Aborting studies to help gramps farming in Calmsden

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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 »

Almost outta gas.. Where does gramps usually refuel? Driving to Cirencester seems a long way off to drive with a tractor. No gas station around here.. A fuel truck regularily visits, and uncle Simon has a diesel tank he fills up when the tanker is here.. So for now, we're buying our fuel from Simon.. Lets get up there and refuel.. Nice little farmyard uncle has up here.

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Oh,.. And £20 in tractor repairs and £4 for baler, after the baling effort..

I guess it's time to test out the grass roller to see if we can get the grass growing back up again fast..
humbe
Posts: 1364
Joined: Sat Jan 18, 2020 9:33 pm

Re: Aborting studies to help gramps farming in Calmsden

Post by humbe »

And £39 in tractor maintenance after grass rolling.. Didn't check out the roller, but shouldn't need repairs.. Grass roller worked just fine, though at 2.9m working width takes some time, and one can't raise it, so it'll roll whatever it goes over, whether wanted or not. Thought I was able to leave a few bits of hay laying around to not have to pick up every little bit, but after seeing it easier after rolling, I just had to get every last bit ;)..

That's bale gathering.. I think we have something like 161 small bales now.. What an effort.. Starting with 16 and using 4 to feed, that's 149 from mowing. Field is fully fertilized after grass rolling..

Hmm.. Map says needs to plow and lime though.. Does that have any effect? Field info says 100% fertilized, but only 68% yield bonus. Maybe grass bonus just don't go as high as grain?

It seems our 40 sheep is eating around 3 bales worth of hay per day.. Given that that stays constant through a year, that is 36 bales in a year, which should mean we have plenty to last over winter. Maybe even so many that we can invest in some more sheep? I think the pasture should be able to hold like 200. Buying lambs is a lot cheaper than buying adults one. As we don't have much money, we could for instance buy 120 lambs to get to 160 sheep, so we have some room for when lambs start appearing by themselves. 120 lambs should cost us around $24.000, though we have no trailer to carry them in, so maybe we need to pay for transport too. That's another $3.600. Hmm.. We might be able to save some money leasing an animal trailer. As we get closer to 200 though, it might be useful to have a small animal trailer to be able to sell excess sheep, but the cheapest one we've seen is $15.000 grand, which is quite a bit of money to use on it now.

A leased animal trailer is a pretty big one too though. Not sure how it will be to hook up to our old small tractor. I've asked gramps to be on the lookout for a small animal trailer, to see what we can dig up.
humbe
Posts: 1364
Joined: Sat Jan 18, 2020 9:33 pm

Re: Aborting studies to help gramps farming in Calmsden

Post by humbe »

Gramps called me back and had managed to dig up a small animal trailer for sale for only $5.000.. Together with the cost for animals, that leaves us with very little money left, but hoping to earn some money selling lambs at some point, so ending up buying it so we'll have it for later.. Looks shiny at least.. Has no roof, but we're not going to transport the animals far either, and can pick a decent weather day to do it too..

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The road to the animal dealership is really steep. We end up in first gear and just make it up the hill.. When we get on top, we just have to take a break and admire the scenery. From here we can see far..

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(High res image. Open in separate tab to view details) I just love how I can know look into the horizon and it looks real !! I've got render distance to see trees not only on the other side of this field, but on the other side of the next one too, and the backdrop looks gorgeous too. Not to mention being able to see the sown rows of crop on the field to the left on the other side of the road, all the way over that field too. Canapy of the trees look great. Only sad thing is vehicles not moving the canapy, so driving a vehicle with a high cab, the branches comes into the cab. Not an issue on my tractor though ;)

Ten sheep seems to fit well into the hangar, and it's small enough to not be an issue on our small tractor. Cost us some money, but looks to be a nice buy..

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(Galucho Transcow mod, not off the modhub. Cheapest / smallest animal trailer I could find)
humbe
Posts: 1364
Joined: Sat Jan 18, 2020 9:33 pm

Re: Aborting studies to help gramps farming in Calmsden

Post by humbe »

Getting back to the sheepyard, I get a call from gramps.. Simon has had an accident.. I gotta hurry up to his farmyard...

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He was trying to hook up his trailer but it slipped on the hill and his legs have been crushed between tractor and the trailer. Ouch.. I secure the trailer, and move the tractor slightly forwards to get him free. Then me and aunt Maggie is trying to put on some bandages to at least stop some bleeding, but his leg is broken in multiple places and we see a bone sticking out.. Eeew..

Heavy machinery isn't to joke with.. An ambulance finally makes it into the backcountry and gets him of to the closest hospital.. A few days later we see activity around the town. Some lawyers have turned up.. Seems Simon had some loans, and now that he's not able to work, they are terminating his loans as he no longer will have an income to deal with it. A week later me and gramps goes to visit in the hospital.. Simon is in a wheelchair. He says he likely aint gonna walk again, but otherwise he'll live. Long story short, without any kids to take over his farm, he's wondering if I could take over running what's left. The bank took his best land, and his newest machinery, but the farmyard, some gear too old to have value and a field is still left over after the bank robbed him.
humbe
Posts: 1364
Joined: Sat Jan 18, 2020 9:33 pm

Re: Aborting studies to help gramps farming in Calmsden

Post by humbe »

Looking over his farmyard, there's a vehicle shop that will come in handy for repairs. There's a silo in there.. Empty it seems. The fuel tank we've seen.. There's also tanks for liquid fertilizer.. Some sheds, and a machine hall with the equipment the bank didn't take.. Here's what's left:

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A tractor, a harvester, a configurable trailer, a fertilize cart, and a forage harvester and a seeder. Oh.. And an old roller laying around outside. Hmm.. That gives us the option to pickup grass/hay/straw without baling it if we want to.. And seeder and harvester could be useful to get started on arable farming on a field. We should check out that field he had left soon. We might need that harvester soon.

Looking at the state of the equipment we get the following:

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And that tips us up to a $300.000 start, though with field 23 that for some reason was worth £0 on the map, and used gear, much of it modded, so very cheap gear to begin with. Without editing in used gear I would have had to start with better gear, but not so much gear. Would probably had some loans to make up for it.
humbe
Posts: 1364
Joined: Sat Jan 18, 2020 9:33 pm

Re: Aborting studies to help gramps farming in Calmsden

Post by humbe »

Lets see if we can dig up this field that we've now got and check out what might be growing there..

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Tested the International McCormick tractor over to the field. It feels a bit stronger than our Massey, and a lot faster. I can drive 50 kph in this one.

What's that for crop? White flower? I don't recognize. Urk.. Potatoes!.. Potatoes?? I guess Simon had a potato harvester that the bank took. Urk. And I was hoping for a crop we had tools to handle. What am I supposed to do with this? Getting through the gate, we see the field is pretty massive. Our sheep pen might be around 2 hectares, in which case I guess this field might be closer to 5 or 6.

Buying potato harvesting equipment sounds out of the question. It's probably way expensive, and even if we found something cheap, it would take forever to get through the field. Well.. Lets drive over to the dealership and evaluate our options.

Ouch.. The dealership only deals with a single self-propelled potato harvester. The Grimme Ventor 4150. They want the ridiculous sum of £599.000 for it. Haha.. As if.. Is it possible to lease one, just for a few days? What?? £30.549 to lease it an hour, and then another £12.579 per hour after that? Insane.. What's your other options..

Well.. Their cheapest option isn't exactly cheap, but the Grimme Evo 290 trailer, at least I can lease for £10.455, and £4.305 per hour which sounds much better. However, it says it needs a tractor with at least 200 hp, and with the field being hilly too, there's no way our old tractors could pull it so we'd have to lease a tractor and a haulm topper too.. A haulm topper would cost us £510 for first hour and £210 per hour after that, and for instance a 220 hp MF 7719 S would cost us £8.542 for an hour and £3.517 each our after that.. That's in total £19.507 for an hour and £8.032 per hour after. Cheaper than the self-propelled, given that 220 hp is enough to work the trailer on our hilly field, but the potato trailer only have a 1.8m working width.

What the working width of the self-propelled harvester is I'm unsure of, but I'm guessing considerably more than 1.8m. For some reason, the salesman doesn't know, but it looks like maybe 3 meters. If we use much more time with the trailer, we'll and up using more money overall leasing anyhow.

Well.. Crop not ready for harvesting before next month, so we have some time to think about it.. There's weeds in the field, and it hasn't been fertilized at all, so the yield bonus isn't all that either.. Come to think of it, maybe I'll have time to fertilize it now before it's too late.. Lets give it a shot..
humbe
Posts: 1364
Joined: Sat Jan 18, 2020 9:33 pm

Re: Aborting studies to help gramps farming in Calmsden

Post by humbe »

Pretty hopeless to avoid overlap and cover all of this field. Have to try and drive towards a fixed point on the other side of the field. Anyhow.. Covered most of it at least. Not gonna waste fertilizer to cover all.

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Fertilizer worked out great though. Can adjust the working width, so I can use a bit less fertilizer when trying to backfill gaps I missed. Thought limited storage in it might mean I had to refill it a lot, but managed to get over the field and back again before needing refill at least.

Unsure how much fertilizer I would be needing, so bought 3 bags, but only used like one and a half I think. Nice with a second tractor to haul the fertilizer.

Now... Can anything be done with the weeds? I guess it might be too late at this stage..
humbe
Posts: 1364
Joined: Sat Jan 18, 2020 9:33 pm

Re: Aborting studies to help gramps farming in Calmsden

Post by humbe »

Think it's too late to do anything with the weeds as they are fully grown.. (Verified testing that spraying did nothing at this point.)

Decided to finish buying lambs while waiting for the potatoes to be ready for harvest..

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Nice that the trailer opens up to let the sheep out.. Would be really nice if they actually walked out, but need to unload manually and then they disappear. Now got 120 sheep in the pasture, but I can't seem to count more in the field.. Looks like only 20 or so is actually showing on the field..
humbe
Posts: 1364
Joined: Sat Jan 18, 2020 9:33 pm

Re: Aborting studies to help gramps farming in Calmsden

Post by humbe »

September has come and we're feeding the sheep. Filling up water in the stream to not need the manual labor of working the pump.

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What is with the insane prices for getting water from a tank? I don't need destilled water? Used to water being free in FS19.
paul_c
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Joined: Thu Nov 25, 2021 4:13 pm

Re: Aborting studies to help gramps farming in Calmsden

Post by paul_c »

You were lucky to come across some bigger equipment. Simon, not so much.....where is his shed located, I've not seen that?
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 »

Ended up leasing a self-propelled potato harvester. This one has a working width confirmed to be considerably higher than the trailed harvesters so I think this will be cheaper than one of those overall.. Still.. £29.478 for the first hour.. *sigh* This'll be stressful as we have to work quickly..
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Will this big piece of machinery even get to the field? The gate north of our farmyard sounds like a potentially hard obstacle. Considered trying other way around, but tested the gate and managed to get through..

Didn't have much time to take photos during the job.. Stressed to borrow the tools as short as possible. Borrowed gramps to hold the wheel on the harvester for when I needed to make quick trips to unload potatoes.

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An enormous amounts. Wonder how this will look when I'm done. Only 18.000 liters of potatoes per haul means we're doing a lot. I was supposed to count them, but I got out of it in the stress and have no idea how much potatoes we're getting ;) Didn't want to drive onto the potatoes, but fear we have to to manage to get all of the potatoes in here..

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With gramps at the wheel we manage to unload at speed to try and finish as fast as possible.

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Wasn't this thing totally clean when we borrowed it? Well.. I don't feel bad not having washed is as we're paying a ton of money to borrow it for a short time. In total we ended up paying a massive £41.616 for the lease. It was a rough continuous 20 hour effort, but finally we made it through.

The lease is in real time.. Had 5 minutes to spare on the second hour of playing before I woulda had to pay even more. Drove it back to the shop, but I guess you can return the leased bits from anywhere without any penalty.

£106 to repair tractor and trailer afterwards.

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That's a lot of potatoes.. How much? I forgot to count how many 18.000 liter dumps we did in here, but I'm guessing at least 10. Lets hope it was worth the effort and we can make a decent profit even with the leased gear.. But it can't help but annoy me, how much more we woulda earned if we didn't need to lease it.

Already starting to wonder how to get this back on the trailer to sell it when the time comes. Considered selling at current low price just to avoid the problem. Scooping it all up with a 450 l bucket sounds out of the question. I guess a belt system might be required here. Or something with a big shovel..
humbe
Posts: 1364
Joined: Sat Jan 18, 2020 9:33 pm

Re: Aborting studies to help gramps farming in Calmsden

Post by humbe »

paul_c wrote: Mon Jan 24, 2022 3:45 pm You were lucky to come across some bigger equipment. Simon, not so much.....where is his shed located, I've not seen that?
Here's an overview of our operation..

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The farmyard we took over from Simon is the one closest in the middle here.. And the entrance to the machine hall is on the closest corner of it, where you can see the door is open now. Kind of an anonymous door though. Easy to miss.. The sheep pasture can be spotted behind the farmyard. There's a green field across the road of the farmyard, and the sheep pen is left of it. Field 23, where we just harvested potatoes is the field where you can spot the upper part behind the forest there.

Looks like we harvested 6.52 hectares of potatoes, when we look at more details field measurements taken by the harvester we borrowed.

To the left of the farmyard, there's a cow barn with some storage buildings. As we're already producing hay and got the machines for that, expanding to buy the cow barn could be a good alternative going forwards. Seems all the farmers around here is close to gramps age, and I think several could be interested in scaling down their operations. Just looking at how many contracts they are offering in an attempt to not have to do the work themselves.
humbe
Posts: 1364
Joined: Sat Jan 18, 2020 9:33 pm

Re: Aborting studies to help gramps farming in Calmsden

Post by humbe »

Hmm.. Leasing harvester made us take up a £35.000 loan.. And then we have no money to spend, so we might even have to go higher. Potato prices aren't good before January I here, so the situation may last a bit.

And now we have 6.5 hectares of field that needs plowing and we have a 1.1m working width plow. That'll be a long plowing job.. What's more sad, is that even if we bought a bigger plow, we might not be able to use it. Our old Massey only has 85 hp. The international have 140 though. Maybe it would be able to pull an Agromasz POV 5 XL, though the plow states it needs a 160+ hp tractor.

A subsoiler could be an alternative requiring a bit less horsepower. I see the Agrisem Combiplow Gold 3M has a 3m working width but only requires 120 hp.. However, that will pick up larger stones on the field and we don't have a way to handle bigger stones.

Spaders might not dig up bigger stones than a plow (?), and there's a spader that only requires 100 hp that has 3m working width, but it's expensive at £42.500, so that would make our loan substantial.

I feel we have no good options here.. Sounds tempting to try and plow up the field in September though, as we'll hopefully be able to sow Canola, which would be a good low yield crop for us, which should hopefully be able to earn us some money with a bit less harvesting effort with our small gear.
paul_c
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Re: Aborting studies to help gramps farming in Calmsden

Post by paul_c »

humbe wrote: Mon Jan 24, 2022 8:26 pm
The farmyard we took over from Simon is the one closest in the middle here.. And the entrance to the machine hall is on the closest corner of it, where you can see the door is open now. Kind of an anonymous door though. Easy to miss..
Thanks, I can't believe I've been on my farm 4 months and missed it! I just had a look in mine.......nothing
humbe
Posts: 1364
Joined: Sat Jan 18, 2020 9:33 pm

Re: Aborting studies to help gramps farming in Calmsden

Post by humbe »

Testing out our small 1.1m plow on the field. Will I go insane plowing up the field with this one? Just to make it more interesting, the AI helper don't understand the plow. I think it's so small, he doesn't think he's no longer plowing and stops and turns at random places.

Asked gramps if he thought the Agromasz plow could work on the International, but he think it'll be too light in front. Actual testing showed it was possible to plow at reasonable speed, but the front wheel lost steering.

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So now we're plowing up a bit to see if we feel we get anywhere, while we think about possible alternatives, and dream about insane potato prices and hopes to earn enough money to afford a modern tractor and some updated equipment.
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