No dollar figure yet on hail damage to crops

Thursday, October 2, 2008

by SUSAN MANN

Ontario tender fruit board chairman Len Troup estimates that one-quarter of his 330-acre fruit crop was wiped out by hail this year but he wasn’t the only farmer to experience damage.

Adrian Huisman, tender fruit board spokesman, believes there isn’t an orchard in Ontario that wasn’t touched by hail. Despite that “we were still left with a very good crop.”

Tender fruit farmers with crops that weren’t entirely destroyed probably benefited more from the frequent storms this summer because the added rain resulted in larger fruit, he says.

Agricorp’s hail damage claim reports for all crops not just tender fruit are four times higher this year compared to the average during the past five years, says Jim Zabitz, Agricorp senior manager of regional services. This year there have been 1,645 damage reports representing 110,000 acres.

In 2007 there were 22,000 acres damaged by hail. The average for the past five years excluding this year is about 26,000 acres of hail damage and 390 damage reports.

“Some fruit producers have been hit with five different hail storms,” Zabitz says, adding it was one storm after another for some farmers.

Once tender fruit is hit by hail it can’t be sold on the fresh market. Just one hail mark even if it heals up and there’s a scar means the fruit is rejected, Troup notes.

In addition, for crops like hail-damaged peaches, growers can’t leave them to decay on the tree. They have to take the fruit off because it can cause rot in the tree that will affect crops in other years.

For apples, there is a juice market and that’s where apples damaged by hail can go. But Troup says prices aren’t good. “The juice price is only the cost of getting it off the tree.” 

In a crop like apples farmers from across the province had damaged fruit. But the most intense hail storms in Ontario happened in the Grand Bend area on Lake Huron and south of London on August 2. Zabitz says it was the most intense hail storm he’s ever seen. The Niagara area was hit by several severe storms in July. But generally hail damage occurred across the whole province.

In some soybean and edible bean fields near London after the August 2 storm “it looked like somebody went through with a mower and just chopped the top off the plants,” Zabitz says, noting this was the most severe damage he’s seen in his 15 years with Agricorp. The damage was so bad that even three weeks later there wasn’t any plant regrowth.

Troup who farms with several family members in the St. Catharines area doesn’t remember a summer with so many hail storms. “There’s always some hail and someone always gets hurt badly. But this year was much more than usual.”

There isn’t a dollar figure yet on the amount farmers who had crop insurance lost to hail because for most crops Agricorp has to wait until after harvest to see if there’s a loss and an actual claim. “Once people have finished harvesting and recorded their yield then we can tell if they actually had a shortfall and are in a claim,” Zabitz explains. The deadline to report yields is Dec. 15.

But Agricorp has paid out some money in interim claims. For example, there has been $655,000 paid out for apples to date. Agricorp is projecting hail claims for apples to be $8 million this year.

Over the long term Agricorp estimates that six per cent of its claims are due to hail. “Over time it’s not a big problem,” he says. BF