Headlands eat more yield than people admit on the day
The middle of a field is a flattering witness. Headlands take the turning, the wet shade of a hedge, the place the sprayer ran out, and the strip the combine leaves wide. If your yield tracking only samples the easy tramline, you will praise ground that leaked along every edge.
On a seasonal visit we stop at headlands on purpose. We do not invent a percentage of loss. We write what is visible: lodging, blank soil, tramline smear, a corner used as a dump for stones. Those sentences annoy people on the day and save them from ordering the same seed rate on land that is not the same land.
A mild method: walk the first twenty metres from the gate and the last twenty before the far hedge, then the centre. If those three notes disagree, the farm-wide figure is a story, not a measurement.
You can still harvest the headland. You should not let it hide inside the plot average when you decide next year’s seed, lime, or whether to grass a corner.