With harvest beginning early this year and now pretty well underway in most parts of the country, I found myself wondering what this one will be remembered for.

For memory is a funny old thing – and while most farming families will have their own 'remember the year when…' stories about this annual push to get the crops gathered in, the recall of events can often vary from person to person as the years pass and details fade.

So, 'the year when the cattle got into the rape', 'the year when we were finished before the end of August' and 'the year when we got the kitchen and the downstairs loo redecorated as we waited for the rain to stop' might conjure up different recollections for different family members, and arguments over details which are, sometimes thankfully, hazy can ensue.

But I guess the early start to cutting the crops will probably be one of the things which we'll remember about this harvest – especially as cutting a reasonable, if not spectacular, crop of spring barley from one of the early fields on August 5 at an average moisture of around 16% marked a pleasant start to the proceedings.

For once, though, should family members hold differing opinions about this event, the fact that it was actually recorded for posterity should quell any heated discussions, as our tech expert, Craig, got some excellent footage of the day’s cutting with one of these light-weight drones which can produce video clips of astonishing quality.

Spiralling round the combine as it cut its way up the 40-acre field, the wide-angle lens not only stretched perspective but seemed to blur boundaries – and gave the impression of a vast, almost endless prairie of grain being harvested by a huge machine. So I guess even with a camera, different viewpoints can offer a different perspective.

But it will be good to have some positive memories of an event which isn’t always plain sailing.

Now I’ve maybe droned on about this in the past, but while it might have been one of the earliest starts to harvest for quite some time – I’d have to say that it never fails to amaze me just how laid back the grain trade always seems to be about opening up their intakes facilities for the inevitable rush of spring barley.

Every year, the weather gives us a fair idea of how crops are progressing and, short of a major change in weather as we’re getting into the swing of harvest, it can’t be all that difficult to take a decent stab at when the combines will be rolling – especially after Scotland had already seen one of the earliest ever starts into winter barley crops.

But I’m still left with the impression that the arrival of Scotland’s main malting barley harvest – be it late or early – always seems to come as a bit of a surprise to the grain trade.

To be fair, though, I may be being a bit unkind to those who handle our grain as, at the other end of their supply chain, they’re often dealing with storing it for customers who require a somewhat more regular supply of malting barley, or whatever else on a weekly or monthly basis. And they can’t just suddenly take the tail end of the previous year’s stored crop up front to allow space for the next year’s coming in.

If we think that it’s sometimes a bit of a nightmare making sure that grain store hygiene is up to scratch for our own stored goods, then I reckon it must be a pretty major task to turn round bulk storage and handling facilities for the many tens of thousands of tonnes of grain which has to be stored in good order, often for some considerable time at maltings or central storage points.

That said, though, while it might be early days for the full rush of harvest, I suspect that this year again it might be a case of keeping in with the lorry 'gods' in the hope of getting a swift uplift of the barley to make room for the other crops which, pushed on by the hot weather of July, will also soon be calling out for the attention of the combine.

With things supposedly returning to something approaching normal after the last few years of Covid restrictions and post-Brexit turmoil, it could be hoped that things might be slightly less fraught on the haulage front – but fuel prices and continued competition for skilled drivers isn’t likely to have seen the pressure reduced much.

This time last year, I seem to remember that there was much talk of lorry drivers being poached by big companies to make sure supplies continued to reach the supermarket shelves, with talk of big pay increases and considerable incentives to move to these sorts of jobs.

Whether or not that has died down now remains a moot point, but I’d be surprised if haulage companies were queuing up to transport grain (although they might well face this fate at some of the slower intakes…)

If our constant hopes for a dry harvest do come to fruition, then it’s almost a given that grain will begin to pile up – especially as, relying on a swift uplift to keep the feet clear, a lot of businesses will probably lack the facilities to store the whole harvest, even on a temporary basis.

But, however troublesome it might seem at the time, such an eventuality might fall under the heading of 'first world problems' and perhaps just serve to highlight how lucky we really are.

All our frustrations should fall somewhat into true perspective by the scale of the challenges facing growers in Ukraine, where, despite the release of a few boatloads of grain, there remains a massive backlog, believed to be in the region of 22m tonnes, of last year’s crop still in storage.

That means that around 30% of that country’s estimated 75m tonnes of grain storage is still filled with last year’s crop – while the Ukrainian authorities estimate that a further 14% has been damaged or destroyed and that ten per cent lies in areas currently held by Russian forces.

So, totting that up, it means that there’s space for somewhere in the region of 34.5m tonnes of grain for a harvest expected to need closer to 51m tonnes of storage– not a good situation if you’re hoping to sell your grain profitably enough to finance the planting of next year’s crops.

So the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation has set up a Grain Storage Strategy to help ease the massive problems faced by the country’s leading industry and has estimated that at least $180m will be required to provide storage for more than 4m tonnes – just over a quarter of the shortfall in space which has been estimated at 16.5m tonnes worth of storage.

Maybe that should put our own problems into some kind of perspective.