13 January 2026
Weighbridge tickets are not a yield map — and that is still useful
A ticket tells you what left the yard. It does not tell you which tramline donated the extra tonnes. Here is how we still use tickets as the backbone of a winter reading.
A weighbridge ticket is a legal and commercial document. It is also the most honest number most holdings have. Moisture, variety, and net weight survive arguments in a way a remembered “it looked well” does not. The mistake is treating the ticket as a map.
Tickets collapse a field into one figure. A 12-hectare wheat block that averaged 8.4 tonnes per hectare may hide a 3-hectare wet shelf that barely covered seed. If that shelf is always wet, the average is a kindness to a problem. If the shelf was wet only because a drain jetting was delayed, the average is a warning about a calendar, not about the land.
When Desktop Routebase reads a harvest, we start with tickets anyway. They set the scale. Then we ask who drove, whether the headland was cut separately, and whether a trailer sat in one place long enough to fool a monitor. Only after that do we walk. The ticket keeps the walk honest; the walk keeps the ticket from becoming a myth.
If you have nothing but tickets this winter, you still have enough to begin. List fields, list weights, list moisture. Mark the ones that surprised you. Those surprises are the agenda for a yield review, not a reason to wait until a colour map exists.