 We are back in the field again and I think it's 103 days after sowing now although we had some re-sowing and replanting so it's not quite accurate because we have quite a few places which we have planted later so and that creates a challenge now because we somehow need to figure out when to harvest this field and there are various ways to do this and we have an expert here with us today Martin Gummert who is our post harvest specialist and also leads the Erie Programme 4 so we'll ask him for help to help us determine where we are and what we do next. Okay so as Ahim said there are different ways to determine whether the crop is ready for harvest so the easiest is basically to look at the color of the grains so if you have 80% of the grains in a panicle colored straw yellow then that's an indication that it should be right. Another way to determine whether the crop is ready for harvesting is look at the hardness of the grains and the grains in the bottom of the panicle should be in the hard dough stage so when you basically open the grain and you look at it it should still be a little bit soft but not too soft like when you make a hard dough for cooking. So when you squeeze it you now should probably cut the grain rather than mash it up so to speak. It should not keep brittle yet. So we start with a visual estimate of how ready the crop is and we first look at the proportion of yellow grains the proportion of straw yellow grains now Martin has suggested an ideal amount for harvest would be 80% yellow now in front of me here we always have an issue as to whether it's representative or not it's probably 50 to 60% yellow something of that order it's not quite ready yet. Now a more objective and professional way to assess how how ready the crop is will be to measure its moisture content yep and this is one way to do that this is a moisture meter so called moisture meter it measures the resistance of the crop which is basically dependent on the moisture content and you have a small sample tray so you take a sample from a panico as Lee said 80% of the of the grain should be straw yellow that basically says 80% of one panico. Getting representative is always a challenge there's a challenge there. So you take a small sample like this fill it in there and then what you do with this instrument basically you crush it oops can I give you this you turn the knob and crush it turn it all the way to the end and then you measure the resistance and that gets translated in the reading of the moisture content and in this case it's 21.6 percent. Now what we're going to do is mix the greener one of harvested and because this is a very small sample it's not really representative neither for small plot nor for the field so what you have to do is you have to in one location you should to different at least three different measurements so now in this sample for example you have a lot more green grains than in the previous one so the reading should be a lot higher 27.9% and you would take at least three samples and then you have a button here where you can average the readings and then you get the average reading for that location and then what you have to do is basically also measure in a representative way in the field because the crop doesn't match your evenly everywhere in the field. We're facing the final tricky decision to irrigate or not to irrigate that is the question so we're considering how moist the soil is now how moist is the soil now moist right we're considering what the weather's like what's the weather like high dry and we're considering how long we'd expect until we harvest and our consensus is about 10 days to two weeks something of that range it'll be close to two weeks time before your back to do the deed so we need this to last to finish properly I think it needs the two weeks but it's moist it's heavy clay and we do want our combine to stay on the ground not to explore the underground all right keep it dry yeah I would have if it was an experiment and I knew that we would be doing hand harvesting I would put on another irrigation just for safety but we need to figure out that we have to come and visit combine and so the carrying capacity of that so we'll be the deciding factor and we can't delay harvest because we see some lodging coming in so I'll go with the majority would yeah I agree so no more irrigation let's see but I pray for a little bit of rain tonight maybe well on recent patterns I think you'll probably have that have that wish granted so there we have it we won't irrigate again and we'll it'll be in approximately two weeks we'll come back and harvest about no second