The freight scale at the co-op has been wrong, in one direction or another, since roughly the season my youngest learned to drive a truck himself, and he is not young anymore. Everyone knew it. Everyone worked around it. Drivers have been keeping their own paper tallies against the co-op's printed ticket for at least three years, and comparing notes at the counter like two people checking each other's math on a bill neither trusts.
Tuesday, the co-op board finally replaced it. The new scale is digital, calibrated by a technician who drove up from Merath, and — I am told, though I have not personally verified it with a truckload of my own grain — accurate to within a pound most other outfits would consider unremarkable.
Nobody at the board meeting wanted to say plainly why it took three years. The kindest version is that a new scale is not cheap and the co-op's margins have not exactly been generous. A less kind version, which I heard from at least two people who were in the room, is that nobody wanted to be the one who spent the money only to have the harvest come in light for some unrelated reason and take the blame for it.
I don't have a strong opinion about which version is truer. I do have an opinion about the three years, which is that they were three years too many, and that the fix cost less, in the end, than a single bad season's worth of drivers not trusting their own paperwork.
The old scale has been hauled to the yard behind the grain elevator, where the co-op manager tells me it will sit "until somebody finds a use for forty-year-old scrap iron shaped like a scale." I expect it will be there for a while. Some things around here move slower than others.