Golf ball-sized hail stones that fell at a farm in South Australia's mid-north remain frozen and embedded in the ground where a lucrative wheat crop once grew.

These hail stones fell two weeks ago and remain embedded in soil, still frozen and the size of a 20c coin ( Simon Schmidt )

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. Listen Duration: 5 minutes 3 seconds 5 m Grain grower Simon Schmidt still in shock after a massive hail storm decimated his crop. ( Caroline Winter ) Download 2.3 MB

The hail hit thick and fast on November 4 when a severe storm swept across parts of the state's grain growing regions.

The freak storm that hit many parts of South Australia all but wiped out crops, fences and resulted in the death of livestock, on Simon and Steph Schmidt's property at Worlds End.

The stones, which have partially melted, were still the size of 20c or 50c coins, and have shocked property owners.

The pair are still reeling from that day and it has taken until now to talk about the damage caused.

"We lost 1,200 acres of crop and it's nearly a 100 per cent write-off," Mr Schmidt said.

"We might be able to scrape out of that 1,200 acres — if I'm very very lucky — a field bin a week.

"I don't even know if it's worth it, but we've got to try I suppose.

"I'm estimating it was between $150,000 to $200,000 of damage on that one crop there, and that's being a bit modest."

But it was not just the Schmidt's crop decimated as Mother Nature unleashed her fury.

"We had hail stones build up on the top of our dams, and then sheep were walking on top of the dams thinking it was hard ground, and falling through.

"Because we've got no fences, we couldn't keep any sheep anywhere, and we were just trying to do the boundary fences to keep them off the road. We've got on top of that now."

Season looked good until storm hit

Mr Schmidt was helping a friend shear that day, and when he arrived back at his property he discovered the worst.

"When we initially drove over the hill we looked at some of our first country and didn't notice anything.

"As we got further up the road to some of our better country, you could see the crops were white.

"The rain had passed and the hail just sort of cleared and the crops were white up there and you could see there was nothing left."

Until then, the season had been looking good for the Schmidts.

Following news of El Nino, they started sowing at the first sniff of rain, and were confident of a bumper crop.

"We got them all in before the peak-time and they looked really, really good. They're probably some of the best crops I'd seen up there, but now this event came through and took out the lot," Mr Schmidt said.

But unfortunately, they did not insure their crop this year.

"We decided against it for the fact that we've got a few headers and we had them all ready.

"We were well into our harvest and we were probably going to have that off in another week's time.

"So we thought we'd save some money, being a dry year we won't insure, and we got caught out.

"At the moment we're just taking each day as it comes. We've still got crop left to reap, so we didn't get all our crop taken out.

"We have to focus on getting off what we've got left, then worrying about the rest."