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Watching the wheat Summer at OX7

  • 20°C at the farm shop, and dry for now
  • Winter barley running at 4.1 tonnes the hectare
  • Chapter 41 is open. Forty came before it
  • Harvest is coming
  • The shop is capped at sixteen miles. It always was
In Hiring

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The record

Eleven votes, four vetoes, and what happened next.

The whole record. A vote that is not published afterwards is a poll, and a veto that is not published afterwards is somebody quietly ignoring you.

The record

Every vote since the first one.

Eleven votes carried, four vetoed, and three of the eleven turned out badly. That ratio is about what you would expect and it is the reason the veto is not used more often.

Recorddeciding-ledger

  1. Mar 2024 Vote carriedSpring barley over spring oats in the Barley Block, 61% Viewers 3f81aa
  2. Mar 2024 OutcomeYielded 5.9 t/ha, which was about average. A fine decision Recorded 9d20b4
  3. Sep 2024 Vote carriedDrill the wheat in the third week of September, 58% Viewers c7e451
  4. Sep 2024 VETOBlackgrass burden. Drilled 18 October instead C. Ireland a10c39
  5. Aug 2025 OutcomeThe delayed field out-yielded the early one by 0.7 t/ha Recorded e4b7f2
  6. Feb 2025 Vote carriedHerbal ley on the wildflower ground, 71% Viewers bb9017
  7. Apr 2025 Vote carriedSell the store cattle in July rather than October, 54% Viewers 2a6ee8
  8. Jul 2025 OutcomeSold into a poor July trade. It cost about £3,100 and the vote was wrong Recorded d5310c
  9. Sep 2025 Vote carriedEarly drilling again, 63% Viewers 77af41
  10. Sep 2025 VETOBlackgrass, again, in the same field, for the same reason C. Ireland 0e92cd
  11. Nov 2025 Vote carriedA high-yielding feed variety, 49% on a three-way split Viewers 48d7a0
  12. Nov 2025 VETOSeptoria rating unsuitable for this site. Second choice ran C. Ireland 6c1b83
  13. Feb 2026 Vote carriedRoll before stone picking, 55% Viewers f09e27
  14. Feb 2026 VETOWrong order. Stones first, and the combine thanks you in August C. Ireland 13ca6f
  15. Apr 2026 Vote carriedLeave the six worst acres entirely, 68% Viewers 8b40d5
  16. Jun 2026 OutcomeCheapest decision of the year and probably the best one Recorded ae7318

Yields, prices and dates are illustrative for this demonstration build. The pattern — the audience votes early and the agronomist stops it — is the part worth keeping.

Patterns

How the audience actually votes.

TendencyDirectionRight?
Drilling date Always earlier No. Wrong four times out of four
Variety choice Highest yield on the list Sometimes. It ignores disease scores
Selling livestock Earlier than the market suggests No, on the one occasion it was asked
Leaving land unfarmed Strongly in favour Yes, and more consistently than we expected
Spending money on kit Strongly in favour Untested. We have never let it decide one
Doing the difficult thing In favour, at a distance Which is the whole nature of voting from a sofa

The most interesting line is the fourth. An audience is consistently more willing to leave ground alone than a farmer is, and on this farm it has been right about that.

The honest bit

Why the outcomes are published even when the vote was wrong.

The July cattle sale cost about three thousand one hundred pounds against the October trade. Fifty-four per cent of several thousand people voted for it, we did it, and it was a bad decision.

Publishing that matters more than publishing the good ones. A vote where only the successes appear afterwards is entertainment; a vote where the failures appear with the arithmetic attached is a genuine account of what happens when a large number of interested people make a decision they do not have to live with.

Nobody has ever complained about being told their vote lost money. Several people have said it was the first time they understood why farming decisions are hard.

Deciding

The record, at a glance.

11 votes carried

Across two and a half years.

4 vetoes

All agronomic, all stated live.

3 that went badly

Published with the arithmetic.

Nothing removed

Including the ones that cost money.

Wondering

What people ask about the vetoes.

It would if it were used quietly or often. Four times in eleven votes, each one stated live with a reason and published afterwards, means the other seven decisions genuinely were the audience’s.

No, and it should not be. The person holding it is the only one in the conversation with a professional qualification and a reputation attached to the outcome. A veto that can be overruled by the people it exists to overrule is decoration.

Because early drilling looks like getting on with it, and blackgrass is invisible on a camera in September. It is a completely reasonable instinct and it has been wrong every time it has been offered.

No. If a decision changes after the vote — because the weather moved or the seed was unavailable — it goes on this page with the reason, labelled as a change rather than a veto.

What is open now.

Three questions, all of them decisions that have to be made anyway.

Deciding
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