In the words of rocker Meat Loaf, two out of three ain’t bad, and it’s true of harvest 2014. With both good yields and fair weather (until now), these two factors alone certainly helped to alleviate the third element, the poor prices. To have two out of three is as good as it gets.

So far, it’s been a good harvest for most crops. Spring barley, while slow to ripen, has performed particularly well with top fields almost touching the magic 4t per acre (not with me, I hasten to add). Wheat yields have gone over 4.5t per acre and I hear of the odd crop over 5t, but it’s overall weighed averages that matter. An occasional peak on the combine’s yield meter doesn’t count.

Nonetheless, I think we are in danger of losing the run of ourselves and I’d like to put these wheat yields in context.

Twenty years ago, most of us were getting something along with 2t/acre from spring barley. Now it’s capable of yielding twice that. Plant breeding and disease control has made this possible. Winter and spring oilseed rape is similar. And winter barley yields have increased significantly over the same period.

But the same hasn’t happened with wheat. Almost 20 years ago, in 1995 (albeit a good year), we were getting an average of 4.20t/acre dried off first wheat. This year, our highest yield was 4.64t/acre dried, with an overall average yield of 4.35t dried. Yes, of course I’m grateful, but now it’s no longer enough to excite me into a wild spending spree – like it did in 1995.

Despite all the expense of the latest SDHI fungicides, with modern wheat varieties and a near-perfect growing season, our yields are almost static. Either I am doing something badly wrong or there’s a load of hype spoken about mega yields, but whichever is right, it’s hardly progress.

Modern wheat varieties do not seem to have the genetic potential to regularly bust the 5t/acre ceiling. To my mind, the plant breeders have allowed wheat ears to become too short to be capable of the higher yields we desperately need to increase profitability.

Some of our wheat crops this year couldn’t have been any thicker with over five big Hesston straw bales to the acre and good quality grain. Clearly there must have been a deficit of filled grains in the wheat ears.

The view from the combine cab revealed rather more lodging in the crops than I knew about. In percentages terms it was very low and it’s not the loss of the crop, but much more the problem that these very flat patches create for subsequent min till drilling. Such patches are enough to turn a tined seed drill into a rake, which can drive you ballistic. We’ve been out with the flail topper and given these areas the once-over.

With just five days into the wheat drying completed, we had a motor fail on the drier burners. It would be a quick repair if you had a replacement motor. But Alvan Blanch didn’t have one off the shelf and neither did the burner people; it has to come from Italy. So at the moment I’m still waiting for some Italian fellow to wake up from his siesta and send it over. I hope I’ll see it this week.

It’s very frustrating with a rapidly increasing pile of wheat and barley waiting to be dried, albeit at around 20% moisture. Once the wretched burner motor does arrive, Jason, my drier man will have to get fired up, well, like a bat out of hell, to clear the backlog.