On Tuesday night, Sharon Kauffman heard the rumble of thunder, saw angry-looking clouds rolling in and felt a pit growing in her stomach. "You know somebody is going to get hit, and there will be devastation," the farmer's wife and insurance agent said. "As a farmer, you're at the whim of Mother Nature. I'm glad I'm not property/casualty or crop insurance on days like today." While her own farm did not get hit too badly Tuesday night, she knows other nearby farms were not as lucky - and her's might not fare as well with the next storm. At least one farmer had been spraying a healthy field to ward off spider mites on Monday and Tuesday, she said, and then the storm and its hail hit that same field Tuesday night. She called it "just a sad thing" to look at those crops now and see that they are "worth half of what they were" the day before, Kauffman said. Crop damage and lowered yields because of Tuesday night's storm are big concerns for Marlin Eisenach, a Colorado State University Extension agent in Morgan County. "We had a little bit of everything," he said. "In places, there were over 3 inches of rain. It was too much all at once. When we get rain that fast, it runs off and doesn't soak in. The hail is definitely hurting the crops. There definitely will be some damage and lower yields." He heard reports of hail ranging in size from golf balls to peas, and rain totals from only a few drops all the way up to the 3 inches reported just west of Fort Morgan. "It was very spotty," Eisenach said. "It's hard to believe the difference a mile makes." One of the farming areas of Morgan County that got hit the worst by the hail was just east of Fort Morgan and not far from the CSU Extension office, Eisenach said. The corn and alfalfa hay crops growing around the county are particularly vulnerable to hail damage right now, Eisenach said. "Where there's hail damage, there's definitely going to be a loss of yield," he said of corn fields. "The alfalfa hay is just getting ready to do the third cutting. Where it was striped of leaves, that's where the value and there's going to be a loss of yield." That lowered yield because of hail may not be covered by crop insurance like it would if the crop were a total loss, he said. "That's the risk of farming and where we live," Eisenach said. Something that was not affected was the wheat crops, he said. "All the wheat is harvested," Eisenach said, "but that's about the only positive I can see. If it had been a week ago, that would have been in the hail path. He also was hearing reports of home gardens and flowerbeds that got hit by the hail. "In some places, they were destroyed completely," he said of people's vegetable and flower gardens. Eisenach said he was worried Wednesday afternoon about the other storms that were in the forecast for Morgan County in coming days, including the potential for another big one Wednesday night. "I'm always concerned," he said, but what he saw Tuesday night was worse than he expected. "The way that thunder and lighting came, it was vicious." Source - http://www.fortmorgantimes.com