Often you do not need to make any measurements of number, length, weight, and distribution because you can quickly gauge the extent and importance of problems by eye. But there are often benefits of measurement:

• Makes you look at the crop or field in detail, helping you to see things that you might otherwise miss at a quick glance.
• Measurement forces us to look at the crop or field objectively; without structured measurement, we tend to look at large or brightly colored things and give them greater significance than small things.
• Measurement leads to numerical descriptions of the crop. It helps you determine not only that you have a problem but also that you have a problem that is big enough to fix or small enough to ignore. Is the problem worse or better than last year?

The following links provide measurement guidelines:

• Estimating yield before harvest
• Measuring soil depthoil depth
• Identifying soil textural class
• Estimating available soil moisture
• Estimating days to crop water stress
• Testing wheat seed viability