Aborting studies to help gramps farming in Calmsden

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humbe
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Re: Aborting studies to help gramps farming in Calmsden

Post by humbe »

paul_c wrote: Tue Feb 01, 2022 12:04 am Smaller header trailers are close-couple axle(s), its the bigger ones which are dolly and a PITA to reverse. When I worked on an actual farm, there was more reversing than there should have been (because the farmyard was quite compact, no space to do curves or turns) and after a while reversing trailers was a not-too-bad task, but dolly trailers would have been a complete pain and unworkable. It wasn't just the steering its getting through tight gaps backwards.
I guess close-couple axle is the term.. Never knew what to call it in English ;D.. After seeing that the JD T560 has the biggest header that fits on the biggest header trailer with close couple axles, and also seeing that it can drive at 40 kph when not working, it is growing on me.. Really sad to see it go unbought in used sales, but getting up to £410.000 loan to secure it for later harvests will cost us quite a bit on interest. Sad.. Already will be paying quite a bit of interest on tractor loan, so looking forward to see how fast we can pay that down..
humbe
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Joined: Sat Jan 18, 2020 9:33 pm

Re: Aborting studies to help gramps farming in Calmsden

Post by humbe »

Mowing is a breeze with the new Pottinger setup.. Bought the front end new, but that part is cheap compared to the back part.

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Actually, we managed to use both parts even though we're short a few horse powers off the requirement. Maybe we can hold of the money for the engine upgrade for a while. Pretty sure the requirement was strict in FS19. Also, I thought it was possible to connect the two mower bits so we could have both in front or back. That way we could turn more without missing bits in between. As it is now, I have to turn very slowly to mow everything, or come back for the missed bit.

Now to mow the cow pasture, before deciding whether to make hay or silage. I think we'll be able to mow once more before winter sets in, so if that is the case, we can make silage of this. We need the money..
humbe
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Re: Aborting studies to help gramps farming in Calmsden

Post by humbe »

Grass mowed.. But there's weeds on our newly planted field.. And from previous experience, when we direct drill, those weeds will grow so fast that we can't get them with a weeder once we see them. We'd need a hoe.. And there's only one model for sale and it sadly costs £51.000. Do we shell out for that? Or live with the weed this time around? In fact, we can weed with weeder before the weeds show, but sounds like an exploit. Also, annoying as you don't see where you've been or not on the field.

Talked to gramps.. He'll take a trip to Cirencester and see if he can find a cheap hoe for me. though haven't seen any hoe mods

Thinking we might go for the hoe, but if so, lets at least wait until we see the weeds.
humbe
Posts: 1364
Joined: Sat Jan 18, 2020 9:33 pm

Re: Aborting studies to help gramps farming in Calmsden

Post by humbe »

Suddenly noticed our sheep pen is full.. 200 sheeps in it.. How did that happen without me noticing the 60 new lambs? I understand they don't want to show 200 moving sheeps in the pen, so they max it out at 20 or so, but would be nice if there was a lamb model and you'd show a representable subset of sheep on the pen so you get a visual clue that there's lambs. Would also be nice, if it wasn't a hard cap at 200, but it allowed youngsters to be in there in addition, just lowering overall health or something to not make it wanted.. So you got some time to sell some and decide whether to sell lambs or adults..

Sold 60 sheep to free up space for more lambs and get some income. Dunno whether we should sell the oldest or the youngest. The oldest are fairly young too, but old enough to reproduce. Ended up selling the oldest ones.. They grow fast. And we get quite a bit more cash for the older ones, so a nice side income. £28.000 for the sold animals, pays off 10% of our loan.

After selling sheep, we thought we'd try to see what to do with the bales. Stupidly, we tried without hooking up a back weight.

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We coulda sweared this was a 2WD tractor, and the drive was on the back wheels, but we actually moved forwards uphill while in this position. Dunno how that happened.

After hooking up our weight on the backside of the tractor, we can barely lift it. If lifting it just a bit, we almost have no traction on back wheels, but it kinda works. If we lift it high, the weight is shifted a bit backwards and it isn't a big issue unless we hit the breaks hard.

We hadn't moved many of the bales before we started feeling down though. Are we going to move this amount of bales 3 times a year? Possibly more as we expand? With the surprise money from selling sheep, we figured we'd look for a bale trailer. Sadly we only found one model, which was kinda expensive at £50.500. But as we've upgraded the rest of our grass equipment it would be nice to add this one so we have a good setup.

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Well.. That ups our loan again, but we should earn quite a bit of money selling our harvest, silage and wool too, so I think we're good for it. Even if we might add to loan up for a hoe soon too..

We didn't get the bale size bits right to begin with, so we created a few small ones first, and then we noticed we upped the size, but too big to wrap it. We thus have one massive grass bale too. Trying to see if we can feed that one to the sheep ;) The three smallest ones is closest to the trailer on the picture. Couldn't load'em up together with the rest..

Well.. Come to think of it, we still have to roll the grass.. So I guess we still have one step left to improve gear for later..
paul_c
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Re: Aborting studies to help gramps farming in Calmsden

Post by paul_c »

The Andersen makes a lot of sense!!
humbe
Posts: 1364
Joined: Sat Jan 18, 2020 9:33 pm

Re: Aborting studies to help gramps farming in Calmsden

Post by humbe »

It certainly does.. Looks huge compared to the old international, but it can handle it fairly well actually.. Trying to use the old tractors for a little every day duty, as they are cheap to maintain...

Rolling the grass was tedious, but before August had ended we have completed the 2nd grass harvest this year. Once September hit, we see weeds have appeared on our field, and a hoe is indeed needed as expected. Sadly gramps haven't managed to find me a cheap hoe, so I had to go to the bank yet again and loan money for a new one at the shop. £350.000 loan ;/.. Better start going the other way around. We have invested quite a lot lately.

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We tried pulling the hoe with the international to begin with, but it got too back heavy, so have to use the new tractor. Checking used sales again, we see a grass roller for sale this month.. We just did the tedious work of rolling with the old one, so think we may take that offer too..

The hoe will be awesome with the new seeder though. Will be a good investment..
dimi
Posts: 111
Joined: Wed Nov 21, 2018 4:17 pm

Re: Aborting studies to help gramps farming in Calmsden

Post by dimi »

Your farm is growing nicely with all the new equipment and the new tractor. I must admit i am not usually a huge fan of new Massey's, but that tractor looks great on Calmsden!
humbe
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Joined: Sat Jan 18, 2020 9:33 pm

Re: Aborting studies to help gramps farming in Calmsden

Post by humbe »

dimi wrote: Sat Feb 05, 2022 11:53 pm Your farm is growing nicely with all the new equipment and the new tractor. I must admit i am not usually a huge fan of new Massey's, but that tractor looks great on Calmsden!
Thank you.. I don't know much about the brands but this tractor seems good value for money Given in game stats at least. And it looks nice too ;)..

Hmm.. We wake up a day in October feeling there's a been a shift in the cosmos.

We wake up to go feed the sheep, but something is up.. The troughs are bottomless!! We have fed them by hand, but this time around we fetched the trailer. We still emptied all this into the trough and it don't look half full yet.. What is happening??? :)

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I was actually considering upping the trough size a bit in the mod myself, as I had to get water to the sheep 3x a day, including once during the night. Should at least hold enough to manage from evening to morning so I don't have to do it in the dark. But looks like the sizes have increased a lot more than that.. I don't mind though.. I'm guessing they don't eat more, so I could keep feeding them at my own rhythm, which suits me fine. Think I'm gonna work to fill them up, so they look full, and then see how often I feel like refilling them even though they're probably far from empty at the time. When the troughs are so big, would it be an idea for them to show as full at 20%+ or something, so those wanting to roleplay smaller troughs would be able to fill them so they look full even though there's space for plenty more?

Another change we noticed, is that our water trailer has broken down. It can no longer be refilled from our well. Seems there's something wrong with it.. As it is fairly new, there's still guarantee for it, so the shop is willing to reimburse us the full price of the trailer if we buy another one from them. So we exchanged it with a bigger Joskin trailer for a £6.500 payout to pay the price difference for the bigger trailer.

Not sure what that was about. Sounds strange if map update interferes with a mod placeable and a built in tank.. Whatever.. Found another that works.
humbe
Posts: 1364
Joined: Sat Jan 18, 2020 9:33 pm

Re: Aborting studies to help gramps farming in Calmsden

Post by humbe »

That's the last of the small hay bales going into the cow trough. With 95.968 liters of hay in the trough, the 10 cows should have hay enough for a while I would think.. But final grass cut before winter is coming up, so I guess we will create some more, though this time around in big bales.. Tired of manhandling all these small ones..

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Having full walls on the trailer actually seemed to simplify manhandling a bit, as you don't need to lift the bales above the trailer, you can move through the wall. Not great for immersion though, but was an easy way to get more onto it, without neatly stacking everything. Starting out neatly stacking, but once i forgot I had superstrength enabled, moved the trailer and everything went everywhere, I took a simpler approach ;)
humbe
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Joined: Sat Jan 18, 2020 9:33 pm

Re: Aborting studies to help gramps farming in Calmsden

Post by humbe »

Last grass harvest for the year almost complete. Just some rolling left..

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Massive difference with big bales. Took a few bales before we realized we were still making 150cm bales that the wrapper can handle, but we can make 180cm bales when we don't want to wrap them. So 5 6500 liter bales and 18 9000 liter bales.. That is, if I had created all 180cm, all of them would fit on a single trailer load. Huge difference from manhandling 486 small 400 liter bales for the total of 194500 liters of hay.

I guess we could have made silage for some of it, as we should have plenty hay for the winter, but nice to have an emergency store, and likely we can make first grass harvest past winter a silage run. Now that we have the nice baler and bale trailer, we can also handle straw well, meaning we could do a straw crop next year, and if we managed to get a TMR mixer, be self sufficient for efficient cow food. Once we see we have plenty food and decent way to get more, we will probably get more cows to. The barn over there can handle far more than 10, and it takes a while for them to reproduce.

Would also be nice with a fairly big grass field we could use instead of the pens, so we didn't scare the animals here to get grass. But that'll have to wait until loan is payed down.. Hoping to get a decent income during winter when we can sell of our products for a good price..
humbe
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Joined: Sat Jan 18, 2020 9:33 pm

Re: Aborting studies to help gramps farming in Calmsden

Post by humbe »

November came and we saw a great Canola price of £ 2.17 /l. So we sold our stock for £112.929. In January we sold silage. We tried to sell at the BGA offering the best price, but they didn't want to accept bales. Didn't know how to cut'em open for them, so we ended up selling to the next highest bidder.

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That's £112.545 total for all the silage bales. That pays of quite a bit of loans.. Now left with £145.000 in loans until wool sales in spring..
Managed to sell all the stuff off when there wasn't any snow, so easier to get to the shops.. But nice with the new tractor to get up the hill with a big load..
humbe
Posts: 1364
Joined: Sat Jan 18, 2020 9:33 pm

Re: Aborting studies to help gramps farming in Calmsden

Post by humbe »

Ich.. Triggered a bug that looked to screw up my savegame.

2022-02-10 21:28 Error: Running LUA method 'update'.
dataS/scripts/vehicles/specializations/TensionBelts.lua(448) : attempt to index a nil value
2022-02-10 21:28 Error: Running LUA method 'update'.
dataS/scripts/vehicles/specializations/TensionBelts.lua(448) : attempt to index a nil value
2022-02-10 21:28 Error: Running LUA method 'update'.
dataS/scripts/vehicles/specializations/TensionBelts.lua(448) : attempt to index a nil value
2022-02-10 21:28 Error: Running LUA method 'update'.
dataS/scripts/vehicles/specializations/TensionBelts.lua(448) : attempt to index a nil value
2022-02-10 21:28 Error: Running LUA method 'update'.

This seems to trigger once I try to get the Orkel TX130 trailer into silage configuration. If I try to customize it in shop the customized trailer seems to come on top of the existing one, and the game basically freeze up, though I can tab and escape vehicle once but can't move or anything... Initial configuration is the max one with cover on top.. Strange though. Have changed this several times before and it has worked, and the trailer is empty. Even if I just change the configuration in vehicles.xml it still fails spectacularly.

The savegame lists 5 tension belts where the last one says isActive="true".. Which seems strange, as I've never used any tension belts on this one. Setting isActive="false" on the last tension belt I seem to get around the issue..


Oh.. Almost forgot about our silage pit.. Tried to get the old forager to get it up in the trailer again, but it turns out it can only handle grass. No longer gonna use that one, so drove it over to the shop get a few pounds for it. Need a plan to empty the silage pit.. It has 166444 liters of silage, so our 450 liter bucket on the frontloader is hardly an option.. Guess we'll have to get the conveyor belt down here.
humbe
Posts: 1364
Joined: Sat Jan 18, 2020 9:33 pm

Re: Aborting studies to help gramps farming in Calmsden

Post by humbe »

The conveyor belt saved us here. Making the tiresome job to make 11 runs with our trailer, rather than using a front loader throughout the month.

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We first tried to sell to highest bidder, the BGA, but we didn't find anything accepting silage at the spot we were told about. We ended up dumping our first load of silage into a container there, and can't seem to get it out, but it seemed that was a production plant that can convert silage to energy and digestate, but the plant is inactive until someone buys it if I understand it correctly.

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No mirrors on our old tractor, but we can see we're dumping from the shadows moving.. Nice ;D

All in all we made £90.619 from the silage we actually managed to sell. Though we want to fire our accountant that has put this silage income in harvest income, but our baled silage income into sold bales post.

That leaves us only £45.000 left of our loan. We should get well into positive numbers after we sell wool in spring.
humbe
Posts: 1364
Joined: Sat Jan 18, 2020 9:33 pm

Re: Aborting studies to help gramps farming in Calmsden

Post by humbe »

We see a fancy self-propelled TMR mixer in here. Looks tempting to scale up milk production, though we have no idea what the added value is for these self-propelled ones, compared to the much cheaper tractor handled trailers.

Is the main difference that they can take the products in bulk from the ground with the gear in front there? Tempting to buy just to test it out ;)

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humbe
Posts: 1364
Joined: Sat Jan 18, 2020 9:33 pm

Re: Aborting studies to help gramps farming in Calmsden

Post by humbe »

We didn't buy the TMR mixer.. It's expensive..

April is here. And we're preparing to sell wool.. We've acquired quite a bit from last April.

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Looks like it's time for first cut of grass too. But it's raining, so lets wait until it dries up some at least..
Stocking up first load of wool to see, we notice that the sheep are well trained here..

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Prices of wool are still rising though. So unsure whether we're going to sell wool first or cut the grass. We'll figure it out..
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