CAPITAL REGION — The owner of a farm that grows vegetables for the Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York said Friday as much as 15 percent of this year’s crop was destroyed in a hail storm on Aug. 2.

Pauline Williman, 82, said her family farm in Knox has been growing vegetables for the food bank for 20 years and this has been a terrible summer for crops because of the weather.

But the worst day so far was Aug. 2, when an inch and a half of rain with hail fell from the sky in 15 minutes, smashing some vegetables into the ground and leaving others with pock marks.

“Some of the crop had already been affected by high water in the fields,” she said. “This has been such a wet season. I don’t remember a summer with more rain in all of my life.”

She said about 25 acres of fields are used by the food bank to grow cabbages, broccoli, peppers, tomatoes, corn and summer and winter squash.

Mark Quandt, director of the food bank, said it is difficult to say what will be the final impact of the weather on the crops from Williman’s fields.

“Some of the vegetables still on the ground may be spoiling because of the wetness,” he said. “We are still getting good crops from the farm, we just don’t know how many will be harvested in the end.”

The August storm followed two earlier hail storms this summer that missed the Williman farm.

One of those, on June 16, was so severe that the federal government is offering low-interest loans to farmers whose crops were destroyed or damaged.

The 40 counties that were deemed eligible for aid include Fulton, Schoharie, Montgomery, Schenectady, Albany, Saratoga and Rensselaer, according to state Department of Agriculture and Markets spokeswoman Jessica Chittenden.

She said farmers who had crop damage in June filed reports with their local Farm Services Agency representative and those reports were packaged by the governor’s office and sent to Washington with a request for aid.

“Now that the loan money has been approved, the farmers can go to their local FSA office and make an application for funds based on their earlier report,” she said.

Gov. David A. Paterson’s office announced the U.S. Department of Agriculture funding for loans Friday morning.

“This help is badly needed,” the governor said in a statement. “It has been a challenging year for New York’s farmers, who are the backbone of our upstate New York economy.”

State Agriculture Commissioner Patrick Hooker said, “While crops are still abundant in the fields, hail storms have repeatedly damaged fruits and vegetables this season, leaving them scarred with pit marks and unmarketable for the fresh market. While the entire crop was not lost, any loss of fresh market produce severely hurts the bottom line of farmers.”

On June 16, much of New York state was battered by one of the worst hail storms in recent years.

Chittenden said the storm damaged many crops, including apples, cherries, fresh vegetables, grapes and corn. At the time, strawberries and cherries had just come into season. The hail damaged the fruit, leaving pit marks. Immature tree fruits, such as apples, peaches, pears and plums, were also damaged aesthetically and are no longer sellable on the fresh market.

Young vegetables were damaged in the fields, where plants were stressed and made vulnerable to pests and disease.

Chittenden said each loan application will be judged on its own merits, taking into account the extent of losses, security available, repayment ability and other eligibility requirements.

Agriculture is one of New York’s largest industries, encompassing 25 percent of the state’s landscape and generating more than $4.5 billion for the state’s economy each year. New York has 7.5 million acres of farmland with more than 34,000 farms, according to the Agriculture and Markets Department.

On another crop front, Tom DellaRocco, of the Farm Service Agency in Albany, said farmers trying to remove hay from their fields in the past couple of weeks have been fighting a losing battle.

“At this point, the quality of the hay is mediocre, but it was impossible to get it out of the fields with all the rain,” he said. “It will be hard to find good hay this year.”