“I’ll be with you at 12 o’clock today,” said Bruno. “Is that Oldcastle time or GMT?” said I, with visions of waiting for hours, if not days.

Bruno has many fine qualities, but timekeeping isn’t one of them. If he was an air traffic controller, he’d wreck the entire Ryanair fleet in a week. Though maybe not – they too can frustratingly wander from their ETA schedules.

Most people think there is only one time zone in Ireland, but there are, in fact, two. There’s Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and then there’s Oldcastle time (OT), which Bruno uses as he has roots in that outpost of northwest Meath. Oldcastle time is anything up to three days behind. But if you knew that, it would be fine – it’s the variability that’s the problem.

Bruno was coming to dig drainage shores and lay pipe and back-filling with pebble. One of these is in the field, which was formerly winter barley, now sprayed off. The other is through a patchy crop of winter wheat, so patchy that Bruno can dig a 200m trench up the middle and the crop will be none the worse. We’ll hardly lose half a combine tank of grain.

But why not wait until the crop is cut, I hear you say? Because, as Bruno will tell you, I don’t do waiting. Soil conditions for laser-levelled field drainage are brilliant – too good an opportunity to miss. As an aside, while the soil’s surface is powder dry, there is moisture 12 inches down – only available to well-rooted wheat or the winter oilseed rape.

Harvest projections

With all these patchy crops and shallow-rooted spring barley not a foot high, I thought it a good idea to do a projected harvest tonnage. This might help mitigate the shock of the combine’s grain tank refusing to fill in a couple of months’ time.

Keen that it wouldn’t just a guesstimate, Max wisely advised that we should do a more forensic approach based on individual fields (that’s the auld UCD ag training coming out).

Winter wheat is perhaps the hardest to call. While the crops are thin, often with very low head counts, thin wheat has an extraordinary ability to compensate by setting more grains per ear and a larger – better filled – grain size. If we get cool, bright weather with even a smattering of rainfall, these two factors could come into their own.

And, in an ironic twist, these thin crops may well come alright as there possibly isn’t enough soil moisture available this season to properly fill thick crops. With all this in mind, the better wheat will get a sniff of a T3.

The end result could be a yield that might just be acceptable. I’m not talking 4t or anything half decent like that, but we project an average wheat yield of 3.2t/ac.

The winter oilseed rape should be fine, so we pegged it at a conservative 1.6t/ac. Personally, I think it could do substantially better, but the pod count may be on the low side for any more. The beans are notoriously hard to predict and have a habit of disappointing. So, this is really based on past dry experiences, with a projection of 2.42t/acre.

That leaves us with just the oats and the barley. Oats look alright, but are impossible to predict, so we won’t go there. The spring barley had such promising potential, but dry weather destroyed it and now it looks distinctly unpromising. Therefore, our projection is just 2.2t/ac, but possibly making malting spec.

Anyhow, we crunched the figures and came up with a harvest income so low, we’ve not seen it since 2009. But only the weighbridge in August will tell the tale. Can’t wait.