Few sounds sink a farmer’s heart like hailstones.

Hail is one of those uncontrollable aspects of farming: bad luck from a chance weather pattern can severely damage an entire crop.

What is in your control is how you respond to hail.

• With a prompt response and the right nutrition, we’ve seen crops make strong recoveries from hail.

In this article, we have some tips on how to survive hail.

• We’ll look into the plant’s physiological response in order to understand the best way to help it recover.
• We’ll share a recipe for a Hail Recovery Foliar that we’ve used with great success.

We wish you a hail-free growing season, but if disaster strikes, you’ll be prepared!

There are 2 very important things to understand with hail:

1. Act fast.

You have a very short window of time to take action. The sooner after storm stress you intervene, the larger the crop response.

If you work with an AEA agronomist, you should be on the phone with them the day of the storm.

2. Context matters.

The exact response to hail depends on the crop, its growth stage, and the type of damage sustained. Our agronomists can help you determine that. What follows is general advice. This won’t help with damaged fruit, or plants that are totally destroyed.

A crop recovering from hail must do several important and energy-intensive things at once:

1. Seal wounds and resist infection.
2. Produce new leaves and tissues to replace what’s lost.
3. Mobilize stored carbohydrates.

All of this depletes the plant’s carbohydrate reserves that it needs to fill grain or fruit.

Therefore, if we want to produce a good yielding crop, we must also:

4) Increase photosynthesis in the surviving tissue to meet carbohydrate demand.

5) Replenish carbohydrate reserves.

The yield that a hail-damaged crop is able to produce depends on whether it has enough functional tissue to provide for its reproductive needs.

There are many ways to achieve this.

Here are some AEA products that help, and a general formula for a hail-recovery foliar.

AEA’s Hail Recovery Formula

Apply as a foliar as soon as possible after hail damage:

Per acre:

1. Seastim™ (6 quarts / acre)

• Helps regulate hormones to encourage the plant to stay in a growth phase

2. Rejuvenate (4 quarts / acre)

•  A source of complex carbohydrates and organic acids to fuel the plant while it recovers its photosynthetic capacity

3. PhotoMag (3 quarts / acre)

• Optimizes photosynthesis in the surviving tissue to help the plant get quickly back on its feet

4. SeaCrop (2 quarts / acre)

• Contains a broad spectrum of trace minerals which are used as enzyme cofactors.
• Enzymes are essential for immune function, to heal wounds, and to rebuild damaged protein

5. Pinion™at 1% dilution

• Open wounds from hail are the perfect opportunity for disease to enter a plant.
• Pinion controls diseases.