A FREAK hail storm devastated some crops near Esperance last week, with affected farmers losing up to 80 per cent of the affected areas.
It was a timely reminder of the old 'don't count your chickens before they hatch'.
Instead for north east Esperance farmer Tom Longmire, from Coorong Pastoral Co, it was "you haven't got it until we've got it in CBH".
Freelance assessor Graham Cooper has been visiting the affected farms and said the damage was terrible and would make anybody want to cry.
"The barley crop, which is probably a five tonne crop yield, will probably lose 80 per cent," Mr Cooper said.
"It's as high as 40 to 50pc on the canola - yet he's got some crop that has no damage whatsoever - it's just a strip that has gone through."
The hail hit Mr Longmire's canola pods, initially bruising them until the pods started to die a few days later.
"The stems of the plants were all grazed open, like you had cut the skin off them," Mr Longmire said.
"Now that they've died off there is a bit of a white tinge to the paddock."
Sitting in his car, watching the last of the hail, there wasn't anything Mr Longmire could do to save his crop - other than "chuck a tarp" over the bit next to him.
"It's a bit of a bummer, it takes the wind out of your sail a bit - especially when you're there while it's hailing," he said.
Danny Bertola, Nerridonia farm, was disappointed by the event, as the storm hit a reasonable section of his barley program.
"We are not the biggest farmers around, we crop just over 2600 hectares, and it's probably affected at least a quarter of our program," Mr Bertola said.
"That's probably the most disappointing part, is that we are not going to get to harvest the full potential of the crop."
Mr Bertola said he wasn't the first farmer to be hit by hail and his crop was insured.
"We've had frost before, and I would much rather be hit by hail," Mr Bertola said.
"It's quite disappointing, really, it was going to be a fairly nice crop - but that's what insurance is there for."
Mr Longmire echoed a similar thought, saying there was no point getting upset with the events, as he still wasn't sure what impact the hail would have on his yield.
"I don't want to get too worried, otherwise I won't focus on the things I need to do," he said.
"If you focused on the small percentage of the bit of damage we got over the whole program, you are probably causing yourself more stress than you need to.
"Until you actually know what the yield range was, you can't really get too worried because we can't quantify what we've lost yet."
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As a result, Mr Longmire is researching how to optimise the harvest of the canola left, which is mostly in the central canopy.
"It just changes our timing to make sure we hit the central part of the canopy for optimal timing, and we are not going to let these top pods fill out because there is probably not going to be much yield," he said.
"If it looks like there is too much damage, we will consider whether we change from swathing to direct heading if we think it's going to be too fragile having two passes."
