Flagship visit
Seasonal yield review
A seasonal yield review is not a lecture on charts. It is a careful reading of what left the field, what stayed in the corners, and why neighbouring blocks of the same variety behaved differently.
Most holdings already collect more harvest evidence than they use. Tickets sit in the office. A yield file lives on a memory stick in the combine. The person who remember the wet week in July is not always the person who orders seed in September. Desktop Routebase sits between those records and the next cropping plan.
We start with paper. Weighbridge weights, moisture, and variety are enough to begin. If you have a yield monitor file, we use it as a conversation, not as a verdict. Monitors misread on slopes, at headlands, and when grain is damp. A walk still matters: tramline ruts, a blocked drain, a late spray miss, a pigeon-grazed headland — these explain gaps that a colour map will never name.
The written pack is meant to be used at the table with your agronomist, not filed. It names fields in your language, uses your numbering, and stops short of telling you what to buy. Where we are unsure, we say so. Where a neighbour’s similar soil behaved differently, we note it as a question, not a boast.
This is the flagship visit because harvest is the one moment the holding tells the truth about the year. Everything else we offer — operations audits, mapping sittings, winter planning — hangs off that reading.
Who it is for
Owner-occupiers, farm managers, and family holdings in Herefordshire and neighbouring counties who want harvest figures to explain next season’s cropping, not sit in a drawer.
What you leave with
A field-by-field yield narrative, annotated maps, and a short list of agronomic questions worth taking to your merchant or agronomist.
Provider
Conducted by Desktop Routebase’s yield readers based at Byford, Herefordshire.
Time and place
Two half-days on farm, plus a written pack within ten working days
On your land, with a follow-up meeting at the kitchen table or farm office
Fee
From £1,450 for a holding of up to 250 hectares
Travel within Herefordshire is included. Further counties are quoted before we set a date.
Included
- Pre-visit review of weighbridge tickets, moisture records, and any yield files you already hold
- A guided field walk of the blocks you nominate, with notes on tramlines, headlands, and wet corners
- Hand-drawn and printed yield sketches overlaid on your field boundaries
- A written pack covering what the numbers show, what they cannot show, and three to five decisions for autumn or spring
- A second sitting to talk through the pack with whoever actually drills and harvests
Not included
- Laboratory soil or tissue testing (we can sit in when samples are taken, but we do not run a lab)
- Machinery calibration or combine setup
- Ongoing crop walking in place of your agronomist
- Software licences, logins, or hosted maps
How the visit proceeds
- You send last season’s tickets, a field list, and a sketch of who did what at harvest.
- We spend a morning walking the fields you care about most, usually after combine or before autumn cultivations.
- We draft maps and notes back at Byford, then return for a second sitting so the story can be challenged by the people who were on the machines.
Preparation
Have weighbridge tickets, variety lists, and a paper or digital field map ready. If a contractor harvested, note header width and whether the yield monitor was running.
Limits
Reviews run from late July through March. We will not walk standing crops in a way that damages them, and we pause in prolonged frost or flooding.
Write with your acreage, cropping, and the harvest year you want examined.