of hail damage,” he said.
“Then there’s this narrow little strip of smaller hail where the wind really threw things around.”
Keith said they were happy with the rain received this season and everything was looking up until the wild weather event.
“Just hours before the storm, we were saying how good the crop looked,” he said.
“After the storm, we were up to our knees in mud and saw how bad the soy beans and sweet corn looked.”
Keith said this would heavily impact their business as they were still recovering from the floods.
A combination of a tree branch and a shed roof being torn off took down two power lines in the creek.
“There was a silo on, (the wind) threw it around and took it about 50 metres across the paddock and mangled up and twisted and wont be able to use it anymore.”
Keith said the soy beans were shredded by the hail leaving nothing but the stems of the vegetable while most of the corn’s leaves were ripped off.
He said some of the corn could be salvaged for harvest whereas the soy beans were a waiting game.
“It might be a miracle if the soy beans do survive but we always hope,” he said.
“It’s getting too late to replant them because it’s getting to the end of the soy beans planting season.
“We will have to possibly plant other crop.”