A 1975 Golddigging adventure (Western Wilds - Hard economy - 1975 scenario)

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humbe
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Re: A 1975 Golddigging adventure (Western Wilds - Hard economy - 1975 scenario)

Post by humbe »

February 1977

After a tiresome January, we didn't do much in February.. Better take some time of before March comes and we can start working the soil again.

March 1977

After taking care of our now 11 month old horses, they are worth 1805 a piece.. Up from 1550 in January. That's $127.5 more per month. Down from 128 steady.. As the game use decimals, I guess the additional value might be between 127 and 128 and we now rounded the other way around, but lets ensure it's not the start of declining returns

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Finally we can start cultivating and rolling our oilseed radish fields, getting a seedbed ready.. Bud and Laurie is doing the work there.. I'll see if I can test out if we can fertilize our fields with slurry and manure that we've collected so far.. Got a feeling we don't have manure and slurry enough to cover a lot, but let's measure and see..

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Opting for the tractor with the cab for slurry spreading.. Spreading slurry onto our field 5, we used 3564 liters of slurry for 0.304 hectares, so 11.714 liters/hectares used. Hmm.. We've got quite a bit of slurry left after that.. Maybe we can actually manage to not need to buy fertilizer this year..

Field 4 used another 1741 liters, so 13368 liters/hectares there. A bit more with a non-square and small field I guess.

As field 6 is 1.19 hectares, and we have 14232 liters of slurry left, I think we should have enough to spread slurry on the big field too.. Yay ;)
humbe
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Re: A 1975 Golddigging adventure (Western Wilds - Hard economy - 1975 scenario)

Post by humbe »

And finally field 6 is also fully fertilized..

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The 4 meter working width and the 2300 liter slurry capacity isn't huge, but for our little operation it works..

For field 6, we ended up using 11.230 liters/hectares. With the bigger field, there's less relative overhead. Using the built in AI helper, who looks to overlap a bit on his run, and he starts/stops at slow speeds, so wasting a bit for every turn too..

So.. What's the plan with the 3 fields that are ready to be sown?

I see we have a crisis of hen food. We are currently feeding them barley from last year, but they have almost eaten it all. Though we bought 7 chicks and a rooster, they have been breeding a lot, so we now have 98 hens and a rooster. That rooster sure has been busy. Currently we have 427 liters of barley left, and they've probably eaten through that come April.. We've sown wheat, but we can't harvest that before at least July. Thus we lack chicken food for like 3 months.

So what do we do? Do we sell a lot of hens, so we don't need so much food? Or do we buy the food? Only 35 hens have past puberty, so a lot of them haven't had a chance to become productive laying eggs yet. I think we'll try to buy some food, hoping to be able to keep quite a few chickens and hopefully earn some money on eggs..

But even when the wheat comes in July, we expect it to have less yield than barley, so the output will not be enough for the chickens until next year.. Thus I feel we should grow more chicken food. As the chickens also eat sorghum and we haven't tried out that yet, I think we'll go for sorghum on field 5. What else do we have equipment for that we haven't tried yet? Sugar beets and Sunflowers come to mind. Not entirely sure what we'll need those for, but why not test it out? As sugar beets will likely be as painful as the potatoes to get off the ground, I think that should mean beets on field 4 and sunflowers on field 6.

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While Bud is planting sunflower on the big field, I figured I could try to cut down some fir up north. The forest right behind the farm isn't very thick, so if we clear some trees, we can fit in a field here too, or maybe just expand the little field we have back here..

Cutting fir is a lot simpler than the elms we were doing earlier. On the trailer here, there's 3 trees ready for the market, and those 3 trees earned us $8.177 by themselves, $2.725 per tree. So we get more per tree than the elms, even though cutting down 3 of these is easier to stack on a single trailer load and less work to cut down and prepare.

Already cut down 9 more trees to ship of. Maybe we get to afford another patch of land this year already..
humbe
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Re: A 1975 Golddigging adventure (Western Wilds - Hard economy - 1975 scenario)

Post by humbe »

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Planting with a 2 row planter takes a bit of time. John Deere has came with what looks like an amazing 6 row planter in '74. The JD 7000 planter. It costs a bit of money, but it may very well be worth it. Will be looking to replace this 2 row planter when we can afford it.. Lets keep a lookout for a used one too..

Planting sunflowers we used 299.95 liters/hectares. Which is likely 300 then, just with some rounding errors

For sugar beet, we used 400 liters/hectares.
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DEERE317
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Re: A 1975 Golddigging adventure (Western Wilds - Hard economy - 1975 scenario)

Post by DEERE317 »

A 1206 pulling a 2 row, now I’ve seen it all
FS15 & FS19 Platinum Edition PC (and War Thunder, Gaijin is way worse than GIANTS ever has been accused of being)
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Deere, Fendt, Claas, and sometimes the rest of Agco.
humbe
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Re: A 1975 Golddigging adventure (Western Wilds - Hard economy - 1975 scenario)

Post by humbe »

DEERE317 wrote: Mon Aug 15, 2022 3:46 am A 1206 pulling a 2 row, now I’ve seen it all
Haha.. Yeah.. A bit of overkill.. But the 1206 is nice to drive, and have an excellent turning circle, so while one of our smaller tractors would be more fitting, it is tempting to still use it..

Looking forward to when we can afford one of these new fancy 6 row planters ;D

And sadly, the selection of equipment from 1977 or before isn't big, so hard to find gear that fits together (not that I know what fits together ;).. In several categories I've just had to pick a way ancient model as there's nothing in between.
humbe
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Re: A 1975 Golddigging adventure (Western Wilds - Hard economy - 1975 scenario)

Post by humbe »

And March marches on..

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We finally completed our logging operation close to the firetower, and decided to plow up a new field. The old plow is getting tiresome with only 3 small moldboards, a small field is still a lot of work.

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Finally finishing the plowing, we started stone picking.. After filling a bucket of stone though, Bud comes along and wonders what I'm doing.. We will get new stones here anyways, so why don't we just roll them back into the ground? Duh.. Because if we get the stones out of the fields we get less stones later I tell him, but he doesn't agree.. Is that really our experience? Do we get less stones after picking? I have to agree with him that we don't seem to, and finally admitting to being stupid I leave the stone bucket and rolls the rest of the field.

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Liming the field, we're starting to get it ready for seeding something.. Though I think we might fertilize first too... Tried to make the field as big as possible within the clearing we made, but it's not very worker friendly with no space outside the field to turn.

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With all the income from the wood, we can finally afford buying another piece of land, and as we then have a lot of new lands to plow up, with the little extra cash we have, we are desperate for a new plow.. Last year, the International 720 semi-mounted 6 furrow plow came to life, and what an upgrade it'll be. $8.000 is quite a bit of money given our situation, but it'll be worth it. Actually looking forward to some plowing and test this thing out.

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Started of creating boundaries for three new fields. Sadly it is raining, and we suspect that might be why the 1206 is having a bit of trouble getting traction to pull this monster of a plow. Should we wait for the soil to dry up a little? Or maybe we should invest in some in tire weights or an extra set of tires to mount on the back. Sadly though, there doesn't seem to be a used market for such gear, so we'd have to buy it new. Sounds like a $3.000 investment, which is kinda ridiculous considering that we bought the entire tractor for $3.083. That was an incredible bargain though. I guess the seller was desperate or didn't really know what he was selling ;)

Moving house in RL and trying to sell my current one, so have had to pack in my gear at occations. Not so much time for playing nowadays, but haven't given up on this game yet ;)
ice_boii_1207
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Re: A 1975 Golddigging adventure (Western Wilds - Hard economy - 1975 scenario)

Post by ice_boii_1207 »

Hey man cool story. When i got to the last page I thought you might have went to jail cuz they traced you down lol.
Ice_boii :gamer:
humbe
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Re: A 1975 Golddigging adventure (Western Wilds - Hard economy - 1975 scenario)

Post by humbe »

ice_boii_1207 wrote: Tue Nov 15, 2022 8:12 am Hey man cool story. When i got to the last page I thought you might have went to jail cuz they traced you down lol.
Haha.. Yeah.. Socialists will be tracked down!! Thanks.. Lovely to hear people enjoy looking through ;)..

Been a while here, but thought I'd give the game another go. I see there's a new mod out, "Through the years" by Thalley that seems to try and add some in game support to what I'm doing with my scenario here. Awesome.. Tried to look up a mod pack to see if I could get a good set of supported mods with gear in one go, but seem noone has made such, so I'd still have to go through and download those I want manually. Think I'll enable showing years from that dependency mod, and use the list of supported mods to try and get more equipment for this one with hopefully a bit less research than earlier.

Not sure how long I'll get back to this story, but lets start and see ;)


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I feel a bit tricked by the retailer. He said the plow should be pullable with a tractor of at least 70 horses, and my awesome and strong IH 1206 has a massive 120 horses, and should get 95 on those working on the drawbar, but still after the weather cleared up and the field dried up somewhat, I'm still struggling. The 15 kph working speed the salesman boasted about is far away when typically manage 3-4 kph. I can't get used to the clutch either, so the tractor is basically stopping each time I need to change gear, which is kind of annoying when we struggle and don't get into a good steam. I think I coulda actually plowed up the field in the same time with my old 1.1m working width plow just as fast, if I managed to drive well and require little overlap for each pass.

I even tried to borrow some bigger tire setup for the 1206, but that didn't help at all, so I returned them. Not feeling great about the $8.000 spent currently, but we managed to power through and finish the plowing eventually. Maybe if we get an even bigger and stronger tractor, like the JD 6030, it'll work out better, but I thought the 1206 shoulda been strong enough for what we needed for a while.

Not sure what happens here really. I'm currently using no REA mod or anything that should make it harder. Didn't think the base game calculated much more advanced than HP and incline. Not sure if it's a misfit, or there's some other property creating a misfit with the 1206 and the plow.

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March being busy, the whole family is working, and with all the 3 tractors busy, Laurie did push the F100 to the limit. She somehow got the dealer to dump 4 big bags of lime in the back, for a massive 8000 liters of lime in the back. The suspension did not look happy, but the F100 pulled through. Getting lime closer to the field was a big help, as our spreader "only" have a 1400 liter tank. With the three new big fields, we did use up a lot of lime. I think more than 10.000 liters.

Being overworked, I've kinda forgotten what the plan was as to what we need to grow. I see we're in dire need of chicken food soon, and it's not looking like we'll be able to grow our own in time, so looks like we might need to buy some. With barely above $2000 in the bank, we might need to find something to sell to, unless we should slaughter some of those chickens. For now, we're sowing oilseed radish on the new fields.. Think I remember them growing pretty fast, so hopefully we can get them up in time to sow Sorghum this year.

There's so much I've forgotten since last time.. Where's my other joystick? What did I map all those buttons to? What mod issues was I working around? Still some issues with ContractorMod I'm using. Not gotten a new release since last I logged in, but I love the mod, so I'd rather work around the issues than dump it. At least for this game.

Lets take a look at the Through the Years supported mod list and see if I can find some replacement gear to look forward to ;)
humbe
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Re: A 1975 Golddigging adventure (Western Wilds - Hard economy - 1975 scenario)

Post by humbe »

Had a neighbor visiting who offered to make us a drone picture of the farm.

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The new land plot sure helped us get some bigger fields. Excited to measure the size and see what we can make from them this season..

The bigger fields should use what we get from our smaller fields not very relevant. Field 3 is annoying to mow, and is likely to be repurposed for some buildings when we need to add anything new at some point. Same goes for field 4 I think. But until we manage to store up some cash we will farm what we have..
humbe
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Re: A 1975 Golddigging adventure (Western Wilds - Hard economy - 1975 scenario)

Post by humbe »

The firetower gives a nice view of our farm..

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We've got a lot of work to do in April, so better start early at first light. As we sow oilseed radish in the newest 4 fields, we need to cultivate, roll, seed and roll again I guess? Can we get away with rolling just once? I don't remember ;).. We definitively want to get Sorghum on at least one, probably multiple fields, as we can harvest Sorghum in time to sow wheat, barley and canola this year too. Soybeans is another alternative to grow ahead of other crop.

Will take some time to get through all those fields with our 3m working width cultivator. Would be nice with better working width for both cultivator and seeder, but we looked closely into options just yet, and it nice with gear, not requiring more power, than allowing all our tractors to use them.

While I started cultivating, which will be the slowest job this month, Brenda took care of the weeds among the oats. Better get them out before the oats grow bigger as then we have no tool to get'em.

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As we'll be doing a lot of rolling, and we now have quite a few fields with fairly narrow paths between them, the cambridge roller setup seems more and more dated. As we can't raise the rollers when they are not in use, we need a huge path to transport them to not destroy crops on other fields. Driving in the woods is hazardious as if we don't find wide enough passages we'll get stuck, and to boot, it's hopeless to back up with them attached.

So Laurie took a trip to the shop and secured us a new roller setup?

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What?? $2689 extra, more than double the price, to get cambridge rolls? Can we mount our existing ones.. No?? Hrmpf.. I don't dare to buy rollers with totally round drums, so I guess we'll have to put out.

I guess the blank drums would do the same job in game, but the cambridge ones looks much better and fits much better with the tracks behind the rollers when using them, so I opted for the expensive option here merely for looks, and possibly realism. Through the years says this roller was available in 1970, so I hope something similar would be available to me, even though the mod with the roller doesn't map to any actual equipment I can dig up info for. Working width seems about the same as the old setup anyhow, and it seems to have an issue.. The working width of actual rolling a seedbed fits the width of the equipment, but the working width for actual removing stones seems smaller, so stones are left here and there.

On the plus side, this roller works with AI helper.
.

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Cultivating is slow.. Even with the 1206, there's a 5 kpg working speed. I think this big tractor should be able to pull a bigger cultivator.. We just need to find one..

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Looking at this recent catalog, at least it looks like we should be able to find a bigger one.. Lets hope we can find one we can afford ;)

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humbe
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Re: A 1975 Golddigging adventure (Western Wilds - Hard economy - 1975 scenario)

Post by humbe »

1977 - July

Just tending animals a few months, July is finally hear, and three small fields to harvest for some wheat, canola and some oats. Hopefully enough oats to last a year. With all the sorghum we're currently growing, we should have enough backup food for the chickens.. The wheat we harvested will not be enough food for them for a year I think.

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Brenda's up early and noticing wheat and canola is ready for harvest.. Finally. No more buying food for the hens.

Haha.. Figured what was wrong with cultivation. Something had gone havoc with the cruise control, and that's what made the slow working speed of the cultivator.. Once we got that fixed working speed was much improved ;)..

Had a low cruise control speed on before hiring helper. Cruise control not working for me for some strange reason, so haven't paid attention to the limits for a while.
humbe
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Re: A 1975 Golddigging adventure (Western Wilds - Hard economy - 1975 scenario)

Post by humbe »

Having harvested the small fields, and grown oilseed there to get a fertilization level before seeding real crops in 2 months time or so, we saw corn prices were good at slightly above $700 per 1000 liters.. So we figured we'd drive some to the train station to sell some. Sadly, our trailer doesn't take much at all, but the bigger issue is, how do you get the grain in the train?

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I'm just guessing here, but I don't think this is the intended way. I'm baffled as to what is the intended way though. Is this why the train station typically pays more than others around here? Because of the issues getting the grain in the train?

At least when I've sold pallets here, I've been able to put them on the low train cart in front of my tractor here.. Even if I had an auger wagon, it would be high to reach all the way up there..
humbe
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Re: A 1975 Golddigging adventure (Western Wilds - Hard economy - 1975 scenario)

Post by humbe »

Ended up building a bigger platform around the train :/..

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We ended up selling most of the corn we were holding on to for when we get pigs.. Haven't got any yet and money will be useful to scale up operations.. Currently at $17.000.

August have hit, and we've been harvesting the Sorghum. The JD harvester did great again. Only issue is that it don't want to stand still with the engine running, so I destroyed a bit of crop idling in the field. 22.700 liters of Sorghum. Guess I can sell most of that, though some backup food for chickens will be good. Though delaying sale to winter when prices looks better.

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Testing a relighting mod here.. Looks pretty nice, though without side by side pictures, it's hard to see exactly how it has changed.

Hoping to get some cash crops in, and see if 1978 can be a good year to upgrade some equipment. I see JD is coming up with a new series of tractors which looks nice.. And expensive..
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UncleRico
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Re: A 1975 Golddigging adventure (Western Wilds - Hard economy - 1975 scenario)

Post by UncleRico »

I think something like this is how you’re intended to load the train https://www.farming-simulator.com/mod.p ... tle=fs2022
humbe
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Re: A 1975 Golddigging adventure (Western Wilds - Hard economy - 1975 scenario)

Post by humbe »

UncleRico wrote: Wed Mar 27, 2024 1:19 am I think something like this is how you’re intended to load the train https://www.farming-simulator.com/mod.p ... tle=fs2022
Thanks for the tip. How did I miss those.. Vintage to fit my game too ;).. Though I would prefer if the train station, which I don't think of as mine, provided gear themselves to load stuff into the train.. Not doing anything now, but considering reverting terrain changes to put in conveyors later.. Didn't think they existed for my timeline yet..
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