9 August 2026 · Kanya Rattanapong
A thin harvest, shown at the same scale
A weak season does not need a softer drawing. It needs the same scale as the strong season, and a spoken line that does not apologize for the paper.
A family that holds rice mills along the river asked for a Season Review Narrative after a poor harvest. The cousins meet once, in a house in Min Buri, and they are not a board in the formal sense. They still behave like one. The person who speaks first sets the weather of the afternoon.
The pack we received had already been gently adjusted in the charts their accountant sent: the axis on the thin year started higher, so the drop looked like a step rather than a fall. I asked for the unadjusted figures. They had them. We drew both years from the same baseline, on two sheets placed side by side, because a single overlaid line was going to be read as a decoration.
The spoken line was three sentences. The yield was down. The rain in the weeks that matter was down. The mills did not invent a cost problem to explain a weather problem. The cousins argued about irrigation and about a lease, which were real arguments. They did not argue about whether the drawing was fair.
There is a temptation, especially with family money, to make the sheet kinder than the year. Kindness of that sort is expensive at the next sitting, when a strong year has to be drawn on a scale you have already bent. We keep the scale. We let the speaker’s voice carry the courtesy.
If your season was thin and your current charts make it look moderate, send us the charts and the table they came from. We will say which one we are willing to draw from. If they disagree, we draw from the table.