A hard economy start starting from scratch seemed almost hopeless when I started testing the game, so thought I'd try and collect hard values to see. I'm also using no mods at all that makes any alternative gear available or changes any prices.
Between each save I evaluate the price of all my assets. Vehicles and equipment I count as original value all the time, but I deduct the money needed to repair/refuel them. I don't care about the paint condition though. I'm assuming it has no effect on the game, though they could have added something that makes stuff wear faster in bad paint condition to for instance due to less rust protection, but I'm guessing they haven't for now. I also count value for land I own, and all products I have, like diesel in tanks, leftover lime/seeds/fertilizer, and of course the money and the loan.
It looked like maintenance prices was insane, so I've tried to keep a setup where I try to get as little as possible. Maintenance prices rise a lot as you wear it down. If you repair very often you can end up with close to just 10% of the repair cost, compared to just repairing when you're close to broken. I've repaired after every piece of work, and sometimes in the middle of long works like plowing with low working width here, to try and see how low I could get them.
To see if I could manage with just the $300.000 starting money, I've bought almost the cheapest gear I could find.
- Fendt Favorite tractor - One of the cheapest tractors at 150 hp, and you need some hp to be able to do all operations needed. The cheapest tractor with all utilities available. Also upgradable, so I could buy it with 115 hp first and upgrade engine afterwards. This is a maintenance trick, as maintenance scales linearly with the initial cost of the vehicle, but ignores added cost from later upgrades.
- Rostselmash Nova 330 with Power Stream 500 header. Cheapest harvester option.
- Claas Carat 140 TD trailer, upgraded to contain up to 22500 liters. Payed a few bucks extra to avoid the small Welger DK115 being the cheapest option. The Carat is a bargain for the size, and a ton easier to reverse with.
- AgroMasz Pov 5 XL plow. Requires 160 hp it says, but works with less, though possibly with slight loss of speed. It has 2.5m working width. There's a $2000 cheaper option with 1.2m working width, but I'd then have to pay more fuel and tractor maintenance and it'd be painful. And I'll need the tractor HP for other tools anyhow.
- Knoche Speedmax 560 Mulcher - This is $11.500 more expensive than the 3m option, but the 5.6m working width and 6 kph added speed was tempting. Not a whole lot of money extra at least.
- As I'll be using oilseed radish to cut fertilize cost down, I need to cultivate twice per crop, so I got the Horsch Joker 4 CT disc harrow. Disc harrows don't pick up stones, and plowing only picks up small stones, meaning I don't need a stone picker. I'll plow every 3rd year, and otherwise just use disc harrow.
- Einbock Pneumaticstar 900 weeder. This amazing weeder has 9m working width and can also seed oilseed radish and canola, and only cost $18.000. I'll only be growing Canola to avoid having to pay for a seeder and save a ton of money.
- Dalbo PowerRoll 1230 HD - Sadly cheapest option for rolling at $41.000. Will evaluate if rolling is worth it.
- Bredal K015 fertilize spreader - Cheapest option that can apply Lime. Solid fertilizer cheapest option for 2nd fertilize stage.
- Tenwinkel PAC-750 - A 750 kg weight should hopefully be a decent sized weight to get decent traction for the various jobs.
First of all.. Checked out leasing option. Comparing leasing to buying purely funded by loan in bank. It turns out that bank loan has 4% yearly interest, but leasing something for the minimum time of an hour, you will pay 5.1% of equipment value. Maintenance/fuel for that hour is typically far less than 1.1% so leasing is always more expensive if you need to use the gear at least once per year.
Ok.. So costs of farming field 41:
First of all the income. Only forgetting to stop the harvester in time once, we destroyed close to no crops, and managed to get 22552.8 liters of Canola of the field at 100% yield bonus. That is 11597.2 liters per hectares, and I thus guess the actual max yield of Canola is 11600, 5800 liters/hectares before you apply the yield bonus.
At $806 per 1000 liter, which is the best price I got the first year that is $18.177 total yearly income. So the profit will be less than that. Even without any costs, that would not be much to live on for a year.
So the costs:
Mulching - $44.3 in repair and fuel cost for tractor and mulcher. 4% of mulcher value in loan interest payments, which is $840. 2.5% yield increase is 282 liters of Canola extra, worth $227. If I had 8 hectares of fields to work, I'd not gain or lose any money mulching, but as it is now, I lost $657.3 mulching.
Plowing - $188.6 in repair and fuel cost for tractor and plow. 4% of plow value in loan interest cost me $640. Thus total costs of $828.6. Without plowing I'd lose a 15% yield bonus (was it?). If so that is 1691 liters of canola worth $1.363. Plowing is well worth it every 3rd year at least.
Liming field - $1290 in lime cost, fuel and repair. 4% interest on the $45.000 cart is $1800 too, but that has to be split between this and fertilizing. Fertilizing and liming adds together 15+23 = 38% yield, which is $3453 of Canola, so together they more than pay back for the loan interest. Alternatively you could buy a bit cheaper fertilizer to only fert and not lime, but 15% is quite a bit of yield gain, so you would lose out.
First fert stage - Seeding oilseed - $228.3 in seed costs, fuel and maintenance. Seeding required to get anywhere, but loan interest adds $720 to the cost, to split between this stage and seeding the canola. Fairly cheap as I'm seeding with a cheap weeder.
Cultivating after oilseed has come and seed canola - $494 in seed, fuel and maintenance. Sadly didn't save in between cultivation and seeding to see diff.
Rolling after seeding - $69 in fuel and maintenance. 4% interest of roller is a massive $1640 in yearly interest, which is a lot more than the 2.5% yield gain from rolling worth $227 for me here. Not sure if not being able to roll away the small stones for plowing has a maintenance impact or something, but rolling for yield seems far from worth it as those $41000 could be invested in something far more useful like more fields.
Second fertilizer step - Solid fertilizer - $1129 in solid fertilizer, fuel and maintenance. But fertilization is big yield gain, so still worth it.
Harvesting - $242 in fuel and maintenance cost.
We had some money to start of with, so 100% of the gear wasn't payed by loans, so loan interest wasn't 4% of all the worth.. In total we have for one years cycle, taken from after we harvested the starting free crop, to after we harvested the next:
Income: $18.177
Loan Interest: - $9.100
Other Costs: -$5.250
Profit: $3.827
$3.827 profit after one full year of farming. Not much to create downpayments of the loan..
If only using income from field work, it seems you'll use a lot of years to pay down the loan so you at least can remove the biggest cost