Hail stones the size of  'giant tennis balls' have battered grape crops in the Nashik region of India with some farmers losing everything.

Grape Growers Association of India president Sopan Kanchan told www.freshfruitportal.com storms over the last few days had severely damaged grape crops in the area, which is in the state of Maharashtra.

"Farmers have never really seen anything like the size of the hail stones that have been hitting the crops over recent days. They were absolutely massive and caused a huge amount of damage," he told wwww.freshfruitportal.com.

"Where does this leave the farmers now? The answer is, in a very difficult situation."

Assessments are being carried out across the state to get a clearer picture of the extent of the damage and see how this will impact Maharashstra's overall grape production this season.

"I know some farmers have reported complete losses to their whole crops while others have reported 50% losses. Some are slightly luckier and have around 20% of their crops damaged. It will take some more time for the information to come in.

"This will be an extremely difficult time for the growers as they have seen their crops devastated over the weekend and there is absolutely nothing they can do now.

"It makes it even worse when you consider some of the crops were at the harvesting stage and were, previous to the storms, looking in very good condition. We had high expectations for this season."

Kanchan said farmers were used to dealing with severe storms but were taken by surprise over the weekend as the unusually large hail stones suddenly came during the heavy rainfall.

"Normally heavy rains do not really affect the grapes so much and you can work around the situation, but this time the hail stones were an extraordinary size; six inches wide according to some people I have spoken with.

"We may need to look at other ways of growing grapes following this event with a view to trying to do more to protect our crops using different types of cultivation practices like incorporating plastic protection systems or something similar.

"We may need to call on international experts from around the world to help and advise us in this direction because there is very little money available from the Indian government to compensate growers when they are faced with these kinds of losses due to bad weather. We have never faced such huge losses before now and we will have to think of ways around it happening again which is a difficult concept because we are talking about uncontrollable weather."

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