ÄDELHOLM 2024: HARVEST (NO STORAGE)
2024 done and dusted.
And I don’t have a single photo from harvest: Christian fixed the harvest, GDL fixed the delivery, and I was busy fixing trial data. Any photos on this post are old ones.
Harvest date was 6 November.
Delivery date was, in the end 13 and 14 November. There was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing here. I think that the initial date we got was around 24 October, then, after a lot of updates, it was out to 14 November, then it slowly crept back to the 8th. When we decided to harvest on 6 November, delivery was the 8th. Then there was a stop at the factory on the 4th, which pushed delivery out to the 12th. In the end two loads went late on the 13th and 16 more were sent on the 14th. We didn’t change the harvest date when the factory stopped as it was felt that there was little to gain by waiting a few more days when there was a deal of uncertainty about (weather, Christian’s availability, factory operation). In the end, we had a successful harvest and avoided any issues.
Here are the actual results, with a few guesses around the payment we’ll receive (it’s a photo, so you can’t play with the table, sorry).
All the numbers in green come from the factory, the rest are calculated. The calculations in each row are “what would the total have looked like if we took the results from a particular load?”. For example, taking row 1: there are 684,57 dirty tonnes (sum of all loads weighed at Örtofta), and a cleanness of 92,8%. This gives 635,28 clean tonnes. At the measured pol of 17,81%, this gives 113,14 tonnes of sugar. At 8.2 hectares, this gives 13,80 t sugar /ha. The price calculations use 448 SEK/ per “clean 17% tonne”, a pol bonus of 9 SEK/ “tn clean” per percentage point over 17%, and a cleanness bonus of 2 SEK/ “tn clean” per percentage point over the reference cleanness of 93.15%. Our average cleanness is more or less bang-on the reference value.
We have data on 17 deliveries because we had previously selected testing at a rate of 100% and I just haven’t updated it. We didn’t get data on one of the total 18 deliveries. Testing at a rate of 100% will cost us a bit, but at the same time – interesting data! I can’t remember if we can select a testing rate of 1 in 17, but if we had and we got the results of Delivery 3, we would have lost just over 13 200 SEK. If we got lucky and we got the results from Delivery 2, then we would have pocketed 7 000 SEK more. That’s differences of -4.3% and +2.3%. In some ways small, in some ways large. This suggests that the downside risks of a low testing rate are larger than the potential upside gains (but this is a single field, so a lot more work would be needed to look at this particular point). Last year it cost 125 SEK / test. 17 x 125 = 2125 SEK. Worth it for the data. Probably also worth it as an insurance against a bad sample too.
As for there being variation between the results: this is completely expected. We have 0 reasons to believe that any single results is inaccurate, but we have 100s of reasons to believe that the results between tests should vary. This is the field that had the 2024 summer meeting, so there are all sorts of trials (eg fertiliser and sowing rate trials, and variety trials) that could lead to differences in crop development and/or harvest quality plus tested quality (i.e. payment) parameters. On top of all that, there is a lot natural variability in the field.
One last little point of interest. We harvested about 0.7ha at the very start of the campaign so that the trials team could access the field. It was a part of the field that had been heavily trafficked, and it was really dry when we harvested. The plant stand was poor and uneven. But still, what a difference. The analysis was on 12 Sept: sugar content 17.09%, cleanness 96.5%, sugar yield 7.9 t/ha.
Yep, it’s been fun.