A harvesting method and apparatus

A harvesting method comprises the steps of (a) operating a moveable harvesting machine (10) in one or more fields (11) to harvest plant matter and produce a secondarily processable harvest product for subsequent processing using secondary processing machinery (16, 17); and (b) while operating the harvesting machine (10) to produce the secondarily processable harvest product, recording data that is capable of giving rise to or including information on one or more characteristics of the secondarily processable harvest product. The invention includes (c) transmitting or transferring the recorded data from the harvesting machine to an external data store (14); (d) causing moveable secondary processing machinery (16, 17) to retrieve at least some data on the secondarily processable harvest product from the data store (14); and (e) controlling one or more controllable parameters of the secondary processing machinery (16, 17) based on the retrieved data during operation of the secondary processing machinery (16, 17) to process the secondarily processable harvest product.