What is hailstorm?

Question

how does it affect agriculture and livelihood

Answer 1

If you are asking about the weather phenomenon, a hailstorm is a big setback to agriculture. Damaged or destroyed crops and equipment. Some hail stones can be large enough to kill livestock, not to mention the farmers. The storms are usually brief but sudden, and may ruin a season's crop.

Answer 2

A hailstorm occurs when you have a cold air mass, high in the atmosphere, meets a warn, moist air mass or front. The warm air will cool rapidly and lose its water in the form of rain. If the cold air is cold enough or high enough in the atmosphere that rain will freeze and fall to the ground as ice. This is hail, and comes in all sizes, from very small, to marble size, dime size, quarter size, golf ball, tennis ball, baseball and rarely, softball size. Hail will usually come with a thunder storm, or even a tornado, since the same atmospheric conditions can cause all of these things. The damage it causes depends on the crops it falls on and the time it falls as well as the amount and size of the hail. If a hailstorm with good sized hail falls while wheat is almost ready for harvest, you can loose the whole crop. I've seen green corn with all the leaves riped off or torn to shreds with only the stalks standing. So a hail storm can be devastating to a farmer, but it is usually not that bad and causes partial damage. It is just part of the gamble of farming.

You can see hailstorm used often in the figurative sense in a lot of the business world when they see hard times coming. Or if I see where my ex is coming to town, I might be heard saying "Here comes a hailstorm!" and it won't be an actual hailstorm at all.

Answer 3

Hailstorms can be relatively minor up to severely damaging dependent upon size of the hail and the amount of wind behind the storm moving through.  In Illinois we have experienced hailstorms in various areas of the state recently.  

Hail can be small pea sized pellets up to an inch or more in size and last for a few seconds up to several minutes or more.  Much depends on the storm system which has  a certain amount of updraft within the clouds to push the moisture into an elevated level where the temperatures are below freezing causing the moisture to freeze and form into the pellets before falling down to the ground.

Hail is most feared after the crops: corn and soybeans, some wheat and alfalfa, are growing and the hail dependent upon the force of the frozen pellets will in some cases shred the plant to chards of green plant material, unable to continue growing.  Fields must be replanted when they are this severe.  

Hail can damage the glass and metal on buildings and autos if severe enough.

Answer 4

Hail is small ice "stones" falling fairly fast.

The amount and type of damage varies with the size of the stones and what they hit.

Wheat is very vulnerable to small hail stones that will beat the grain out of the heads.  Bigger stones would break the stalks but might leave it harvestable.  Either way the farmer takes a beating.

Corn and hybrid sorghum are less damaged by small stones since their stalks are heavier and their leaves can continue feeding the plant even if they are shredded somewhat.  Bigger hailstones can break stalks which cuts the yield.

Wheat is also more vulnerable since the prime hail season is right at harvest while corn and sorghum are still small and can recover.

A neighbor had about 300 acres of good wheat almost ready for harvest.  A hailstorm beat it into the ground and all he could do was burn it to reduce the number of plants that would sprout from the grain beat out of the heads.

In 15 minutes he lost about 15,000 bushels of wheat -- something like $80,000 in lost gross income.  He still had to pay for the fertilizer, seed, fuel and other costs of raising the crop.

And "hail insurance" is too expensive.

It's all a part of being a farmer.