A second chance - Yet another farm blog - Where noone else dared to farm

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humbe
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Re: A second chance - Yet another farm blog - Where noone else dared to farm

Post by humbe »

Grr.. Save more often.. Game crashed and I'm back at not having mowed the yard.. Considering just editing in 49.000 liters of grass into the savegame and not redo mowing the yard.. Just redo the nw grass patch part that died mid through..
humbe
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Re: A second chance - Yet another farm blog - Where noone else dared to farm

Post by humbe »

The hill up here isn't exactly perfect for growing bits in. It's way too steep. Thankfully I know have a pretty strong tractor so it manages to get up, but it's crawling at 2 kph in the worst slopes. It looks like I'll be able to gather a bit more than 100.000 liters of grass on this patch.. If I sow grass on the hilly bits where the forest was, I'm guessing I can approach 200.000 liters of grass including the farmyard, without making a grass field. With another harvest same year, that's 400.000 liters of grass per year, which is way more than we're currently consuming.

Currently the horses consume around 40.000 liters of hay per year, and the cows around 72.000 liters of hay/silage. Thus I can at least double the amount of cows, while still being able to refill my hay and silage storage with the leftover bits around our land. A grass field would be a lot easier to work though.

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humbe
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Re: A second chance - Yet another farm blog - Where noone else dared to farm

Post by humbe »

We thought we could sow wild grass anywhere, but it seems we can only do so in patches here. Have no idea why. I guess I could likely plow it up to sow grass everywhere here, and then I could fertilize it easier and such, but that kind of make me commit to use this meadow, which I'd like to avoid. There's enough flat lands beneath here..

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Hmm.. I have sown wild grass through asphalt on mistake before. Can't remember not being able to sow it. (Wild grass mod that enables sowing grass outside fields, and destroy bushes you drive over with seeder when seeding wild grass)
humbe
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Re: A second chance - Yet another farm blog - Where noone else dared to farm

Post by humbe »

We took a break in summer after the silage operation. Half the grass is in the bunker, and we'll load the rest into it soon.

It was sadly mid october before the crop was ready for harvest, and still some time before it was dry enough to harvest. The summer has caused quite a bit of damage sadly.. Our perfect fields now look like this:

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Have no idea if we could have done anything to prevent it, but at least the majority of it is intact. Lets see if we can manage to harvest it all before winter sets in. I think that should work but we have more than enough to do for a while.

The animals are doing alright.. Not much oat left for the horses, but soon we'll harvest more.. Just in time..
humbe
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Re: A second chance - Yet another farm blog - Where noone else dared to farm

Post by humbe »

We have worked hard harvesting the crops, but we managed to complete early November after constant work by the old Bizon. Not sure if we would have even been theoretically able to complete harvesting our fields with the old harvester trailer we had.

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Never has an old Bizon done so much, for so few, in such a short time...

We ended up with:

Code: Select all

 78.855 l barley
 73.273 l oat
 28.711 l canola
264.295 l soybeans
  5.808 l corn
Not sure how much straw we had to begin with and what we got but we got tons of straw and has blow all straw storage we have. Currently we have 946.784 liters of straw. Not sure if all the barley was from the harvest. There could have been some left in the silo before we started filling it up, but I think at least most should be from the harvest.

Last year soybean prices soared to above $1200 per 1000l. Currently it's below half that, so I guess we'll store it for a while hoping for a better price. With a good price we will get more than $300k for the soy. Maybe around $20k for the canola. The barley and oat we're gonna keep for animal food. Come to think of it, we may try out a few pigs, and if so we might hang on to some canola for pig food too.

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Grabbed the corn last. Practical that we got that corn header with it as a bonus. Should we use this corn to try and get a few pigs? We have milk to drink for breakfast. Would be nice to have bacon with our eggs :)
humbe
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Re: A second chance - Yet another farm blog - Where noone else dared to farm

Post by humbe »

So.. What was pain points this year around?

The sprayer worked beautifully and covered the ground quickly with a 17m working width. However, the herbicide was very expensive. We now have 3.688 liters of herbicide left, of a total of 20.000 liters, so we used herbicide for around $16.300.

If we estimate the total value of crops we harvested to around $450.000, 20% less yield would mean $90.000. For us to lose more than $16.300, weeds would have to cover at least 18% of the fields. Looking at how much weeds got into the oilseed, I'm guessing less than 10% of the field actually get affected.

Our grain trailer did not work as perfect though. The Bizon has a fairly low pipe, so we had to remove the upper layer, leaving only 2 sets of sides on the trailer, making the max capacity 11.300 liters. That caused quite a few trips to fill our silo, but at least we could do that while the Bizon was working. The 3540 liter storage of the Bizon caused us to have to empty it a whole lot of times during harvesting which ended up a pretty tedious operation. Not to mention getting all the straw back to the farm too.

The seeder also used a lot of time to seed the fields, and doing it twice for oilseed didn't help either there, but it's large seed tank was a large help, so we only needed a handful of refills, making it a more pleasant task regardless of the time it took.

A seeder with a higher working width would be awesome. A harvester with higher working width and hopefully a lot more tank capacity would be awesome, and a trailer that could carry more seed would also be very nice, but if the harvester was tall enough to use our trailer at max height that would also help a lot. We have tractor power to pull a 6 meter direct drill seeder, but anything bigger we might need to cultivate separately. A stronger tractor would thus also be nice at some point..
Getting into known territory here now. Can now afford starting to buy the gear I've started of with in earlier games. It's no longer an economic struggle but just a question of time, so wondering whether to continue this game or maybe start over somewhere else in another scenario. We'll see what happens..
humbe
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Re: A second chance - Yet another farm blog - Where noone else dared to farm

Post by humbe »


Taking a break from this savegame. Might continue later..

Some learnings from the game:

  • Logging income seems way too high. Even at hard economy I earned a ton. Way too good for a game where you optimize for income per game time unit at least.
  • Horse income was a very nice steady income.


Scream out if you want to see it continue ;D...
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Dairydeere
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Re: A second chance - Yet another farm blog - Where noone else dared to farm

Post by Dairydeere »

I really enjoy watching this thread, was wondering what caused you to slow down on this :hmm: . No worries, it doesn't matter either way, just curious. No pressure to continue at all
Dairy farmer, college student, part-time modder, always looking to drive a tractor

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Happy farming!
humbe
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Re: A second chance - Yet another farm blog - Where noone else dared to farm

Post by humbe »

Dairydeere wrote: Sat Jun 20, 2020 2:57 am I really enjoy watching this thread, was wondering what caused you to slow down on this :hmm: . No worries, it doesn't matter either way, just curious. No pressure to continue at all
If people are interested to see how it develops it makes it more fun to play on so that is just good ;D.. Thanks for the feedback. I don't think I'm done with it entirely, but I just hit a few glitches. First of all, all the money from logging made it a bit too easy to expand. I kinda wasted all of it on land and setting aside the safety account, quietly forgetting about all the other forest to exploit on the map. Makes sense to use money for land as long as the equipment I have manage to work it with the time available. Trouble is that it is getting a bit hard to do it. Seeding oilseed in the large field right now, and it's a 5 hour realtime job.. The pic below is 2 hours into it ;D.. Not so bad when I've got stuff to do at home that doesn't involve the PC, but I'm not gonna manually drive it for 5 hours.. Just loading the courseplay route takes a couple of minutes, and if I try press the eye in courseplay to view it, the game freezes up a few minutes before it comes up so I can continue :) Additionally I've had some issues with PC freezing up and crashing, so a bit frustrating when losing hours of work. Might be heat related as there's been a heatwave here recently.

But first priority now is to get bigger equipment so I can work the fields without it taking forever. And after I manage to get a hold of that, I might be able to play at half decent speed again. I might be alternating a bit back and forth between this and the Sandy Bay scenario I set up. Trying to see what the difference of play is for me, when I don't need to landscape everything myself, and can't resort to logging for income. If the economic challenge seems better, or if the in game objects and small fields gets too annoying when I start affording to buy some of them.
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Takes a lot of time to seed these fields with oilseed with 3m seeder. Luckily we have a fairly sizable fuel tank and a big seed capacity on the seeder, but it still takes me a lot of hours to drive through it.
humbe
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Re: A second chance - Yet another farm blog - Where noone else dared to farm

Post by humbe »

Managed to finish seeding oilseed before October was up. It's all germinated it seems as it has reached first growth stage. Last day of November we're weeding and using a spreader to fertilize a step with spreader. I guess weeding oilseed might not make a difference at all, but the weed don't look good on the field.

Don't think we're going to keep spraying herbicide. The herbicide is just too expensive to be worth the extra yield. And as it's a poison anyhow, avoiding needless use of it will be good. I've ordered a bigger weeder, so we can weed a bit simpler, and then I think we'll just ignore the weed when the crop grows too large to weed it without destroying it..

Finally got the weeder. This made all the difference, as it's wider than the typical splot of weeds. It's $18.000 I maybe shoulda used for something else, but it is nice to be able to weed as we're not planning to apply herbicide.
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When winter struck in and just before Christmas we got a decent canola price and sold our harvest for $19.710. The soybeans will bring in a lot more, but expecting price there to be good when summer comes.. So i guess it is more likely that we'll be spending our income on harvester rather than seeder this year, as we likely need the seeder prior to selling the Soybeans.
JohnDeere77
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Re: A second chance - Yet another farm blog - Where noone else dared to farm

Post by JohnDeere77 »

Its a fun read!

In my opinion the problem with logging profit is when u buy land with fully grown timber, u earn in most of the cost of buying the land. Its a different story when u plant 60 trees and get 300k five seasons later. So price of land should reflect whats on it. Its the same price with a ready to harvest soybean-field as the just harvested one.

Happy farming!
Plays on pc, hardmode and loves grinding
humbe
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Re: A second chance - Yet another farm blog - Where noone else dared to farm

Post by humbe »

JohnDeere77 wrote: Mon Jun 22, 2020 9:36 pm Its a fun read!

In my opinion the problem with logging profit is when u buy land with fully grown timber, u earn in most of the cost of buying the land. Its a different story when u plant 60 trees and get 300k five seasons later. So price of land should reflect whats on it. Its the same price with a ready to harvest soybean-field as the just harvested one.

Happy farming!

A bit sad that they haven't fixed land costs to not make it beneficial to buy land just to harvest it and sell it afterwards. They could even have done it so simple that they could just say that selling price is 25% less than buy price no matter what. Wouldn't fix all the logging issues here though. The first forest plot I bought cost $85.000 and I think I made around $850.000 logging it, so I could have bought 10 more plots. Waaaay to much money in logging when you don't need to plant and wait at least. Likely when planting too, but at least you need to invest quite a bit of time and land to do it (unless you can buy and sell hack land).

Maybe all the natural trees should be tagged, and have poor quality or something so they were worth less.
humbe
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Re: A second chance - Yet another farm blog - Where noone else dared to farm

Post by humbe »

March was too cold for seeding, but April looks promising, with 5 degrees in the soil from the start. Weather forecast seems to indicate it won't get cold again either.

A wider working width seeder would be great, but compared to the Hassia my Kuhn seeder rocks. As we're still waiting until summer to sell the soybeans, we currently have around $170.000 saved up, and some milk we haven't gotten around to sell yet. But to get a big seeder we also need a stronger tractor. A Massey Ferguson 7726 sounds tempting. With 280 horsepowers we could pull something like the Amazone Condor 15001 which has a massive 15 meter working width. The Horsch Pronto 9 DC is a smaller and cheaper variant we also need that much horses for. But to realize that we need $104.000 for the "cheaper" Horsch variant and $211.000 for the tractor. That's at least $315.000 and we just don't have that kind of money now.

Rather we're thinking we might see if we can afford a decent harvester this year. If so, possibly invest in that first, and then save up for tractor and seeder afterwards. If we cannot afford a good harvester yet, we can go for seeder and tractor next year.

So what are we sowing this year? We should have enough oats for now. I think we should have enough sowing oats on field 5 every 3rd year. We have plenty of barley for chickens. We don't have many anyhow. We also have more than plenty straw for cow bedding and TMR if we want to put it in there. We should also have a good amount of hay for at least another year, probably more, unless we get a lot more animals, but we do have capacity to store more hay and silage, so maybe creating a grass field early instead of late would be good. With grass we can also extend into sheep production and/or get more cows. We have plenty space in our barn. We could also look into testing pigs, in which case more corn would be good, and Canola might be cheaper to feed them than Soybeans.

A half decent crop rotation seems to alternative between Cereal (wheat, barley, oats), Oilseed (canola) and Legume (Soybeans). No crop rotation seems to earn back keeping a field fallow for a year. Cotton can't be grown this far north. I don't have equipment for Sunflowers and some of the other possible crop types, though even if I did, crop rotation doesn't look to improve much with them.

Field 1 (The original small field in backyard):
Year 1: Potatoes
Year 2: Canola
Year 3: Corn
Current year: Canola. Just as cash crop. Possibly to feed to pigs instead.

Field 2 (The bigger field north on same plot):
Year 1: Barley/Oats
Year 2: Canola
Year 3: Soybeans
Current year: Barley - Just keeping crop rotation - Cereal, Oilseed, Legume - Likely cash crop

Field 3 (East of field 2):
Year 1: Fallow
Year 2: Fallow
Year 3: Barley
Current year: Canola - Cash crop

Field 4 (South of field 3, east of lake):
Year 1: Fallow
Year 2: Fallow
Year 3: Canola
Current year: Grass - Make it a grass field to see what the yield is there..

Field 5 (West of farm):
Year 1: Fallow
Year 2: Fallow
Year 3: Oats
Current year: Canola - Cash crop

Field 6 (Large field out west):
Year 1: Fallow
Year 2: Fallow
Year 3: Soybeans
Current year: Canola - Cash crop
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