If your grainstore is struggling to cope with the output of your combine, you’re almost certainly in good company. For most farmers, spending money on dryers and other grainstore kit has always lagged well behind the much more satisfying business of buying new combines.

But the latest figures from Claas showing the throughputs of some of its customers’ machines could make anyone manning a grainstore this harvest feel distinctly beleaguered.

Every year the company compiles an online league table of outputs from customers who have fitted high-tech telematic systems to their combines. These automatically monitor speeds, throughputs and even the percentage of time the combine is running but not actually cutting.

The figures for last week show that six operators managed to achieve spot outputs of more than 100t/hour. In fact, the operator listed in the table as Matt 1014 managed an amazing 109t/hour.

Average outputs are obviously somehwat lower because they include cutting headlands, changing fields and – presumably – the driver occasionally answering the call of nature. But even these were as high as 59t/hour.

Pity the chap managing the grainstore, we reckon.