YOU may have noticed that combine harvesters are on the move – it’s harvest time again.

And you can help, even though you’ve never done anything more to contribute to the British (or world) harvest than eat bread and cakes.

How come? Well it’s a frantic time of year for the farming community, all hands to the pumps as the race starts to beat the weather. Roads and lanes will be busy with tractors pulling heavy grain trailers to the store and it helps a great deal if you can be aware and make way for them. Meeting head-on requires one or other to reverse to a passing place and that’s easier in a car than in a tractor pulling many tonnes of grain and with no rearward vision.

Timing is vital so that the trailer can be emptied and returned to the field emptying the harvester’s grain tank and keeping the whole operation moving at pace.

Already, the late June rain has cause some lodging in crops, the term for when the wind or rain beats down the crops onto the ground, making it hard for the grain to ripen and the harvester to gather the resultant crop. As the fields turned yellow then gold while July progressed, an anxious eye was being kept on weather forecasts and weather apps to judge when the window would be right.

It’s a difficult equation to solve. The grain itself must have the right quality to get the best price and it’s often pre-sold on a contract with penalties if quality is down. It also has to be dry or there’s a hefty bill for running the drying plant, which helps explain why harvesting seldom starts early and often runs late until the point where the descending dew makes the moisture content too high.

This is an important point to understand and part of living in the countryside that previously urban dwellers don’t always get. But the balance between profit and loss in a field of grain is very delicate and solving the puzzle of exactly when to fire up the combine is many farmers’ worst nightmare.

Maximising yield (and that means quality as much as tonnage) will become ever harder as the subsidy system diminishes and payments start to favour environmental gain and public good. The latter doesn’t always favour high yields yet something has to bring the income to pay the bills.

Farmers are grappling again with a period of change in the payment system and hoping the quality of their produce gives it a favourable place in the world market. The days are long gone when it went to the miller down the road in small sacks filled from a threshing machine. These days, the grain market is a world one and the high quality of British grain finds eager buyers.

With less for home consumption as the tonnage decreases (while pressure rises within political circles to make payments according to things such as improved soil structure rather than production) there will be more grain coming in from abroad to fill the gap and much of it produced using chemicals and processes banned here.

Don’t just think the fuss about the Australian trade deal, and others to come, is all about red meat that’s not up to our standards. Vegetarians and vegans would do well to worry about other aspects that go against the grain, too.

Kevin Prince has wide experience of farming and rural business in Hampshire, where he lives near Andover, and across southern England as a director in the Adkin consultancy. His family also run a diversified farm with commercial lets, holiday cottages and 800 arable acres.