Heavy rain and hail damaged crops in the Yorkton region on Tuesday evening.

“A pretty vicious hail storm rolled through and wiped out our grain crop and quite a few others as well,” said Adrienne Ivey, who farms in the Ituna area about half-an-hour west of Yorkton.

“The hail was a good toonie-sized, not quite golf ball, but getting up there,” said Ivey. “They were very unusual looking. They were rough and looked like little weapons.”

Adam Stuart farms in the Theodore area, about 40 kilometres northwest of Yorkton. He sent a tweet saying “2 3/4 (inches of rain) and hail. You got to be kidding me.”

Environment Canada had a recap of weather conditions based on social media reports. They include;

-66 millimetres of rain northwest of Preeceville and in Theordore.
-30.5 millimetres of rain at Indian Head
-76 millimetres of rain recorded 23 kilometres southeast of Wynyard by a volunteer weather observor.

There was rain in other areas of the province, but in much smaller amounts. There was about 5 millimetres in the Carrot River area, 285 kilometres northeast of Saskatoon. Spencer Maxwell was hoping to resume combining later on Wednesday afternoon, if the trucks could travel on the wet back roads.

“We’ve been using our grain dryer,” said Maxwell, who has about 15 percent of his crop in the bin. “You would like to wait for dry stuff, but after last year, 20 percent moisture wheat looked good so we decided to better get going. I think that was kind of the general feeling in the rest of the area too.”

Maxwell says the unsettled weather pattern, with rain every few days, is making the 2019 harvest a challenge.

“When you look at the (weather) forecast and you see a 40 or 60 percent chance of rain all week, it makes it tough to know which way to go.”

(above photo: Adam Stuart/Twitter)