The pre-harvest checklist for clean records
The record-keeping jobs to do in the fortnight before the first field: areas checked, sheds allocated, tares taken, meters tested and the team briefed.
· 6 min
Clean harvest records are made in the fortnight before the first field, not during it. Once the combine is rolling there's no slack in the day to rename sheds, chase down field areas or discover the moisture meter reads a point low. The jobs below take an afternoon or two in total. Skipping them costs far more than that, spread across August in small, irritating instalments.
Work through them in order. Most depend on the one before.
1. Check the field list and cropped areas
Write out every field being cut this year, with its crop, variety and cropped area — cropped area, not the field's gross size. Headlands taken out, a wet corner left uncropped, a margin scheme along one side: these all shave hectares off, and every missing hectare inflates the yield you'll calculate later.
Check the numbers against your RPA maps rather than memory. Measuring field area properly is its own subject, but the short version is: the area figure you write down now is the denominator in every yield you'll quote for this field, possibly for years. Get it right once.
2. Name the sheds and allocate them by crop and spec
Decide now which grain goes where, and write it up somewhere everyone can see it. The rule that matters most: keep the milling wheat plan physically away from the feed heap. A milling premium is commonly £10-£30/t over feed depending on the season, and it evaporates the moment one trailer tips on the wrong side of a shared shed.
Give each store a short, unambiguous name — "Shed 2", "Dutch barn", "East bin" — and use those names everywhere: on the wall, in the records, over the radio. If two people call the same building two things, a load will eventually go astray on paper even if it tipped in the right place.
The physical side of getting stores ready — cleaning, repairs, vermin-proofing, cooling — is covered in the grain store preparation checklist. This job is the paperwork half: names, allocations, and rough capacities so you can see full coming before it arrives.
3. Take fresh tares on every trailer
Weigh every trailer and lorry empty, this week, and write the tares where whoever runs the pad will see them. Not last season's figures. A winter of mud, a new tyre, a toolbox and a jack left in the front — a tare can drift by a couple of hundred kilos, and that error lands in the net weight of every single load recorded against it. Two hundred kilos across sixty loads is 12 tonnes of wheat that either exists or doesn't, depending on which record you believe.
Plan to re-tare during harvest too, especially after heavy rain. It takes two minutes per trailer.
4. Check the moisture meter against a known sample
Test your meter against a sample of known moisture — a merchant's lab result, a co-op intake figure, or at minimum a cross-check against a neighbour's recently calibrated meter. Do it for each crop you'll measure, because meters behave differently on wheat, barley and rape.
A meter reading half a point optimistic is an expensive instrument. It tells you to cut, and the intake tells you the load is 16% against a 15% feed contract limit. Now you're paying a claim or drying charges at roughly £2-£3.50 per tonne per percentage point — on a 29-tonne artic load, £60-£100 a point, load after load. There's a fuller guide to choosing and checking moisture meters, but the pre-harvest job is simple: prove yours reads true before you trust it.
5. Pin the contracts and specs up at the pad
Whoever is loading lorries in August should not have to phone the office to find out whether the Crusoe is sold at 14.5% moisture or what the specific weight floor is. Print the key numbers for each contract — crop, variety, tonnage, moisture max, specific weight min, movement window — and put them on the wall at the weighbridge or the store.
It's an hour's job. It prevents the specific August mistake where a lorry gets loaded from the convenient heap rather than the correct one.
6. Brief the team on tagging loads
Everyone who touches a trailer needs to know the rule: every load gets recorded with its crop, field and destination shed, at the time it happens, using the agreed names. Not from memory at 9pm. What a complete record looks like is what belongs on a weighbridge ticket — weight, crop, variety, field, shed, moisture, initials.
Agree who records what. If the cart drivers call loads in, the person at the pad writes them down; if drivers record their own, show them the system before the first field, not during it. Whatever the method — ticket book, spreadsheet, or something built for the job — the pre-harvest job is making sure everyone knows it exists and uses the same field and shed names it does.
The checklist, in one place
| # | Job | Time it takes |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Field list with checked cropped areas | 1-2 hours |
| 2 | Sheds named and allocated by crop and spec | 1 hour |
| 3 | Fresh tares on every trailer | 30 minutes |
| 4 | Moisture meter checked against a known sample | 30 minutes |
| 5 | Contracts and specs printed and pinned up | 1 hour |
| 6 | Team briefed on recording loads | 30 minutes |
Half a day, all told. Cheap insurance against a season of arguing with the records.
Frequently Asked Questions
What should be on a pre-harvest checklist for records?
Six jobs: confirm the field list with checked cropped areas, name and allocate grain stores by crop and spec, take fresh tares on every trailer, verify the moisture meter against a known sample, pin contract specs up where loading happens, and brief the team on how loads get recorded.
Why do trailer tares need re-taking before harvest?
Because empty weights drift — mud, kit left aboard, and repairs all change them, sometimes by a couple of hundred kilos. That error goes straight into the net weight of every load against that trailer, and across a season it adds up to tonnes of grain that exist only on paper.
How do you check a moisture meter is accurate?
Compare it against a sample with a known lab or intake result, ideally for each crop you grow, and do it before the season starts. A meter reading half a point out will steer cutting decisions wrong and can trigger moisture claims or drying charges on every load it clears.
Should milling and feed wheat go in the same shed?
Only with a physical divide and a clear plan, and even then it's a risk. One trailer tipped on the wrong side can blend away a milling premium worth £10-£30/t across everything it touches. If separate stores are available, use them and write the allocation up where everyone can see it.
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