A Scale Ticket Gets Keyed In Three Times Before It Reaches Your Grain Books. The 2026 Plug Between AI and Farm Accounting Kills Two.

Keying number one: the scale house

How many times does one load of corn get typed into a computer between the field and your checkbook? Count it honestly on your own operation. The scale ticket prints at the elevator with gross, tare and net, moisture, test weight and any foreign material. That is keying number one, and somebody else does it. Then your bookkeeper types the load into the grain spreadsheet and marks it against a contract number or against open storage. Two. Then the settlement sheet shows up days or weeks later with the drying charge and the shrink taken out, and that gets typed into the accounting program as grain sales income, split by crop and by landlord share. Three. Then somebody adjusts the bin inventory and updates the number that actually matters, which is bushels still unpriced. Four.

On 3,200 acres of corn and beans, call it 615,000 bushels and roughly 1,230 truckloads across a six-week harvest. At three minutes a ticket that is sixty-one hours of typing, in the exact six weeks when nobody has an hour. Which is why it happens in December instead, out of a shoebox, from tickets that went through the wash in a jacket pocket.

The spreadsheet everybody pretends is the system of record

Here is the workaround nobody says out loud. The real system of record on most grain farms is a spreadsheet on one laptop. The accounting program has the money. The elevator's portal has the tickets. Bushel Farm or a marketing adviser has the contracts. But the number the owner actually trades off, "how many bushels do I have left to sell," lives in a spreadsheet that one person maintains and that is between four days and four weeks out of date at any given moment.

That number decides things. When December corn rallies eighteen cents at 9:40 in the morning and you have twenty minutes to decide whether to price another 20,000 bushels, you are deciding off that spreadsheet. If it says 60,000 unpriced and you actually have 41,000, you just sold bushels you do not own.

Say the definition plainly, because this is the part owners get sold wrong: the Model Context Protocol is a common plug that lets an AI assistant read and write inside the programs you already pay for, so the answer lands in the system of record instead of in a chat window you then retype. It is not a new program to buy. It is the reason the assistant stops being a separate tab.

What changed: one common plug, and the vendors who built on it

Through 2025 every AI tool that touched business software needed its own custom connection, which is why almost none of them touched farm software at all — the market is too small to build one-off connections for. In 2026 the Model Context Protocol became the common way that connection gets made, and the big business-software vendors shipped agent surfaces on top of it: Oracle's AI Agent Studio for its Fusion applications, Microsoft's Sales Agent and Service Agent, Salesforce working through Slack. The point for an owner has nothing to do with Oracle. The point is that the connection is now standard plumbing rather than a custom project, which is what brings it down to farm-sized software.

What it means at the kitchen table: the assistant opens your grain and accounting records the way your bookkeeper does, writes the load in, applies it to contract 41127, moves the remainder to open storage and updates unpriced bushels — in the program, not in a summary you retype. Ask your own software vendor the blunt version: can an outside assistant read and write records in my account, with my permission, and is there a record of what it changed? Some farm vendors have opened that door and some have not.

flowchart TD
  A["Truck weighs out, scale ticket prints"] --> B["Ticket photographed or emailed in"]
  B --> C["Assistant writes the load into the grain records"]
  C --> D["Load applied to a contract or moved to open storage"]
  D --> E["Unpriced bushels updated the same evening"]
  E --> F{"Settlement sheet matches the ticket?"}
  F -->|Yes| G["Posted to the books, landlord share split"]
  F -->|No, shrink or discount differs| C

Harvest Tuesday, 6:40 p.m., with the plug in place

The trucks are done for the day. The driver takes a picture of the day's tickets on his phone before he hangs the keys up, or the elevator emails them, which most now do. By seven o'clock the loads are in the grain records with the ticket number, the destination, the net bushels, the moisture and the contract they went against. Anything the assistant was not sure about — a ticket where the contract line was blank, a load hauled to the ethanol plant instead of the river terminal, a moisture reading that would put the load outside the contract's grade — is sitting in a short list on the owner's phone.

He looks at it while dinner is heating. Four items. Two he answers in ten seconds. One is a load somebody hauled to the wrong place. One is a ticket that never got taken. Then he asks the thing he actually cares about: how many bushels of corn are unpriced right now, and what is that at the two bids I can reach today. The answer comes from the records, not from a spreadsheet somebody meant to update on Sunday.

When the settlement sheets come in a week later, the assistant matches each one against the tickets it already wrote, and it only speaks up where they disagree — a shrink calculation that does not match the moisture, a discount for damage that was not on the ticket. That is the check the bookkeeper never had time to do at all, and it is the one that finds money.

The arithmetic: what twenty-five misapplied loads cost

An illustration on made-up but ordinary numbers. Suppose 615,000 bushels, 1,230 loads, and a hand-keying error rate of two percent on which contract a load got applied to — twenty-five loads, roughly 12,300 bushels sitting in the wrong column. Suppose half of those get caught in the normal course of things and half do not. Suppose the 6,150 bushels you believed were priced at $4.62 were actually still open, and by the time you find out in February you sell them at $4.28.

The keying hours are the number people quote. The 34 cents is the one that matters, because it is not a labor saving — it is a decision made on a wrong number.

What still needs a human: shrink, discounts, and the deferred-payment contract

Do not let anything post a settlement automatically when the shrink or the discount schedule is in dispute. Elevators are not all the same on how they compute shrink off moisture, and the conversation about a damage discount on a wet-year load is a phone call between two people who do business every year. Have the assistant flag the disagreement and hand it to you. It is very good at noticing that two documents do not match, and it has no standing whatsoever to negotiate on your behalf.

Tax timing stays with your preparer. A deferred payment contract that settles after January 1 sits in a different year, and where you put it is a decision about your whole year, not about that load. Same with a landlord's share on a crop-share farm — get the split rule written down once, in plain words, and confirm it every year, because leases change and the assistant will keep using last year's rule forever.

And keep the paper. Tickets and settlement sheets are what you produce if a buyer disagrees or a crop insurance production review asks. A tidier record is worth more, not less, when somebody wants the original.

Connect one thing first

One connection, before harvest: the grain records and the folder where the tickets land. Not the accounting system, not payroll, not anything that writes to a bank. Run it two weeks on one crop and check every entry against the paper ticket. If it holds up through the first wet week, when the loads are messy and the moisture is all over the place, it will hold up in the dry weeks. Then add settlement matching, and only then let it touch the accounting side.

Frequently asked questions

My elevator does not email tickets. Does this still work?

Yes, from photographs. A phone picture of a thermal ticket taken on the tailgate reads reliably now. Get the driver in the habit of shooting them before the truck leaves the yard, which also gives you a backup of the one thing that fades to blank in a hot pickup by February.

Is my grain position safe if an assistant can write into my records?

Ask your software vendor two questions: can I set it to read some things and write only others, and can I see a log of every change it made and undo it. If the answer to either is no, keep it reading only until it is yes. The connection standard supports both; whether your vendor turned them on is a different question.

What about the loads that go to my own bins instead of to town?

Those are the ones a spreadsheet always gets wrong, because there is no ticket. Weigh what you can, use the yield monitor for the rest, and treat the bin as an estimate until it is measured or emptied. Make the assistant label it an estimate on the page, so nobody prices off it as though it were a ticket.

Do I need to change accounting programs?

Not for this. Ask whoever you already use whether an outside assistant can connect. The whole point of a common plug is that you stop rebuilding your records to suit a tool.

Where we fit. Every mismatched ticket ends in a phone call — to the elevator office, to a driver, to the landlord who wants to know what his half yielded. CallSphere builds AI voice and chat agents that answer the farm phone and website chat 24/7, take the ticket number and the question, and book a callback — a real help in the six weeks when everyone who could answer is in a combine.