Every trailer is weighed on a public weighbridge and every ticket is kept for the grain contract. Field 6 is eleven and a half hectares and it puts about eleven tonnes over the theoretical maximum through that bridge every harvest.
I farm four hundred acres of combinable crops and I have a degree in agriculture, which is relevant only because it means I know where the ceiling comes from.
Wheat yield has a theoretical maximum. It is worked out from the solar radiation falling on a hectare over the growing season, the fraction a wheat canopy can intercept, the efficiency with which it converts that to dry matter, and the share of dry matter that ends up as grain rather than straw.
For this country the number people use is somewhere between fifteen and eighteen tonnes a hectare. The world record, set on a farm with everything perfect, is about seventeen and a half.
A good crop here is nine or ten. My farm average is eight point four.
Field 6 is eleven and a half hectares of grade three land on a slight slope.
It does about twenty three tonnes a hectare.
Every number in this comes off a weighbridge that is not mine.
I do not store on farm. Everything goes straight from the field to a co-operative store eleven miles away, and the store has a public weighbridge, calibrated and certified for trade, because the grain is sold on that weight.
A trailer is weighed in loaded and weighed out empty and the difference is the load. I get a ticket, the store gets a ticket, and the merchant gets the tonnage.
So the weight of my harvest is measured by somebody else's certified instrument and paid for by a third party.
Field 6 puts about two hundred and sixty tonnes through that bridge every year.
What I checked first, obviously.
That the loads are actually from Field 6. I run one combine and one trailer at a time and the tickets are written up as they go, by me, in a book in the tractor.
So in 2019 I did a harvest where I did nothing else but be certain. Field 6 on its own, nothing else cut that day, every load ticketed, the field cleared, the combine's own yield monitor logging.
Twenty six loads. Two hundred and sixty one tonnes on the bridge.
The combine's monitor, which is a different instrument on a different principle, said two hundred and fifty eight, which is agreement.
The area.
An eleven and a half hectare field yielding two hundred and sixty tonnes needs to be twenty eight hectares to make that an ordinary crop.
The area is not in doubt. It is in the land registry title, it is in my Basic Payment claim, which is measured off aerial imagery by the government and which they will penalise you for overstating, and I have walked it with a GPS.
Eleven point five two hectares. I have claimed on that figure for fourteen years and it has been checked twice.
The crop in the field.
It took me longest to accept this, because I had assumed the field was simply extraordinary.
It is not. It is a good crop and no better. I take yield samples before harvest, cutting quadrats by hand and weighing them, because I have always done it and because it tells you when to start.
Field 6 samples at about nine and a half tonnes a hectare.
Nine and a half times eleven and a half is a hundred and nine tonnes.
The weighbridge says two hundred and sixty.
So the field grows a hundred and nine tonnes of wheat and two hundred and sixty tonnes leaves it.
I have said that sentence to one person, who is my agronomist and who has known me for twenty years, and he did the only sensible thing, which was to come and sample it himself, on his own, without me, in 2021.
He got nine point two.
Then he stood in my kitchen and asked me, carefully, whether anybody else could be tipping into my trailers.
The field is surrounded on three sides by my own ground and on the fourth by a wood. There is one gate. The trailer goes from the combine to the road and the road to the store, eleven miles, on a route I have driven a thousand times.
The straw.
If a field grew twice the grain it would grow about twice the straw, and straw is baled and counted.
Field 6 bales at what a hundred tonne wheat crop bales at. Two hundred and some big square bales, which is normal, and I sell them and they are weighed too.
The grain is the only thing that is double.
What I do about it.
I sell it. That is the honest and unflattering answer and it is why this has gone on for fourteen years.
Field 6 is worth about thirty two thousand pounds a year more than it should be, and that money is the reason this farm still has a farm on it, and I have thought about that in every possible way and I keep arriving at the same place.
The grain is good. It is sold on specification, and it is tested for moisture and protein and Hagberg at intake like everybody else's, and it passes, and it has never once been rejected or queried in fourteen years.
Somebody eats it. That is a sentence I would rather not have written down, and I have written it now, and I am going to leave it.
The one thing I have changed.
I used to cut Field 6 last, because it dries late on the slope.
I cut it first now, in the middle of the day, with the sun high, and I do not go back into that field after harvest until the spring.
The drilling is done by a contractor. He has never asked me why the man who does every other operation on this farm himself does not do that one, and I have an answer ready about the slope, and in nine years he has never needed it.