After sowing potatoes, it's time to start sowing barley. As barley sell for less, I'm guessing it gives higher yield, and assuming chickens eat the same amount of either, barley sounds best to feed them. Not sure if the assumption holds water though.
The Hassia looks really old. Felt I had to use old Fergie to use it. Seems to work out ok. Though with a 2.2m working width, it'll take some time to sow this field. It only holds 100 liters of seed too, so I'm keeping seed big bags on the pickup to have refill close. Low tech auger wagon
This works with Fergie, but there's a strange issue. If I drive manually, I only get to 1-4 kph.. But as soon as I enable cruise control or use a worker, it goes 11 kph easy. Not sure what this is, but have seen the same on some other gear that Fergie struggles to use.
This also has issues using bulk sources of seed. I've only managed to fill it from big bags. I love the looks of it though. Fits this scenario perfectly. I guess I will be just using big bags until I get a seeder that works from bulk. Possibly converting seed from silo to big bags by editing savegame. Seed left over can be placed back in a big bag.
It does get a little dirty and get some paint damage which is great ..
The picture above is while engaging courseplay, so I got a random worker up on the tractor. I'll be using courseplay a bit, especially in tedious operations, but I'll never do more in parallel than the number of family members I'm supporting, so nothing in parallel right now. I will keep on driving myself too, but nice to be able to do writeups like this while the tractor is running. Using enough time on the game as is Courseplay isn't exactly autoplay when seeder takes 100 liters of seed though. Gotta keep attention to get anything done.
Last edited by humbe on Fri May 29, 2020 7:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Decided to plant some saplings, to see how sustainable logging can be. For $3.400 we managed to buy tools to plant saplings by hand, and for another $1.000 we bought 20 saplings that we planted around our farmyard, where they likely won't get in the way of future expansions. Will be interesting to see how long time they use to grow.
Cash flow thus down to $5.515. Better ensure I keep some cash around as Kent will want a salary when he gets here too.
Found this interesting mod to plant sapplings by hand that fitted this scenario. Had some issues picking up the spade from the misc placeable with equipment. Nothing seemed to appear in the shortcut key list (F1), and clicking failed to do anything. But suddenly I managed to just left-click and get the space equipped, and then I could just go to pallet with sapplings and pick some up with left-clicking.
Last edited by humbe on Fri May 29, 2020 7:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Fertilizing with the new Massey works pretty fine. It manages to keep the fertilizers max working speed of 15 kph pretty much everywhere, and the fertilizer usage isn't that high, so I don't need to refill it a ton of times, as I needed to when applying lime, or seeding with the Hassia. Fertilizer is still fairly expensive though, so I will probably try to use Oilseed Radish at the end of season.
I don't have any tractors with narrow wheels, so important to fertilize before I get into second growth stage here. Fertilized before seeding and now after seeding, and will do final pass after first growth stage.
At least there's one positive thing with my old, small equipment. I can have a very small turning circle when driving back and forth the field
A bit sad that I haven't found any old tractors with narrow wheels. They generally have few options. Little Fergie has so narrow wheels anyhow that the default ones could count as narrows.
Last edited by humbe on Fri May 29, 2020 7:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.
The first weeds showed up in northeast corner of the farm.. We grabbed our hand weeder and went up there.. But after removing the visible weeds, the soil still doesn't look good. We thought we saw an old, small weeder up at Stephens junkyard, so we drove up there to buy it. It's in shoddy condition so we got it for $400. With that one we managed to clear away the roots of the weeds too..
I was hoping for the hand weeder to work ok, but sadly it seems like the weed is an area on the field, with occasional visible plants. It's easy enough to remove the visible weeds, but it's hopeless to use this tool to cover the entire area as there's no visual clues as to what areas remain.. So ended up getting the weeder that has a working width and can get all..
May has come, and I'm about go drive through the muddy roads again to fetch Kent. He's been taking a train and switching to a bus, but he's still 65 miles from here where the bus passes the closest, so it'll be a day trip to go fetch him. One thing he definitively will be in charge of is weeding. I'm getting annoyed at removing all the weeds popping up from nowhere.
We've got $6.493 in cash currently. The hoss owner has been more happy with us as his horses gets in better shape and he has actually payed us $984 for caring for them the first half of May. That's almost $2.000 for one month.
That gives us what looks like a steady and sustainable income for our family. The minimum budget we had set up in the family before I left, was $500 per season (3 months), $166 per month per person, which isn't much at all to write home about, but it was what we could afford on dad's salary. For all 6 family members that's $1.000 per month, and we're already fetching almost $2.000 a month caring for two horses.
So I'm calling up the rest of the family and saying they can come join me when they want to, and I'm setting aside $2.000 per month from now on, doubling our budget to $333 per month per person. Not a luxurious salary by any means, but a big step up. Hopefully we can double the budget again later to get a decent living standard for everyone. Shouldn't take too much time before we can possibly do that, but for now, lets keep some money to invest in the farm for the future.
(I'll turn weeding off and say Kent's handling it. I'm paying him enough anyhow, so the rest of the family should have some chores too. It was pretty annoying without having a sprayer available to do the entire field once a year)
Adjusting daily income on log cabin to -38.88 which should amount to -$1000 per day and as we're in 6 day season that should be $2.000 per month and $1000 per tracked day.
I guess that is already half the original game goal, having already onboarded the whole family and doubled the initial broke budget.
Went and picked up Kent. Just in time for putting him to work weeding
First growth stage has come, and we have done the final fertilization pass, so all that is left is to watch for weeds and await harvest season. In the meantime we expect grass around here being ready to cut as soon as June comes. That will make us a lot of extra work.
The rest of the family is likely to come join us in June sometime.
Contractor Modhttps://fs19.net/farming-simulator-2019 ... mod-v-1-0/
Got the contractor mod working and have defined up 4 contractors for my family. My two youngest siblings ain't old enough to work, so it's me, Kent and mom and dad. Turned off vehicle explorer and save player position to get it working, and also disabled cowboy hat for now, as I found no way to give only me a hat.
Also found a way to add passenger seat to the Ford.
Last edited by humbe on Fri May 29, 2020 7:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Caring for animals, we're running out of hay. Got hay for a few days more. We better be able to cut and dry hay in June or we'll run out, and the weather forecast doesn't look pretty for the start of June. We seem to have plenty of other resources for now though. Ran a check to see how much animals consumer per day, and found that currently the two horses use 107 l oat, 320l hay, 967 l water and 162 l straw per day. Not sure if that's going to stay static through the year. I guess they might eat more in winter when it's cold. We should have plenty of straw and oat until harvest season, but need more before next year.
Grass should soon be fully grown though. Should we only make hay? Would be great to get silage too. We'll want to get cows at some time, and silage would be useful, but we don't have a baler. Baling equipment is more than we can afford currently. Could we manage to make grass silage in silage bunker? Will we be able to use the old equipment there to load up wet grass into our loading wagon? I saw an old loading wagon at Stephen's which is probably cheap if we need another way to load grass. There's also an old TMR mixer there. If we could get a hold of that one, and make silage, together with hay and possibly straw we could make TMR for cows when we get some.
Once we have gotten grass/hay/silage we'd also like to get some cows, but cows cost money. Where should we get that money? Should we try to log some more for money? Should we try to make a bigger horse or chicken pen to try and make more money there? Or should we sell part of the crops for money when we get to harvest?
When the whole family gets here, Ira and Ron won't be old enough to do real work, but I may be able to get them to care for horses for instance, so maybe a horse pen extension would be good. Horse income seems great at least, but my butt is aching enough after riding two every day.
June has come and the grass around here is fully grown.. We've decided to mow the meadows around here that aren't our land, but I don't think anyone will detect it and it will grow back fast. It's government property anyhow and I'm pretty sure they don't care.
The old mower seems to be working, even though the curtains are gone so the grass is spraying everywhere. It's a bit heavy though, so Fergie is easily getting on the back wheel, especially when accelerating. I guess we should rather use the MF, but I thought Kent might use that to try and collect the grass and that equipment looks much larger.
This was the oldest, crappiest mower I could find, but even that was inoperable by Fergie. As I wanted Fergie to be able to do basic farming, I unpacked the mod and commented out the <powerConsumer ...> tag that sets how much power is needed to use it. After that it works, but is still a bit too heavy. I guess I could have reduced mass too, but it kind of works, and that is enough. Just needs to be plausible.
Last edited by humbe on Fri May 29, 2020 7:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.
While I'm mowing, Kent is collecting the grass.. Rain is coming in at noon, so this won't become hay anyhow, but would be nice to get some silage too.
First time we're testing out the bunker silo. Hope we do it the right way. Looks like it'll become a mess with the make shift walls here though
With 6500 liter capacity on the grass wagon, and a pretty big working width on the grass thrower, windrowing makes no sense. It fills up in no time anyhow..
Nice mod with older tech to get hay/straw into loading wagon. Modified it to accept regular grass too, as I've seen my uncle using something similar to get wet grass into loading wagon, so this sounds like a lower tech option than going for an automatic loading wagon.
Configurable trailer that gets worn and dirty, does not have floating front axle and works with furashir above. It's not old, but adding wear and dirt to begin with, it doesn't look that bad. Best option I could find.
Last edited by humbe on Fri May 29, 2020 7:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.
It's been raining the first part of June. We've put the last remains of hay into the horse pen, but the content will hopefully last a while still. The rain has stopped and the grass moisture is just short of 20% so we're hoping to be able to make hay. Mowing with low working width is one thing, but the job is really gathering it up, as our hay wagon has the capacity of 6500 liter, which is about 1.5 bales. While working as hired hands we moved 16 bales at a time, so this feels like a terrible effort to do very little.
We've gathered some grass that's fermenting in the bunker silo, we screwed up covering it up too fast, while having more grass to put there, expecting to be able to remove the covering and fill it up more, but that isn't recommended I see. We can always fetch more later though. We probably will get more than enough silage for whatever many cows we will afford to have a year forward from now on. Though more due to the latter being not many :/
Last edited by humbe on Fri May 29, 2020 7:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.
It's late July.. We have 144 liters of Hay left in the horse pen.. But the grass finally dried up, so we can start gathering up hay. Looks like we'll have hay for a long time forwards. Kent did a massive amount of work getting all this grass mowed. By now the rest of the family has arrived, and we'll be taking turns on the massive job of getting all this hay into the barn. Unless the barn burns down, we'll have hay for a long time coming I think.
While I'm doing a late shift to try and get all the hay loaded into the barn, Kent is trying to unload the silage bunker.. A lot of work to clean out the bunker, when all you have to help yourself with is a front loader and a 3000 liter trailer.
Last edited by humbe on Fri May 29, 2020 7:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Got together for a family photo.. Hard to take one though..
Mom.. You could smile once in a while. It's not that horrible out in the outback.. And we have gotten our own farm!! Kent.. Turn around and talk to dad later..
Player doesn't seem to face in the direction I was facing when I tabbed, so it was hard to create a shot. I like the concept of the contractor mod.. Now, if I enable courseplay, the tractor still shows the character I entered it with inside. I can tab to another character, but if I leave the vehicle courseplay stops it. Still using 3rd person mod though, so that's confusing if I enter 3rd person view as I see main character regardless.
Did another attempt at using the bunker silo. Now I've got around 90.000 liters of chaff in it.
Not looking forward to unload that with a front loader. Was tiresome the last time. We spilled a lot less to the sides this time around though. We avoided driving too close to the edges when compacting it, and used the front loader to put some of the spilled out chaff back in before covering it up, so think we got most of it in there. Cut a tree back there to have easier access on other side.
All in all happy with the silage bunker, though it's a ton of work to use it with current equipment, and still the 90.000 liters in there is less than 25 bales. Grass silage in bales seems to be a lot easier option to get silage.
Last edited by humbe on Fri May 29, 2020 7:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.
July is nearing the end, and hopefully we can start harvesting grains some time in August. Potato harvest season doesn't start before September sets in.
Now that we have plenty silage and have filled every corner with hay, it would be great to get some cows, but we're short of cash. The current horse income isn't enough to cover the family expenses, and we've got some farm expenses on top of that. We need another income source. We will likely sell the potatoes, and I guess we can consider selling barley or oats too if we get more than we need for chickens/horses and we get a decent price.
Also considering chopping into the bank and thin out the forest behind the hay barn a bit, to sell some logs to buy cows. We won't start getting good milk income before a year after getting cows though, so it'll be a rough venture with our cash flow situation.
We will get plenty horse and chicken food though. I guess it's an option to get a bigger pen. A bigger horse pen would certainly bring some well needed cash if we find more horses that needs taking care of.
While Ira and Ron aren't old enough for most farm work, I think they'll like caring for the horses. They will get the responsibility of riding and training the horses. We ended up cutting down some of the large trees in the small forest behind the barn to afford materials to whip together a bigger horse paddock. Surprisingly costly in materials even though me and dad made it very simple.
Hoping to find more horses to take care of, and new income we can use to buy cows. Might wait until we have harvested oats though.
Tried to get Horse Helper working, but it seems it doesn't work with seasons mod. But there's a horse helper script included in Global Company mod that we got working. Unzipped it and edited the script to remove the cost, as we're already paying Ira and Ron quite a bit elsewhere, so this work is expected from their share of the farm income.
The pen has a 4 horse capacity, but thinking I might up it to 8. It's 4x the size of my other pen and almost 4x the price of building at $30.000.
Last edited by humbe on Fri May 29, 2020 7:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.
