hail damage
 

a few weeks ago i was heading down to binghamton to get some pics at a local state park, when i noticed that many of the cultivated fields looked very bad. i didn't get a pic of what I thought used to be soybeans; each plant had only 3 or 4 leaves left, and overall what was left looked like a plant after it had been frozen (and shredded). it was reported that several small but extremely powerful storms had gone through and dropped +1" hail. ...that's not over an inch collected of hail, but individual hailstones averaging an inch or more. drifts of leaves had collected along the roads near the ditches as water piled the leaves together. the smell of rotting vegetation was also pretty bad

thankfully those storms seem to be over now! now, it's just dodging the remains of hurricanes (good luck to all in the path of real hurricanes.....)

http://www.cnyos.org/exdisp/hail1.JPG
a corn field near my Uncle's farm (he leases out his fields, luckily for him) showing shredded leaves. corn will likely survive and be harvested

http://www.cnyos.org/exdisp/hail2.JPG
pokeweed which would normally have large fruit and nice leaves

http://www.cnyos.org/exdisp/hail3.JPG
along the road were several staghorn sumac trees that would normally have a leaf canopy that you wouldn't be able to see through easily; trees are stripped

http://www.cnyos.org/exdisp/hail4.JPG
closeup of staghorn sumac sapling, leaves stripped off

later on when I was at the state park taking pictures, you could see one of the storms had dropped large hail there as well; lily pads out on the water of one of the ponds showed holes over an inch across

Yup, our lilies were toasted by that hail (not as large but still shredded!)

That's some serious damage. 'Really sad to see.

Serious weather up there!

What a shame!

Wow, that's sad. It would be hard for soybeans to take a hit like that.

I would be surprised if any were harvestable from those fields, at least 300 acres if not more