Riverdale Valley - A farm blog - Ravenport, season, from scratch on hard economy

[humbe]

Hrmpf.. First I don't notice crops have gotten to second growth stage.. When doing contracts where crop doesnt get damaged I forgot I haven't put on narrow tires yet.. When I cut down trees close to fields and forget that trailer doesn't have nattor tires.. Won't be getting optimal amount of crops from those fields this autumn.. Though they're so small I guess the difference will hardly be noticeable..

[humbe]

That was a lot of logging for someone not used to it.. But finally we have chainsawed through the area where we can extend our fields, using our trusty Strautmann SEK 802 trailer to carry the wood away to the sawmill. After the first month of summer, the June numbers are up:

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June {
                                                                          Cash flow:       Assets:
    Incoming balance:                                                     +$  67.834
    Incoming assets:                                                                     $ 815.470

    Investments:
      Upgrades:       Narrow Wheels                                       -$   1.000    +$   1.000
    Seed used:          3732 in, 3703 remain,

    Seed used:          4364 in, 3732 remain, 632 l used                                -$     569
    Fertilizer bought:  23.000 liters.                                    -$  44.160    +$  44.160
    Fertilizer used:    3981 in, 5912 remain, 21.069 l used.                            -$  40.452
    Fuel usage:                                                           -$     375
    Vehicle/equipment maintenance cost:                                   -$     805
    Property Maintenance:                                                 -$       1
    Contracts income:                                                     +$ 174.955
    Selling wood income:                                                  +$  34.522
    Rounding correction:                                                  +$       1
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                                                           $ 230.971     $ 819.609     = $ 1.050.580
    ================================================================================================================

The contracts income are a bit lower than we were hoping for, but selling wood has made a nice addition to our income.Those fertilize contracts costs us some fertilizer, but they are still good money as they are fast to do with a 30m working width.

Only trees left on our farm now is on the hill we are likely to leave as is. But we might want to take down the trees remaining down towards the road, as we may want to put buildings in place there at some time.

[humbe]

Now in July with $230k in bank, we have enough money for a harvester, maybe even a decent one. But we are starting to get a lot of grass on our farmyard, so we have opted to take a chance and invest in grass gear.

We bought the Pottinger Novacat setup (8.4m working width) for $61.000 total. To keep it as cheap as possible as we need to get a harvester soon, we went for a Kuhn SR 314 windrower (8.5m working width) for $23.000, and the yellow New Holland Roll-Belt 150 baler ($49.000). To be able to carry the bales without too much swearing we also opted for the Ursus T-127 bale wagon that can load 8 bales for $39.000. Carrying half the content of the square auto-loading bale wagon and costing more than half of it, seems like a good option to make round bales livable. I see there's some cheaper options from mod that can carry 12 bales for a third of the price but that feels like cheating so I'll stick with this one.

That allows us to get quite a few grass bales. Hopefully we can sell some and possibly store some for animal food later.

Storage can become an issue though. I guess grass bales needs to be protected against the elements if I'm not to wrap them. The weather report doesn't say anything about rain yet, but I'm wondering what to do. Maybe we should get a shed we can store them in temporarily.



The SR 314 windrower was pretty easy to use. I expected it to get stuck on some of the various terrain here, but it actually worked out really well. The Kuhn Merge Maxx 902 is of course way more awesome on a big field where it can join two parts together into one row to create less driving for the baler, but that's a totally different price range.

Barn lists grass prices as zero though. Do I have to create silage out of it to earn any money from the bales? Hoped I didn't need to buy a wrapper, like the Kuhn SW 4014 as that's another $54.000 I want to save for harvester.

Missing out on fertilizer contracts earlier didn't matter though. I've gotten more than enough of them, and currently there's only one field left in ravenport that needs an extra fertilize step. I'm guessing they will be lazy as the rest of them and offer the job to us at some point. But that means that my current cash balance of $115.652 is pretty much the cash balance I'll have going into harvest season. Hopefully I can get a bit of money from some bales (have also saved some from baling missions that should have fermented by now), but we might have to loan a bit of cash to be able to afford a harvester.

And if we're going to help others harvesting too, it's tempting to loan more and get a decent one. Maybe we can earn enough money contracting to pay it of during harvest season and thus not have to pay interest for more than a few months.

[humbe]

We actually ended up getting 74 round bales with grass from mowing our yard, including the new bits where we chopped down the forest. Much more than expected. Now the trouble is how to store it. I want a bale barn, but it costs $48.000 mod, and the bale barns store either round or square bales, and long term I hope to use square bales instead. I could sell them as I probably will get more easy enough for when I do get animals, but then I need to wrap and ferment them first. I could by a wrapping machine, but that's an expense I'd rather not have right now. I guess I could try to build a shack of some sort so at least I had some emergency storage under a roof if needs be.

Grass rains away on the ground, so I guess the round bales are also damaged by rain when not wrapped. I guess leasing a wrapper is also possible. I wouldn't need it more than an hour, so $2754 doesn't sound terrible, when the value of the bales after fermenting will likely be more than $15.000 at least.

We've basically got nothing critical to do now.. All fields in Ravenport are fully fertilized. But harvesting season starts next month, so not long until then. We've got some transport contracts we could do but I find them a bit annoying. They pay decent for the amount of game time put into them, but I feel like a lot of work compared to real time effort.

If I'm to put in a shed for emergency storage, before really having planned anything as to what goes where on our farm, the entrance to the farm looks enticing. The hill makes this part of the farm not much usable for anything else so putting it there it is unlikely to be in the way later, and as we expand later, most of our tools will probably drive of to be used anyhow. Trees seems to be in the way of landscaping and building placement though, so if we're to put it here I guess we need another logging effort to get rid of the trees along the side there.

[humbe]

Ended up building our first farm building. A shed out at the farm entrance where it won't be in the way later.



Cramped in there with all the gear, but only the bales really need to be there, so no real issue. Apart from what's in the picture, the wrapped bales are still on the farmyard where they used to be.

In order to build the shed I had to landscape a bit to flatten the area before building. Actually building it was a bit tricky too. Seemed I had to have a good deal of free space in front. It's pretty much situated as close to the road as possible. Also, I was unable to alter the terrain close to the road, so the ditch on the side of the road is still there. The building also needs to stay flat, while the road has a small climb, which gets really noticeable on the difference of driving into each end of the shed, but it ended up fairly well I think. I guess I could do more forestry on the hill behind here but I'm tired of that, so taking some free time this month preparing for harvesting season.

Got some rain overnight, so getting a shed was a good decision

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                                                                          Cash flow:       Assets:
    Incoming balance:                                                     +$ 230.971
    Incoming assets:                                                                     $ 819.609

    Investments:
      Field tools:    Pottinger Novacat X8 ED Mower   $ 42.000
                      Pottinger Novacat 301 ED Mower  $ 19.000
                      Kuhn SR 314 Windrower           $ 23.000
                      New Holland Roll-Belt 150       $ 49.000
                      Ursus T-127 Bale Wagon          $ 39.000            -$ 172.000    +$ 172.000
      Buildings:      Easy Shed 1                     $  9.000                          +$   9.000
                        + Construction costs          $  9.761            -$  18.761
    Seed used:          3732 in, 3698 remain, 34 l used                                 -$      31
    Fertilizer bought:  8.000 liters.                                     -$  15.360    +$  15.360
    Fertilizer used:    5912 in, 2718 remain, 11194 l used.                             -$  21.492
    Fuel usage:                                                           -$     148
    Vehicle/equipment maintenance cost:                                   -$     293
    Property Maintenance:                                                 -$       5
    Contracts income:                                                     +$  76.976
    Selling wood income:                                                  +$   8.891
    Rounding correction:                                                  +$
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                                                           $ 110.271     $ 994.446     = $ 1.104.717
    ================================================================================================================

$110.271 will be short to get a harvester and hopefully a bigger trailer for harvesting season. We'll consider taking up a loan, and seeing if we can try to pay that back fairly quickly due to harvesting income.

[humbe]

Was expecting harvest to start in August, as all the fields were in the final growing stage late July. But August and September came and went and crops were still not ready.. So a long vacation for us. Now in October all crops in Ravenport are ready for harvest, and winter is coming, so now it's time to work fast.

Accounting for August and September really simple. -$5 in building maintenance each month.

[Dairydeere]

You really can get some work done. Well done, your economy and status are thriving!

[humbe]

Thanks.. Though I've basically just done a ton of contracts yet far, which is very safe economically as they give a steady income with no risk. Starting to wonder how they can make any profit at all in this market hiring me to do all the work in the field.

I guess next time around I'll give it a shot without contracts. Will make it a lot harder to get initial income, and years will fly by to get enough income to expand territory, but then at least it is fine to use all the small equipment as I have no large fields to take care of. That sounds like one will have to resort to logging to create extra income though, so not sure how that will fan out.

Examining my options a bit closer:

• Get cheapest harvester. Bizon Super Z056 $84.000 + header $27.000 = $111.000. Convert my SEK 802 trailer to get 12.000 liter capacity for $4000. That's $115.000 total and only $5000 above my cash balance. A very safe option, but I'll be using a long time to harvest big fields if I want to take on contracts with my own gear. I'm guessing it'll take at least 4 hours to go over field 8 with that setup, and that might very well mean that I won't have time to do all the contracts I could have been doing.
• Another option is to go for the above, but borrow equipment for the bigger fields I help out in. Got an offer for the biggest field (field here, which is $23.371 but with $4985 reduction if I borrow gear. The gear is excellent though. Ideal harvester with 12m header and likely a big trailer. Sounds harsh to lose ~20% of the profits, but it actually is less than that, as we'll likely get some extra grain from those fields we get to keep too. Depending on how much that is it could possibly just be a ~10% profit drop.
• A third option is to actually lease gear myself and use it to serve contracts. They charge a stiff operating hour rate though. Leasing a good harvester will cost me more than 10k per hour, which sounds way more expensive than borrowing equipment. Especially as I'll likely have harvester downtime while emptying it and unloading trailers.
• Yet another option is to take up a fairly fat loan and buy a fairly good harvester, and come end of harvester season, sell it used if we don't manage to pay back enough of the loan. If I try to not loan that much, I might even be able to keep it. If I have to sell it used, we'll lose some profits there. But on the other hand, if we buy a cheap harvester we are pretty sure we will sell it before next harvest anyhow. Though we will lose less money selling a cheap one of course.

It would be really cool to afford the Draper Stream 900 header with built in trailer and 9m working width, but it's $58.500 for header and $299.000 for harvester. $357.500 total. We can borrow that much, but we'll have a ~250k loan in the bank, which sounds like quite a bit to pay back.

But if we manage, we avoid losses in profits for borrowing equipment, and we end up with a very nice harvester which we can use for many harvests to come. It's a risk not knowing what our income will be and how profitable harvesting missions are in this hard economy, but worst case we'll just have to sell it again after the harvest season. Lets give it a try..

To avoid having to dump the trailer content every time we empty the harvester, we are also buying the Agroliner TKD 302 trailer. Then we can fit two harvester loads in it before driving of to dump..

[humbe]

Hmm.. Learned something important here.. I used to think that you got some progress for harvesting, and some progress for delivering goods, and those were separated and static. That does not seem to be the case. I was driving goods for harvester contract to ranch, and after delivering it, the game said I had moved 96% of what was needed. While waiting for the next load, the contract completing due to me filling the rest of the progress bar driving harvester.

Thus, when doing a harvester mission, we get completion for actually harvesting with harvester AND for delivering the goods, and if we want to keep as much of the extra goods as possible, we need to harvest the entire field prior to dumping enough goods to complete contract.

As it is now, I've already completed the contract, and I'm harvesting the rest, but I have no use for 105% completion of contract, so I wasted some oat I could have gotten for myself in the process. I should have dumped the oat in the silo temporarily instead of driving it directly to the ranch when getting close to completion..

[humbe]

Strange.. After vacation we got out of bed before sunrise to get the most out of harvesting season, and we did manage to harvest field 8 for contract. We never saw it rain while we did it, but now other crops are too wet for us to start harvest right afterwards. How long do we have to wait until we can harvest again? No rain in broadcast.

[Bryan83]

From experience, go with the better harvester right out of the gate and spread the loan payments out over 2-3 years. You'll pay interest, but you'd lose more buying all the gear, selling for used price and then buying all over again at a higher class. And with contract work, anything that harvester brings in, put as much as you can towards the loan, maybe you can pay it off faster.

[humbe]

Rrr.. And what silly shed did I buy?

All my grass bales are just gone.. Did someone steal them? Or did the they rain away somehow through the roof?

Turns out grass rots over time anyhow. Should have bought the autowrapping baler..

[humbe]

Thanks for the input Bryan... I did end up buying the Rostselmash RSM 161 for $299.000 with its Draper Stream 900 header for $58.500 with a 9m working width and built in trailer. A really like the built in header trailer bit and this was the smallest header with one



Not exactly what I had been planning playing from scratch on hard economy for first year. And I'm guessing it might be too big to be optimal due to later interest payments, but at least I can harvest with own gear with reasonable efficiency.

My grass plan did not work well though. I was hoping to use the non-field parts of my yard to earn some extra dollars making grass, or to store them for animal food later. To make it cheap i bought cheap equipment for baling which would also be useful when harvesting grains with straw later. Trouble is that the grass rots over time even if bailed, so if I want it for animal feed, I need to store it in multifruit silo I hear, or I can make them into silage with a bale wrapper and that makes them sellable. Hiding bales from rain was the driving decision to build a shed too, which used money I could have saved for harvest. I should have opted for the baler with the built in wrapper instead.

I have bought a wrapper now, and ran a second grass bale run, but now with less bales, and even more money used that wasn't in my pockets.

Harvesting season started late for some reason, and when it started, it was too moist to harvest, strangely enough I managed to harvest field 8 before getting an error message though. Could reloading the game have changed the moisture somehow?, so even though I woke up before sunset to start pushing, I had to wait until 9 before I could start to harvest more fields. Everyone seems to be behind as pretty much everyone wants me to help them harvest. Only a handful seems to have harvested for themselves.

I was wondering whether I'd hit a multiple missions bug when I noticed I had multiple missions to harvest same grain type to be delivered at the same spot, but game seems to handle that fine by delivering to one at a time at some order. At least the one I started harvesting the field for was counted first. Hopefully that's always true.

I also figured out what happens if you fill a trailer with a grain which already hold something else.. Something else disappears.. Wasn't much but still money lost

[humbe]

Some interesting harvesting data.. I did get 18003 liters oat extra harvesting field 8. Could likely have gotten more if I awaiting selling last bits until after harvest was done. And I got 12275 liters wheat extra for field 13.

Not a ton, but it will help economy.. Storing it for now, hoping to be able to await high demand before selling. Will at least wait until after harvest season and see what's left of my loan before deciding to sell for current price or not..

Lets see how much harvesting I can manage to do this season

[humbe]

Boy was September a rough month with late evenings working.

Hard to expect how busy harvesting season will be the first year around, but not only did most of the farmers want to recruit me to help them harvest, but once I finished that, a lot also wanted help with cultivating, baling and seeding. As we suddenly got a bit careless with a huge bank loan to get a great harvester, we will make an extra effort to earn every buck we can helping others. Hoping we will finish helping others mid November, so we have time to plow up a bigger field on our farm before winter sets in. But if it doesn't we'll probably prioritizing contracts first and rather use early spring to plow.

Currently working field 5 here, which is the only field remaining to be harvested here. We'll finish that one before going to sleep.



We've sadly hit a bug. We got a contract to harvest in field 14, but when trying to do so we kept getting failures of not being allowed to do so. When we delivered barley to restaurant that we harvested elsewhere we got progress towards the field we can't harvest. Thus we lost barley to a contract that we cannot complete. Ended up cancelling the mission and adding back $2.500 bucks to our account. I think we lost at least that amount selling our product for nothing before we noticed.

Same thing happened on field 16 and 22 when we got cultivating missions. Those two fields we weren't able to work. The fields are relatively small and we have no expense on those though, so we'll just cancel those two missions.

I'm guessing it can be caused by accepting too many contracts at the same time with the multiple missions mod. We'll try to not tag that many at the same time

We've been using the public railroad silo east, and thought it had 400.000 liters capacity, but after putting 200.000 liters of wheat in it, it is saying it is full. I guess there's 200.000 capacity in each of them so if I want to hit max I need to use the west one too. No matter. I've stored away more than enough, so can just starting to deliver the wheat directly to final target, as I will likely be able to keep far less than 200.000 liters once contracts are fulfilled. (Temporary storing them there to ensure I max out progress from actually harvesting before counting progress by selling)

At the end of October, the accounting shows a considerable income. Right after October we realised we were paying unnecessarily high rent, and payed back 100.000 of the loan, but still we have 150.000 to pay back. We may manage to pay back some of that in November before winter sets in. Anyhow, rent is at an acceptable amount. If wanted we can make up for that with a few transport missions winter time.

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                                                                          Cash flow:       Assets:
    Incoming balance:                                                     +$ 110.261
    Incoming assets:                                                                     $   994.446
    Loan:                                                                 +$ 250.000    -$   250.000
    Investments:
      Vehicles:       Rostelmash RSM 161 Harvester        $ 299.000
      Field tools:    Rostelmash Draper Stream 900 Header $  58.500
                      Agroliner TKD 302 Trailer           $  27.000
                      Kuhn SW 4014 Bale wrapper           $  54.000       -$ 438.500    +$   438.500

    Fertilizer bought:  8.000 liters.                                     -$  15.360    +$    15.360
    Fertilizer used:    2718 in, 7066 remain, 3652 l used.                              -$     7.012
    Fuel usage:                                                           -$   2.225
    Vehicle/equipment maintenance cost:                                   -$   2.064
    Property Maintenance:                                                 -$       5
    Loan Interest:                                                        -$   3.204
    Bales sold:                                                           +$   3.838
    Harvest income:                                                       +$  32.896
    Contracts income:                                                     +$ 191.039
    Rounding correction:                                                  -$       2
    Silo inventory: Type:  Liters: Price/1000: Value:       Total:
                    Wheat  102.891  $371       $    38.173
                    Barley  32.359  $351       $    11.358
                    Oat     36.305  $590       $    21.420
                    Canola   4.141  $710       $     2.940  $ 73.891
    Silo value difference from last month:                                              +$    73.891
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                                                           $ 126.674     $ 1.265.185   = $ 1.391.859
    ================================================================================================================