Riverdale Valley - A farm blog - Ravenport, season, from scratch on hard economy

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humbe
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Re: Riverdale Valley - A farm blog - Ravenport, season, from scratch on hard economy

Post by humbe »

And more details:

Property maintenance:

PropertyMaintenance = (DailyUpkeep + 0.025 * DailyUpkeep * SeasonsYears) / SeasonLength

SeasonsYears is taken from the xml file of the item (mod or base game data file). Value needed to be rounded down to closest whole day in season.

Lime:

Measured that if you do just turn on and off the K105 lime spreader as fast as you can, you get a diamond shaped lime part on the field. I measured that you need ~494 liters of lime to cover a hectar that way.

If I just drove at max work speed in a fairly straight line, I ended up using ~3083 liter per hectar.

Looking at how much lime I actually used to cover field 27, I see I had 25.5% overlap. Some of it because not driving at max speed all the time, and some of it due to overlapping parts already covered or outside field. I was a bit surprised at the number, as I thought I was pretty strict at avoiding overlap when I did it.

Anyhow. With these numbers I can estimate how much lime I'll be needing, and I can check how poor my route have been by checking the overlap. Additionally, if I miss some spots here and there, it's fairly cheap to drive over them and do quick on/off on the spreader to cover it.

In theory, you could drive 9m lanes and put down diamond shaped figures that fit exactly within each other to get a lot lower lime usage, but that will require very precision driving and use of on/off button :)
humbe
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Joined: Sat Jan 18, 2020 9:33 pm

Re: Riverdale Valley - A farm blog - Ravenport, season, from scratch on hard economy

Post by humbe »

It is early spring, and we've used the time to apply lime to our 3 non-grass fields. The new field needed it, and some parts of the old fields too. To not have to apply it in patches later, we have tried to apply it to all of the old fields too, but it's tricky to know if we were successful or not with the oilseed radish still in the way. We could have run a cultivator to remove it first, but as our seeder also cultivates we thought we'd save fieldwork by not doing so.

Image


Easier to spot from straight above than sideways, but still challenging, and the map overview don't help us when applying parts of field that doesn't require a new lime session yet.

Also have been using the time to improve my savegame tracker to report what I have done the first day of spring. Currently it outputs data like the following:

Code: Select all

savegame1 Ravenport Hard: 2005.03.01 08:11 Cash: $ 45,638 (+2,092)
Tended cows. Sold 1+ cows for $ 2091.580078
  Food used:              Amount in liter:            Value/l:        Total Value:
  Hay                         1,914.444213            0.060000          114.866653
  Straw                       5,120.139892            0.045000          230.406295
  Silage                      3,709.456787            0.070000          259.661975

  Resource:                                      Added maintenance cost:  Cost of fuel used:
  SB1000 Front Weight                                           0.002212
  Stoll FZ 30 attachableFrontloader                             0.044186
  Stoll Pallet Fork                                             0.000974
  Siloking TrailedLine Duo 1814 mixerWagon                      0.106653
  Stoll Universal Bucket                                        0.004523
  Fendt Favorit 515c tractor                                    2.641239            2.067050
  Fendt 1038 tractor                                            0.809007            0.256043
  Joskin BETIMAX RDS 7500 livestockTrailer                      0.502958
  Krampe Dolly 10 L dolly                                       0.000732
  Lizard MKS 32 waterTrailer                                    0.005531
  Total:                                                        4.118017            2.323093

  Total cost:                                                 611.376032

savegame1 Ravenport Hard: 2005.03.01 08:30 Cash: $ 43,119 (-2,520)
Limed field Field 27 covering 3.62 hectares (100 %) buying 14000 l lime and using 13995.685811 l with overlap of 25.52 %.
  Resource:                                      Added maintenance cost:  Cost of fuel used:
  SB1000 Front Weight                                           0.074086
  Bredal K105 spreader                                          3.195042
  Fendt Favorit 515c tractor                                    6.623383            5.566941
  Total:                                                        9.892511            5.566941

  Value of lime used:                                       2,519.223446

  Total cost:                                               2,534.682898

savegame1 Ravenport Hard: 2005.03.01 08:45 Cash: $ 43,119 (0)
Tended chickens. Sold 0+ chickens for $ 0
  Food used:              Amount in liter:            Value/l:        Total Value:
  Barley                      1,342.268555            0.370000          496.639365

  Resource:                                      Added maintenance cost:  Cost of fuel used:
  Manitou MC 18-4 teleHandler                                   1.014551            0.125905
  Total:                                                        1.014551            0.125905

  Total cost:                                                 497.779821

savegame1 Ravenport Hard: 2005.03.01 09:03 Cash: $ 40,599 (-2,519)
Limed field Field 28 covering 3.23 hectares (100 %) buying 13995.68685 l lime and using 13234.975954 l with overlap of 33.1 %.
  Resource:                                      Added maintenance cost:  Cost of fuel used:
  SB1000 Front Weight                                           0.079906
  Bredal K105 spreader                                          3.462611
  Fendt Favorit 515c tractor                                    6.747651            5.716056
  Total:                                                       10.290168            5.716056

  Value of lime used:                                       2,382.295672

  Total cost:                                               2,398.301896

savegame1 Ravenport Hard: 2005.03.01 09:38 Cash: $ 35,683 (-4,917)
Limed field Field 30 covering 5.98 hectares (100 %) buying 27680.192056 l lime and using 22669.456978 l with overlap of 22.87 %.
  Resource:                                      Added maintenance cost:  Cost of fuel used:
  SB1000 Front Weight                                           0.158154
  Bredal K105 spreader                                          6.817460
  Fendt Favorit 515c tractor                                   13.421852           10.596332
  Total:                                                       20.397466           10.596332

  Value of lime used:                                       4,080.502256

  Total cost:                                               4,111.496054

Not sure what my actual field sizes are. I just inserted whatever was reported fertilized now, so coverage thus 100%. Got some values surprisingly different than I thought I had when seeding. Will retrack when seeding now and recalculate above for official report.

I'll try to use these work bits detected here as a way to group values in reports later..
humbe
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Re: Riverdale Valley - A farm blog - Ravenport, season, from scratch on hard economy

Post by humbe »

Invested quite some time into modernizing the farm, using new computer programs to automate a more detailed accounting report. The report for March is in. Sadly BB Code version here have poor functionality for formatting data. Printing screenshot of my terminal for now.

Image

The above report is created automatically, but requires me to save often to get only one type of work activity between savegames. Will need to add more to support more kind of activities as we go. Haven't manually verified all the numbers above, but they look ok. I have stored the source data, so if I find issues I'll be able to regenerate it.

Basically, I can see income and expense from each type of activity separately, and a general bit to account for the remainder. This is a combination of cash flow and assets, such that I track income and expense regardless of when value are paid for or realized.


April has come, and we have started sowing Canola and Barley. While waiting for soil to get warm enough to sow corn, we are fertilizing the other two fields. Happy with the conveyor belt here. A front loader would have been tedious.

Image
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A bit annoying the maximum content of the manure pit. We have 214.118 l manure left, but the pit is empty. It seems that there's a maximum size to content of the pit, and each 15 minute game time, the game checks if it's full and if not drops out some more into the pit. Not entirely sure what the max in pit is, but it's around 45.000 liters I think. I'll see if I can measure at some point.
humbe
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Joined: Sat Jan 18, 2020 9:33 pm

Re: Riverdale Valley - A farm blog - Ravenport, season, from scratch on hard economy

Post by humbe »

Another day, another mod..

I got annoyed by the manure pit in the barn. There's a large underground manure storage unit, but it takes ages to load it up into the manure pit. When the manure pit is full the process stops, and when we start to fertilize and need it, we quickly use up the bit in the pit, and then we need to wait hours upon hours for the manure to come back up from the underground storage.

Additionally, it makes tracking manure hard. When seeding for instance, we can see how much seed we buy from accounting data, and then calculate seed used based on assets before and after, but manure is aquired without anything being written anywhere so it's hard to know how to divide manure diff between manure created and manure spent.

The solution is a nifty new manure storage pit that works better. It has larger storage capacity. A whole 1.2 million liters can be stored. And we can empty it fast using its own unload functionality. We'll have to move manure from the barn pit to the new pit, but then we can do that then the pit is full, so we don't hide large amounts of manure below the barn where it's hard to get to.

Image

Puzzling where to count the costs for this. I think I ended up deciding to track the cost of the extra pit and the manure moving in the general category, as it's not really a necessary step to use the manure. The cost shouldn't be much anyhow. We can ferry quite a lot of manure at a time, and the pit upkeep is only $20 a year to begin with.

We decided upon putting the pit next to workshop. Considered several locations. Close to other pit would be nice, but couldn't really make it fit there, and that's close to farmhouse too. Had a couple of other corners I could put it in, but it felt a bit cramped. Decided on putting it here as that makes it fairly accessible, not blocking up too much and keeping as much free space possible elsewhere in farmyard for future expansions.

We need to drive trailer with straw in and out of the barn here, and we're blocking a bit here, but as we need free space next to pit to unload stuff we can use that space when reversing into barn, so sounds like a good compromise on space usage versus easy access.

The mod seems to work out fine. My only objects are graphically. It would be nice if the content within varied in size with content stored, and it would be nice if you could avoid getting the decorative heap of bales next to it. Would rather see some potential manure related tools like a spade and maybe some packaging stuff or something. Being able to put the output on the other side of the pit would also be nice. The output pipe seems overly big and leaning further away from pit needed in my case, but at least it should work with all sizes of trailers and vehicles under there.
humbe
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Re: Riverdale Valley - A farm blog - Ravenport, season, from scratch on hard economy

Post by humbe »


I want to measure the cost difference of using various tractors, so this first time, I've used the Fendt Favorite for everything. Next year I plan to use the Case, and next year after that the Vario. Though as I do multiple fertilize runs, I can test out the Case for the next fert run this year. In this steep field the Favorite isn't able to keep at max operation speed going uphill so I'm expecting the other tractors will be cheaper to use overall.

To be able to measure apples vs apples, I don't want to drive manually for these tests so the test data is obscured by me driving differently. Thus I've created courseplay routes to try and run these tests.

To get good test data I also want to do a good job of covering the entire field, and making a route that does that is tedious. Here's the route I ended up with for field 28.


Image


Courseplay has a corner issue. I don't have real corners on the field so the "turn" option for turning doesn't work, and also it is slow. All the options I've tried, if the corner is tight, it won't adjust by driving close enough to the edge to be able to cover the outer bits of the corner. Also, as I need many headlands to be able to turn normally later, the corners that aren't tight to begin with gets tighter and tighter as you create headlands within the other. To compensate, I've manually adjusted the route to go closer to the edge in tight corners, and when the corners get tight and I have enough space, I've altered the route to drive through and do a 270 degree turn around.

I noticed that when courseplay generated routes that overlapped headlands to drive to start of back and forth pattern, it turned off the spreader while driving. The courseplay routes are saved in the personal FS19 folder, and there is XML files one can edit manually. I found that the overlapping parts waypoints was tagged isconnectingtrack="true".. So I tried to add this to waypoints in my 270 degree turns to avoid spreading where I didn't need to, and that seems to work fairly well.

I also used that to make non-connecting track before my route actually started, such that the tractor will drive up to the same starting point before driving down to where it will start the spreader so it will have the exact same speed and heading when it starts the actual route.

For field 28 I sadly also had to adjust some of the back and forth bits, merely because the field is so steep that it seemed to miss bits between headlands a few places. Is the tractor sliding a bit sideways when it's steep?

Anyhow. The above route seemed to work out fairly well. Only issue is that I need to refill the spreader 3 times and when I do I need to manually restart where we left of, and I won't be able to start the spreader in exactly the same spots each time I resume.
humbe
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Joined: Sat Jan 18, 2020 9:33 pm

Re: Riverdale Valley - A farm blog - Ravenport, season, from scratch on hard economy

Post by humbe »

And April numbers are in:

Image

The cash flow is getting low. We're planning to sow corn soon, and then we need a planter, that will cost more than our current cash in hand. We have plenty milk to sell, and still soybeans and canola from last year. In all cases we're waiting for better prices. Soybean prices seems to soar in summer though. So worst case we'll take up a small loan and pay it back when we sell the soybeans. If we're lucky we may get a great demand for milk or something before that though.
Last edited by humbe on Fri May 01, 2020 9:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.
humbe
Posts: 1364
Joined: Sat Jan 18, 2020 9:33 pm

Re: Riverdale Valley - A farm blog - Ravenport, season, from scratch on hard economy

Post by humbe »

Got to first growth stage and have finished fertilizing two first fields in May.. The second time around I used the Case, which have quite a few more horsepowers, making it able to keep closer to max working speed at all times. Thought I'd post details of differences in cost:

Code: Select all

Fertilized field Field 27 with Manure covering 3.61 hectares (99.98 %) using 64330.046875 l. 17838.24 l per hectares.
  Resource:                                      Added maintenance cost:  Cost of fuel used:
  SB1000 Front Weight                                           0.121293
  Stoll FZ 30 attachableFrontloader                             0.011909
  Stoll Pallet Fork                                             0.001091
  Samsonagro SP 14/17 manureSpreader                            5.746740
  Fendt Favorit 515c tractor                                   10.632857            9.059105
  Total:                                                       16.513890            9.059105

  Value of Manure used:                                                    1,929.901406

  Total cost:                                               1,955.474401

Fertilized field Field 28 with Manure covering 3.22 hectares (99.99 %) using 62841.78125 l. 19500.18 l per hectares.
  Resource:                                      Added maintenance cost:  Cost of fuel used:
  SB1000 Front Weight                                           0.105844
  Samsonagro SP 14/17 manureSpreader                            5.014433
  Fendt Favorit 515c tractor                                    8.971246            7.867766
  Total:                                                       14.091523            7.867766

  Value of Manure used:                                                    1,885.253438

  Total cost:                                               1,907.212726

Fertilized field Field 27 with Manure covering 3.61 hectares (99.981 %) using 62659.015625 l. 17374.62 l per hectares.
  Resource:                                      Added maintenance cost:  Cost of fuel used:
  SB1000 Front Weight                                           0.108003
  Caseih 7250 Pro tractor                                      12.017521           11.490784
  Samsonagro SP 14/17 manureSpreader                            5.113755
  Total:                                                       17.239280           11.490784

  Value of Manure used:                                                    1,879.770469

  Total cost:                                               1,908.500532

Fertilized field Field 28 with Manure covering 3.22 hectares (99.988 %) using 57991.28125 l. 17995.34 l per hectares.
  Resource:                                      Added maintenance cost:  Cost of fuel used:
  SB1000 Front Weight                                           0.098911
  Caseih 7250 Pro tractor                                      11.056626           10.876084
  Samsonagro SP 14/17 manureSpreader                            4.689707
  Kuhn PRIMOR 15070 strawBlower                                 0.000681
  Total:                                                       15.845924           10.876084

  Value of Manure used:                                                    1,739.738437

  Total cost:                                               1,766.460446
To summarize, total cost of using Fendt Favorite was $1,955 for field 27 and $1,907 for field 28, while using Case the cost was $1,908 and $1,766. As expected, the lower consumption of fertilizer was much more important than the slightly higher upkeep of the Case. Field 28 has very steep parts, so there the Favorite had issues and the Case reduced the overall cost of fertilizing with 7.4%. The difference on field 27 is far less. It also have some elevation differences, but we drove headlands such that we drove down the steepest part, and drove back and forth sideways to inclimb. Thus we only saved 2.4% there.. We'll test the Vario next time (though that'll be next year).. Not expecting it to be much better than the Case though. Maybe it can do it slightly faster than the Case, but I don't really think it'll be enough of a difference to cover the maintenance and fuel expense difference.
humbe
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Re: Riverdale Valley - A farm blog - Ravenport, season, from scratch on hard economy

Post by humbe »

Mai has past. We're trying to get accounting to work, but got some errors in our new system and haven't been motivated to look into it yet. Hoping numbers and motivation will come soon.

Finished fertilizing field 30, so now harvesting is next.

Image

As said before I've numbered my fields 27-30 to avoid confusion with original fields that may or may not be included in my fields and are totally different size. Quite a different size to the farming area in the valley now. Our total field area is probably close to the bigger farmers here now, and they are certainly starting to take notice.

Our grass field is ready for harvesting, so I'm guessing that's next.

Tempting to mow immediately to ensure we get a second harvest of grass, but grass dies in winter anyhow, so as long as we get a second before winter I guess it doesn't matter when.. Easiest to get drying conditions for hay in summer, so I think we'll wait a bit as drying conditions seems to improve a bit a bit later in June. We've got plenty of both hay and silage for now, so I guess we'll make one of each. So hay first..
humbe
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Re: Riverdale Valley - A farm blog - Ravenport, season, from scratch on hard economy

Post by humbe »

And May numbers are finally in.

Image

Cows seemed even better this month as we sold some. We don't sell every month. I think we sold a bit late this time, possibly hindering a birth. I think our accounting issue is fixed, and April numbers above has been corrected.

Hmm. I notice manure count in barn is strange though. If I load the savegames, I get a listing of how much manure is in the barn, but when I look at items.xml in the savegame, I don't find the number. Very strange. I first thought I had a manure bug, where I didn't get any in May, but now I'm thinking the tally is stored strangely and that's why I haven't seen it. I guess I should try to move content to other pit monthly to get better numbers. According to numbers, we have only gotten 7 liters of manure in May, versus around 57.000 liters in April. That isn't correct :) I guess April numbers probably are from earlier too, but I saw it in my numbers due to moving it to new pit. While May numbers aren't in the count. I'll see if I can find a way to count better.
humbe
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Re: Riverdale Valley - A farm blog - Ravenport, season, from scratch on hard economy

Post by humbe »

Have played through harvest season and harvested my fields, except for second crop of grass on grass field. Got preoccupied supporting harvesting information in my savegame extractor utility and got a bit tired of dealing with it right now. Will take a pause in this game, and hopefully at some point at least add end of year analysis, and possibly pick it up later..

Right now I got inspired by old gear to go try a new map with a backwards farm. New thread incoming :)
humbe
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Re: Riverdale Valley - A farm blog - Ravenport, season, from scratch on hard economy

Post by humbe »

Picking this savegame up again after a long FS 19 break ;).. Before the break, we had as said above finished harvesting, so starting with reporting some numbers from that:

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In June, we cut grass and made hay. Also we applied fertilizers to field 30.

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In July we just cared for animals.

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In August too, we just cared for animals. (The internal trade in the figures above, have been added to give value to manure used for fertilization, so the manure cost is applied to field work for producing stuff, while manure is listed as income for the cows bit)

Image

Finally in September, our two first fields got harvested with Barley and Canola. The corn field has been harvested in October, but we have not reached the end of October yet, so those numbers will come later..

Note that we failed to account for milk production in the month we sold a lot of milk. As we didn't track how many liters we sold, we don't really know how much milk was produced, and there's thus a bug in the numbers for September. But earlier months have pretty steadily shown that we have gotten 16-18 thousand dollars in value from our cows every month, and I'm sure that was the case this month too. But the numbers will stay as is due to my inflexible accountant.
Last edited by humbe on Sun Aug 22, 2021 9:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.
humbe
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Re: Riverdale Valley - A farm blog - Ravenport, season, from scratch on hard economy

Post by humbe »

So, October is here, and the fields are finally all harvested. Where do we go from here?

We now have all ingredients for pig food in our silo, and we do have some money saved up. I guess a pig barn and some pigs are next in line. But first, let's finish up the fields before winter comes.

Field 30 needs to be plowed after the corn harvest, and we sadly still just have the Agro Masz POH 5 plow with 2.5 meter working width. Really want to get a bigger plow, but with limited funds, I guess we'll do the tedious work one more time so we have money left for pigs. Almost 6 hectares to plow with 2.5m plow. That'll take some hours. The Case is more than strong enough to pull that little plow, so we'll use that one as it's cheaper to maintain per hour than the Vario.
Feirmeoir Eireannach
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Re: Riverdale Valley - A farm blog - Ravenport, season, from scratch on hard economy

Post by Feirmeoir Eireannach »

Jeez humbe you're back, great to see ya back at it again.
humbe
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Re: Riverdale Valley - A farm blog - Ravenport, season, from scratch on hard economy

Post by humbe »

Thanks... Good to be back ;) Still haven't cancelled my wow classic subscription though, so don't know how active I'm going to be :)

Figured the more can be done before winter sets in, the better. So we spread dung around fields close to the farm and spread fertilizer on the big field 30 in the valley, and then we sow oilseed radish on all our 3 non-grass fields. Waiting around for more manure before doing the last fertilization stage. One of the nice things with oilseed radish, is that one can get the ground fully fertilized early so one don't have to fertilize after seeding, having to take care not to destroy the crops.

Also had a second pass on our grass field, and took with us some wild going grass around the farm at the same time. Packed it up to create silage. For now we've dumped the silage bales outside, so they can ferment without blocking access to already fermented silage in our bale barn. Hmm.. We don't have space for all of them either.

After having finished the feed, we thought it would nice to extend animal handling as we have the food for more animals anyhow. So we called in some favors and got somebody to build us some animal pens real quick. Now we also have pigs and sheep on the farm.

Image

Now lets see if we can figure out how to use these pens. Dunno why the game and modders couldn't afford 300 words of description of buildings and how to use them. Have had issues seeing and accessing dirt in the pig barn. I guess because I didn't plant it on totally flat ground. Place anywhere might be to blame. Dirt didn't seem to appear inside the feeding area, even though cleanliness went down. After increasing elevation underneath the area a bit, we can see some dirt at least. Hoping we can sort it out.

The sheep pen seemed simpler, though it says no bales on the door, and game isn't exactly full of ways to turn hay bales into hay. But it seemed it might have accepted a hay bale regardless. Only issue is, I can't dump 4000 liters into the feeding area, so the bale remains inside for now. Shouldn't matter though, as the only reason to drive inside is to add food and transfer sheep in and out.
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DEERE317
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Re: Riverdale Valley - A farm blog - Ravenport, season, from scratch on hard economy

Post by DEERE317 »

For the MW pig barn, I just use Easy Dev Tools and Clear Tip Area. It’s there just the floor isn’t a tip collision so it spawns on the actual terrain, below the shed…
FS15 & FS19 Platinum Edition PC (and War Thunder, Gaijin is way worse than GIANTS ever has been accused of being)
FS Comunity Trader: https://fs19communitytrader.freeforums.net/
Desktop: i5-9400f, RTX 2060, 8gb RAM, 256gb SSD.
Laptop: Pentium Silver N5000, UHD605, 4gb RAM, 1tb HDD.
Deere, Fendt, Claas, and sometimes the rest of Agco.
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