Visit

Harvest mapping sitting

Mapping sittings exist because a colour printout from a monitor is not the same as a map the farm will actually use.

Golden cereal field with a farm track running toward the horizon

Yield monitors are useful and often wrong in the same afternoon. Grain flow lags. Headlands smear. A damp patch looks like a disaster until you remember the trailer sat there for twenty minutes. We treat the file as a draft.

Around the table we mark the zones in pencil first: the wet corner everyone already knows, the strip that always yields, the headland that should not be compared with the body of the field. Then we ink a version that can live on the office wall through winter planning.

Who it is for

Growers who have a yield file they have never opened, or only a paper map and a strong memory of the year.

What you leave with

Printed field sketches with high, middling, and low zones marked in language the drill operator will recognise.

Provider

Desktop Routebase, Byford.

Time and place

Three to four hours

Your farm office or kitchen, or our table at Byford if you prefer to bring records

Fee

£420 for a half-day sitting, materials included

Travel within Herefordshire is included. Further counties are quoted before we set a date.

Included

  • Help opening and printing whatever files you already have
  • Hand annotation of high and low zones
  • A short legend so next year’s operator can read the sheet in the cab

Not included

  • Creating new survey-grade maps
  • Variable-rate prescription files for specific consoles
  • Subscription mapping accounts

How the visit proceeds

  1. You bring files, paper maps, and whoever drove the combine if they can spare the morning.
  2. We print, sketch, and argue the zones until they match what people remember.
  3. You leave with paper you can pin up, not a login.

Preparation

Copy any USB sticks from the combine beforehand. Note header width and whether the monitor was calibrated.

Limits

Sittings need a table, power, and enough quiet to hear one another. We do not work from a moving vehicle.

Name the harvest year and how many fields you want on paper.