Drawing a harvest series from district returns

A harvest chart that looks calm is often a chart that has forgotten a border. Georgian district returns change name, area, and unit more often than a corridor audience expects. Before we draw Kakheti deliveries or a single qvevri house’s intake, Giorgi lays the bulletins beside each other and writes the joins.

The first temptation is to convert everything to tonnes and proceed. Conversion is only honest when the bulletin states the moisture, the crop, and whether the figure is field estimate or weighbridge. When it does not, we keep the original unit on the axis and refuse a second series on the same sheet.

The second temptation is to average a drought year into the “usual” line so the present season looks dramatic. We would rather print the drought as a marked year and let this harvest sit against a shape that a grower recognises.

If you are commissioning a briefing on a harvest, bring the district names you actually buy from, not the marketing region. The returns follow the former.