Big day on the farm today.. First two cows are arriving..
We calculated that we likely have oats for four horses until we are able to harvest, so we found two more horses to take care of to get a bit more of a cash flow. Will try to use income from the extra horses to buy cows. Good to try and get them in as early as possible so they can soon get pregnant.
It's already late August and still nothing ready to harvest. Lets hope we don't have to wait long into September before we can harvest. The start of September looks to have good harvest weather, but after that the weather forecast doesn't seem that good..
Last edited by humbe on Fri May 29, 2020 7:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.
At the start of September our barley and oats crop finally got ready for harvest, and we found a window to harvest it before the bad weather sets in. I wondered if Fergie was able to pull this harvester at all, so thought I had to try first to see how uncle might have done it. Though, from what I hear, this machine was new to uncle too, and he used to do it by hand. No wonder he didn't have a bigger field.
The lowest tech option I found for harvesting grain, and the only option I found that wasn't a self-propelled harvester. Sadly this model don't get dirty and don't get paint damage. At 2.5m working width and 1500 liter storage, it's not a very efficient machine. As it is the lowest tech option available, and Fergie drives horribly slow with it, I removed the powerConsumer setting in the mod so Fergie could use it. But now that I have a tractor with huge amount of hp (72) I reverted it back to default after testing Fergie on it.
I like it.. Though it would be great if it got dirty and got some paint damage too.. And would be nice if there were other low tech alternatives too.
It takes a lot of effort to harvest with this gear. The low working width is one thing, making it take quite a while, but the small tank size causing constant need to empty it, and us not having a trailer with more than 3000 liter capacity felt worse. Barley done. Around 18.000 liters in total. Felt little compared to the effort, but then we're used to more modern machinery. A self-propelled harvester and a bigger trailer would be great additions next year if we can afford it.
Last edited by humbe on Fri May 29, 2020 7:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Mid September has passed. Harvesting of oats and barley is finally done. Potatoes aren't ready to harvest yet though.
Ended up with around 13.000 liters of barley, 32.000 liters of oat and 255.000 liters of straw.
I've got 53.000 liters of silage stored away and around 90.000 liters more in bunker silo. Wondering if I'll just leave it there until I need it or if I should go at it with a front loader again. There's more grass to get if we want to give it another try, but we should have silage for quite a while already, and the work is tiresome. Also.. Taking advantage of the area around to get grass for own usage is one thing, but if we started to sell it in large quantities someone might wonder, so we'll not sell any grass or grass products, but just use it for ourselves. Then we should have plenty for a while.
The guy we're keeping horses for is satisfied with our operation and has recommended us to some friends, so now we've managed to fill the new horse pen and we have 8 horses there. That will increase our income, and hopefully we'll get more cows soon. Increasing the size of our chicken coop would be good too. We've gotten some chicks here now, so our coop is getting too small, and we've yet to fill our first 150 l egg box. At 104 liters now.
Oh.. And it would be great to afford buying that cow food mixer at Stephens junkyard. I might be able to get it for around 7-8 thousand dollars.
And finally the potatoes are ready for harvest and we get to test out the Lanz LK-30.
Where on earth did uncle get a hold of this old gear? It's slow going at 3 kph, but max working speed for it is 4 kph. Working width is 80 cm. At least I don't need a haulm topper first to get it to work. This WILL be the last time I use it. No more potatoes How did uncle pick up the potatoes? I guess he used hands or shovel. At least we have a front loader, but that doesn't sound like a good option either. But then the field is small so we'll manage.
Nice little mod. Originally green, but with lots of paint damage all paint is gone. Ridiculously low working width and speed. Courseplay don't support working widths below 1 meter and this is 0.8. It's slow as hell to drive it too. And while Fergies wheel are small enough to drive between the rows its wheels don't count as narrows, so with crop protection of it destroys the crop before I can harvest it. Hard to not destroy at least half the crop with the wheels, so I ended up turning crop protection off for the harvesting.
Last edited by humbe on Fri May 29, 2020 7:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.
It took some time to harvest potatoes at 3kph with 0.8m working width. Ended up late before we managed to get the potatoes off the field.. Guessing a front loader isn't the usual equipment to get potatoes into storage, but it beats the bucket and spade by miles.
Got a few minor spots I missed, but I'm ending up with about 70 thousand liters of potatoes. Quite a lot considering my biggest trailer can carry 3.000 liters. The trailer size has been the biggest pain point in harvesting season. Will have to try and do something about that for next year..
Last edited by humbe on Fri May 29, 2020 7:46 pm, edited 2 times in total.
It's the last day of September and winter is coming. It's raining, but hey.. We've got a tractor with a roof now. Bring it on!
Figgered we'd start preparing for next year.. Fertilizing, cultivating (plowing for the potato field), fertilizing again and then sow oilseed radishes. Then we can just cultivate and sow when spring comes and be able to sow early in case the winter is short. Fertilizing with the old D028 sprayer is really one of the more enjoyable tasks. The 10m working width seems massive compared to our other tools, and it can hold a decent 600 liters of fertilizer, so we don't need to refill often with our relatively small fields. Also, as we now have a tractor able to drive it lifted off the ground, it's easy to maneuver. While a lot of bad things can be said about these old tractors, at least they have pretty good turning circles when they're not pulling anything.
This patch of withered crop annoyed me. It's the only patch we got on the ground, and everything would have looked so nice and clean without it, but we don't know what we could have done to have avoided it. Did it get too little sun close to those trees?
With the new horses, we are getting a steady decent income of ~$6000 per month after deducting property maintenance and living costs for the family. Currently we're using that income to invest in cows, and today we picked up two more, giving us 5 in total. Sadly it seems impossible to get cows with a calf, or pregnant cows, so none of them are ready for milking yet, and none seems to be pregnant yet either. We've picked Holstein as a race, as we'd like to produce milk. We get attached to our cows, so sending them off to be slaughtered isn't popular.
We need to think forwards soon though, and figure out what we need money for in the future in case we need to start saving up some soon.
Last edited by humbe on Fri May 29, 2020 7:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.
We're going to sell most of the potatoes I think, so looks like that might be around $14.000 if we find a good price. Current price is $176 though, so hopefully it can rise a bit. The oats and barley is worth something too, but I think it's worth more as animal food, so we'll hang on to that for now. Since we gathered massive amounts of hay that's also worth quite a bit, but we're not selling that either. We need it for animal food, and we don't want to get questions about where we got that hay.
So.. What's the biggest pain points from the current season? We'd think we'd be bothered by the working width, but that wasn't the worst.
Seeding was tedious with only 100 liters of seed storage in the seeder, causing constant need to refill.
Harvesting was also rough, with small storage in harvester and a small trailer to fill up into. The harvester was also hard to drive around. As it's not in front, it was hard to find a way to harvest without destroying parts of the crop. Going from headlands and inwards was possible, but as we had split the field in two, we had to drive through the split.
The hay operation was also very tedious. Max 6500 liter capacity of the loading wagon made us drive back and forward over and over again. We cut way more grass than we should. But hopefully we'll be good for quite a while.
Making silage was also tedious. We expected it might be more of an effort to compress it as we had no good weight to drive around with. And if we had one, our tractors would likely have issues moving it .. But we could drive with the tractor only, and it didn't take that long. Moving silage from bunker to our storage building was a lot more tedious though, as we'd have to use a front loader bucket to unload it. A conveyor belt here would have been awesome.
The island in field 2 has also been a bit annoying. Made it more complex to figure out where we should drive, especially during harvester with the trailer to the side.
I do remember Stephen had some interesting equipment in his yard.. Like a bigger trailer, a bigger seeder, and a self-propelled harvester.. I guess we'll have to check up on him how much he wants for some of that gear. The old Bizon harvester there would have been awesome to get our hands on, but it's probably cost quite a bit.
While cultivating/plowing we have tried to measure the size of our fields. We measure field 1 to 0.327025 hectares, and field 2 to 2.929575 hectares. Probably with way too many decimals in calculation but what do we know about math?
Oh yes.. Great demand at root crop sell point my cellphone suddenly said.. Awesome.. If it hadn't been for carrots.. Grmpf.. Potato prices are increasing at least. Now at $190. Price early September was much better though. Strange that the highest sell price we've seen was during harvest season. I guess we'll hang onto the potatoes a bit more to see how price change.
Went and took another look at the junkyard to get some price estimates from Stephen, to see what possibly could be doable..
Here's the picture we took last time..
There's a reasonably large Fliegl trailer there which would be an awesome upgrade during harvest, and possibly for grass/hay/silage operations too. As it stands it has 11300 liters capacity, and it's possible to buy more wall pieces and get it up to 18600 liters capacity. It's not that old and fully functional so Stephen isn't willing to sell it cheap though. He says he wants $18.000 for it. Damn Stephen.. We can buy a brand new Farmtech TDK 1600 trailer for $19.000 and that's 14.000 liter capacity, and we can get a new basic Strautmann Sek 802 trailer with 12.000 liters capacity for $12.000. I manage to bargain the price down to $15.000.
A real harvester would be a great upgrade. The old Bizon harvester looks very interesting. There's another old scrapheap of a harvester that's probably considerably cheaper, but it only has 18000 liter capacity, which is just a little bit more than the harvester trailer we have now. Stephen wants to sell them with their matching headers. The old scrapheap I can have for $7.000. While the internal storage is a minor upgrade for my trailer, the added working width, ability to harvest corn and the fact that it's self propelling so I harvest what I drive over is appealing in itself. The old Bizon with its headers, Stephen says he wants $52.000 for. That's a lot of dollars, but I guess still cheap compared to buying a new one.
The TMR mixer for cow food would also be interesting, especially when we in a years time start getting milk production. I'm guessing we'd get more milk if we had good food. This old piece of junk Stephen wants $7.000 for.
I guess that covers the gear that looks most interesting at this time. He also has a seeder with 3m working width, but which still only hold 150 liters of seed and has lower working speed than the Hassia so not sure if it's worth it. I guess I should maybe rather keep saving for the Amazone D8 30. Though even the basic new Amazone still requires more horsepower than we currently have available.
Last edited by humbe on Fri May 29, 2020 7:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Winter is getting closer. It's late in November already. We have grown oilseed radishes and fertilized both before and afterwards, so now the soil should be fully fertilized and cultivated. Only seeding and weeding remains for next year before the harvest.
We had enough fertilizer with a small margin. Only around 500 liters left. But as we did it so early we would have plenty of time to restock in time anyhow. We have around 2300 liters of seed remaining which we expect is enough to seed next year, but we might as well restock a bit before just in case. We've got 4800 liter lime left. Not a lot, but we don't need any before several years from now unless we get money to buy a new land plot. 2147 liters of diesel left in the tank. Would be good to restock there too, though we likely have enough until next fall I'm guessing.
Getting a couple of cows now and then as we get income from horses, we're now up to seven holstein cows, and one of them has become pregnant. This time next year, we'll drink self-produced milk.
Mom thought it was about time to clean up a bit around the farmyard, so I took the seeder and moved down some of the weed here to make it look a bit cleaner.
We can't think of much to do now but to wait.. I guess we can get some more cows, but we should start saving money for other things soon too. A trailer would be very nice. Not looking forward to selling 70.000 liters of potatoes using a 3000 liter trailer. Wonder if Stephen would be open for me to buy the trailer, but let me use it to haul the potatoes before actually paying him. If I can afford it that is.. Would be good to restock on fertilizer, seeds and diesel too as that is critical resources.
I guess next year we might grow Canola or something to just earn cash after harvest selling it, to help my crop rotation, as I think I'll have enough oats and wheats for next year too anyhow. That should leave us more money after next harvest, so maybe we should rather try to save our money to then and hopefully be able to buy another plot of land where we can earn a lot of money on logging and then make fields there.
But I unzipped it and exchanged one of the texture files to make it look like it a wooden building instead of a brick building. I pretend it's where we manually stack crates and store leftover bits, such as our potatoes, but to not waste too much real time managing it, it is nice that it's a silo storing anything. Using the other storage buildings for what they are intended for though. Only used this shed to store potatoes and silage, and leftover hay after I managed to get to max capacity of the hay barn.
We stopped buying cows after we got eight. It costs a lot of money to buy cows, so I guess we'll breed the rest ourselves. We also took down a couple of trees more to make some extra space close to field, and ended up with a bit over $7.000 for that, and by selling our first batch of 150 liter eggs, we managed to stockpile $14.000 when the SMS suddenly ticked in that there was demand for potatoes in the village. $221 per 1000 liters. I think the price was above that some time during summer, but it sounds like a decent price, so think we'll sell. We gotta make some good will at the settlement too.
Stephen wanted $15.000 for the trailer though, but giving him a downpayment of $14.000 he was ok with getting the last $1000 after I have driven back to fetch the first load of potatoes.
It's 09:15 and we've been up for hours caring for our animals, but the shop in the settlement is still closed. I see lights in a few windows at least, but I think I woke up Stephen. The bakery was open at least. We see that winter has come though, as the sunrise is getting later and later.
Last edited by humbe on Fri May 29, 2020 7:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
How did uncle pick up the potatoes? I guess he used hands or shovel. At least we have a front loader, but that doesn't sound like a good option either. But then the field is small so we'll manage.
