Before each load of grain leaves the farm, check it, write down what you found, and date and sign the sheet. When the buyer’s discount arrives, with that sheet you can tell a problem that left the farm from one that started on the road. Without it, the first reading of the grain is the buyer’s, taken after the trip, and the deductions rest on that reading alone.
The settlement comes back lower than you expected, with deductions for moisture, foreign material and damaged kernels. The load shipped without anyone on the farm checking it, so you have nothing written about its condition at loading to compare with the buyer’s numbers. Whether the loss started in the field, on the truck or in the buyer’s sampling can no longer be answered, and you have nothing on paper to dispute the discount with.
What you fill in is one sheet, before the load ships, with the date, the name of the person who checked, and what they found. The factors are the ones you can check on the farm: moisture, foreign material, damaged kernels, and the smell and heat of the grain. You end with a written record of the condition the load left in, on a known day, signed by a known person. Kept load after load, these readings also become your own number, and another article in this library covers how to compare that number with a published reference, to see whether your grain is getting better or worse.
Why does the sheet list factors instead of a general impression?
The buyer does not grade “good grain”; the buyer grades a short list of named factors, each one measured. The University of Minnesota Extension explains that the official United States grade, set by the Federal Grain Inspection Service, rests on test weight, the presence of foreign material, and damaged or shrunken kernels. Moisture is a further test the same service approves.
Your buyer’s written standard is built on factors like these, and getting it in writing is the subject of another article here, the buyer’s grade standard. Before the truck is loaded, you can judge foreign material and damage by eye, measure moisture with your own meter, and check test weight if you have the scale for it.
Your sheet does not need the buyer’s laboratory. It needs the factors you can check on the farm, written down as you found them.
Why is the load that arrives not the load that left?
Grain breaks every time it is dropped, on the farm and after it leaves. Shahbazi and Shahbazi, two researchers who measured how corn kernels break during handling, found that 13.80 percent of the corn broke in a free drop, against 7.26 percent sent down a closed let-down ladder, a chute with baffles that slows the fall. Breakage also climbed with the height of each drop. A load is dropped from the combine into the cart, into the bin, into the truck, and again into the buyer’s pit, and the last of those drops come after your check.
Condition also shifts on the road. Researchers who measured corn during transport, with sensors inside the load, recorded in a load at 16 percent moisture relative humidity above 86 percent in the air between the kernels, an equilibrium moisture content (the moisture the grain would reach in balance with that air) rising to 20 percent, and dry matter loss near 0.06 percent over twenty hours. The study measures the air between the kernels, not the moisture of the grain itself, and the load at 12 percent lost no dry matter.
So a bad number at the buyer’s scale can start in the field, on the truck or in the buyer’s sampling, and from the buyer’s reading alone you cannot tell which.
What goes on the record, and why do the date and signature matter?
On the sheet you pin down the condition of the load at the moment it left, and a few fixed lines are enough. Record templates from the University of Maryland Extension, written for fresh produce rather than grain, have on every sheet what was done, when, and a place for the worker to sign or initial and for the supervisor to sign at review.
With the sheet, “the load looked fine” becomes something you can pull out and show months later. With the reading, you can show what condition the load was in, and with the date, when. With the name and signature of the person who checked, you can show who answers for it and that the check was done that day rather than pieced together from memory.
Wherever you sell, look for these same lines on any record your buyer, your food-safety rules or a certifier already asks you to sign. If you are working toward a certification seal, what the seal asks you to document, another article here, has the list of records a certifier asks for, so you can see which ones you already keep before you pay for the audit.
What can a check at loading settle, and what can’t it?
A check at loading lets you split a bad result between the farm and the trip, and nothing more. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, in its guidelines for measuring post-harvest losses, recommends this pairing for long hauls: “grain samples can be taken at the loading stage and at the unloading stage, and then examined for changes in moisture content and qualitative damage during transit”. If you check the grain as it is loaded, you can separate what left the farm from what the trip did; if you skip it, the buyer’s number is the only one there is.
The check does not fix poor grain: improving the grain is production work, outside what this article covers. When the buyer’s grade comes back clearly worse than what you wrote at loading, take your sheet and that difference back to the buyer. Then write down your next decision, whether to accept the discount, dispute it, or change how the grain is loaded and hauled, with a date and a name, so it does not rest on anyone’s memory. If the buyer rejects the load or docks it outright, record the case on a separate running list; the rejection log, another article in this library, covers how to keep that list and spot the problems that repeat.
Where to start
Thirty minutes at the loading point, with the last settlement from this buyer, to see which factors they deducted for, and a moisture reading on the day’s load.
A load that ships without a check still takes the discount; you just have nothing to set against it except the buyer’s number, taken after a trip that changed the grain. The sheet does not make the grain better. With it, the day the load left becomes a written fact, the one part of the story the buyer cannot tell, because the buyer never saw the load leave. Writing down what you checked, with a date and a name, is a habit that serves every part of running a farm, the subject of the page on farm management. The other articles on selling are in the marketing section of this library.