Add the Number You First Thought Of....

Things you should know:
1. Farmers don't always mean what they say or say what they mean.

2. They're all better at maths than Rachel Riley.

3. It's all voodoo.  

Before I started seeing Ivie, I hadn't really thought about what farmers do all day but it turns out the answer is mental arithmetic. 

I'd been thinking about writing this blog post for a while but have been procrastinating. Mainly because I knew I'd have to understand the ins and outs of it before I started writing. Today, I sat Ivie down with a coffee and interviewed him. Here's a brief summary...

When Ivie is going to spread fertiliser at another farm, the farmer will tell him how much (in hundredweight or cwt) he wants spread per acre. So far, so old school. 

BUT the machinery is modern and measures in kilos per hectare. 

A hectare is 2.47 acres and 1 cwt (112 lbs) is 50 kilos. Still with me?

So, 1cwt per acre is roughly the same as 125kg per hectare apparently.

Fertiliser comes in 600kg bags but used to come in 1cwt bags. So to complicate things even further, some farmers still talk in terms of 'bags' per acre when what they mean is 'one twelfth of a bag' per acre. And then you get into fractions of hundredweights but that's when my head starts to explode. Or implode. Or both.

At this point, Ivie started trying to explain units of nitrogen per acre but I had to stop him. That was plenty enough for one day.