Grain Harvest & Storage by the Numbers: Harvest Capacity, Moisture Shrink, Drying Costs, Bin Volumes & Store-or-Sell

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Turn the combine's width, speed and field efficiency into hectares per hour, add up the combining hours for six fields, round them up to whole days and check them against the dry days in the forecast.
• Convert ten weighed test strips into tonnes per hectare, average one field with AVERAGEIFS, and measure how much the strips vary with the standard deviation and the coefficient of variation.
• Apply a fictional buyer contract to eight loads: water shrink above the contract's base moisture with MAX, a handling shrink on every load, the paid tonnes, the overall shrink and the value of the weight lost.
• Work out the kilograms of water a dryer takes out of six barley batches, turn them into fuel cost with a fictional dryer spec, add fan electricity and find the drying cost per dry tonne.
• Calculate the cylinder and cone volume of five round bins with PI and POWER, turn cubic metres into tonnes with a bulk density and find how many new bins the barley would need.
• Turn field capacity and yield into tonnes per hour, time a truck's round trip to the store, find how many trucks keep the combine running for each field and the farthest field two trucks can serve.
• Compare selling wheat at harvest with four later price offers: storage cost, interest on the money tied up, extra shrink, the net gain per tonne, the break-even price and the best month.
• Close Ilse's harvest: dry tonnes of one field with SUMIFS, the drying cost per tonne of barley, the revenue of the sales plan with SUMPRODUCT and a column chart of the tonnes to sell each month.