A second chance - Yet another farm blog - Where noone else dared to farm

[humbe]

Silly me.. Why get the lime into the silo when I can just drive my car up to the field and get a much shorter refill path. This big bag was useful. Maybe I should keep it around to be able to bring more with me at a time when working a bit away from the farmyard.



I reached certified working speed of 15 kph while now that I've repaired the cart. Maybe I would have had enough lime if I did that to begin with.. Well well.. You live, you learn..

[humbe]

Time to fertilize fields.. Used 99 liters of solid fertilizer to fertilize field 1 (the small field at the farm yard), and 349 liters to fertilize the second field. Sounds like my estimate of second being x3.5 the size sounds about right.. Though field 1 is much easier to cover without overlap being nice and square. Would be nice if I could make the second square too, but to do that I think I need dynamite. Not to mention a vehicle able to move some mass around.

[Bryan83]

About the Russian name, фуражир is translated as "forager." In Russian, pronounced fyoo•rah•zheer.

[humbe]

About the Russian name, фуражир is translated as "forager." In Russian, pronounced fyoo•rah•zheer.

Yeah.. I have tried to translate through google translate, but haven't started to alter mods to make English names. I've altered some mods, but want to keep it to a minimum so it's easy to update most of the mods if the author fixes something.

English is a second language for me, so knowledge about farm specific terms are limited, so not sure what these tools should be named. I guess it's not a forage harvester as it's not creating forage, nor cutting the grass. It only picks up and throws the grass further. And the wagon behind it I guess isn't a loading wagon, as it doesn't have a loading mechanism, though I have no idea

No big deal with one piece of equipment with name I can't read, but there's a handful more in the junkyard above so then it'll be trickier to map from vehicle overview to vehicle (which for some strange reason still shows up in my vehicle overview even though I set farmid="0" on them, so I had to edit them out of the picture I added).

[humbe]

It's late March.. I've plowed up the two fields, limed and fertilized them. Next I guess I'll sow them, but it's too cold. The weather report is not looking promising. Below zero night temperatures forecasted in mid April, and also some below 5 degrees spots in May. I guess I might have to wait until May to sow.

I've been thinking.. While I only have a single plot of land here, the government owns the surrounding area, and there's noone around. While I don't dare to cut down trees there or make fields there, I'm guessing there's a very fair chance no one will notice if I mow the grass in the surrounding meadows. That way I can get hay for the animals, while keeping other production on my own fields. Even if I get caught, i guess the reaction wouldn't be too bad. The grass will grow back again fast anyhow.

I'm betting I'll be annoyed next summer that my field isn't taking advantage of my plot here, so I have decided to keep on plowing, also over the dirt road here, and plow what I can.. I'll have to leave an island for a rock formation up here, but we'll get quite a bit bigger field. That means more to sow and more to harvest, and I don't have to extend it later and get a field where parts are in different crop rotations.. Sounds like a plan.. Unsure whether I'll get to lime it all this year, but that aint the end of anything...

[humbe]

Had a eureka moment and managed to fix the wheel dead zone. Yay. Finally driving is a nice experience..

	I first thought the deadzone was built into the old Ferguson and the old Ford, as old american vehicles are known for it, but when I loaded another savegame and saw it didn't work there either, I finally figured out that I have somehow lost my setting override and my in game wheel has gotten back to 14% dead zone in settings. I don't understand why that's the default.. Anyhow.. Set it back to zero again, and now steering is responsive. A note about low working width tools. When plowing, you dig X ditches next to each other. My 3 furrow plough typically digs 2 ditches. If I position perfectly I can manage to dig 3 ditches, but it's way too easy to go a tiny bit sideways and leave an unplowed part between what you're plowing and what you have already plowed. Being satisfied digging two ditches and driving in the direction of the ditch, I'm able to drive it fairly perfectly manually. Thus, maybe the 2 furrow plow with a smaller working width would still plow the same actual width on the field. It would just be a bit harder to stay straight enough to do it. Another fun observation. It seems the game tracks tiremarks for the last X meters you've driven. As I'm driving back and forth so close to the last passes, one of those passes I ended up driving next to my tail where the tiremarks were disappearing, so 10 meters left of the tractor the tracks disappeared at the same speed I was driving forwards

[humbe]

We don't have enough cash to lime the new field, so we're leaving it as is for now. March has gone. Bills are in the mail and thankfully some income.

We've gotten $666 for caring for the horses in March. That's quite a lot for little effort and will save the day. We've also got a bill for the stuff we needed to maintain our buildings in March, $145 in total. We also got a $141 bill to repair our old chainsaw. Quite expensive to use. Lets hope those trees can give us some income.

All in all we're up $457 to $1051 in total. We decide to buy the last two big bags of lime from Ray to hopefully cover the rest of our field, as we seem to have the gear we need to fertilize and harvest we hope we'll manage.



While fetching the bags though, an early April day, the Ford refuses to start. Thankfully the Stephen's repair shop is close but that was another $69 that's hurting the economy. $262 left. We're hoping income from those logs we left behind will soon come. We dropped by Bob to check and he's already delivered it, so he's expecting the goods to be evaluated and money to be wired very soon.

It doesn't look like we'll lime today though.



Also noticing we've started to get horse care income paid in front, so first half of April is giving us $646 income for that. I had forgotten to clean the horses to begin with, so he probably found his horse dirty and retracted for that. Now they are clean and nice.

Cash flow is thus back up to $908.

	Strange mechanics there.. Seems to keep them clean I have to brush them, but there's no brush or brush icon or anything. Gotta follow horses in pen and click on them many times and then they get clean. No animation, notification or anything, but you can see some dirt disappearing if you look closely..

[humbe]

Dang.. Me and calendars.. I'm getting a bit all to myself up here I reckon, because I miscalculated the number of days in March, and we hit April now instead .. I'll have to correct some numbers earlier in my logbook here.. Now corrected. Cash flow at start of April is $908, much thanks to getting horse care prepaid.

	Thought I had adjusted to 6 day season but was still at 3 day season here, so have miscalculated some above, adding only 2/3rds of the month. Correcting. Altered to 6 days just after midnight when mid spring started, so think that got me back into a good state. So now day 3 mid spring. (Horse care does not look pre-paid in practice, but the money appear on next days budget in game, so rather than remembering to track that money for the day before I just take a hit once and handle them as if they prepay.)

[humbe]

A call from Bob.. I'm getting excited as I guess the log sale has come through. Wonder what it could be worth. He says my cut is $14.189.

What?? 14 THOUSAND DOLLARS? For 3 small loads of wood? God damn.. No wonder us poor hired helpers doesn't get anywhere but landlords get ever richer. I had no idea those logs would be worth anything close to that in a hard economy to boot.

That puts our bank balance up to $15.097.. I'm rich damn it

We take Mackenzie for a ride over to the settlement. What should we use all that money for? First things first.. Lets wire the $571 I got from dad back to them. They need it! I've got some trees on my plot, so I bet I can make some more logging money, so I think I can tell Kent I can give him work on the farm her, leaving only 2 extra mouths to feed for my parents.

We take another look at the junkyard to see if Stephen has something we could really use now.

I see he has a tree stump remover. That would be really useful. We have several stumps left on our new field that would be good to remove. Also, as logging seemed so profitable, we'd likely want to do some more of it. There's two issues though. The stump remover isn't that old so Stephen wants quite a bit of cash for it, and it's probably too big for Fergie that will just tilt backwards I think. So a more modern tractor would be awesome. There's an John Deere 850 in the lot that has quite a few horsepowers that sounds tempting, but it can't use a front loader which would be a useful utility to have. Also a roof over our head would be nice to be able to keep a bit warmer on cold or rainy days. Buying the Massey Ferguson 698 sounds tempting.. We bring up the gear in front of Stephens shop to take a closer look at it, and start haggling for what price we can get.

Stephen says the tractor is worth $6980, but as the paint job is botched and it needs a bit of repair, he wants $6.037 for it. The stump grinder he says is good as new if one repairs and repaints it, so he wants $4.208 for that.. I'm also interested in getting the front loader and the log fork so I can load up wood easier, and if want the front loader, that's $2.296 and the log fork $1.290. $13.831 in total. That's a lot of money. Especially for that old and worn load of gear. We can afford it, but we'd want to have money left to get some lime, and we need some money to pay Kent too when he arrives next month.

$4.208 for that worn stump remover sounds insane. Granted it seems to work fine, but it has thousands of hours of use and I have no idea when it will break, and maintenance cost will be higher than if I bought a new one. Gimme a break Stephen. In the end we settle for $11.000 and Stephen throws in an old bucket for the tractor into the deal as a bonus.



Before going back, we call the old border shop manager, saying I'd like to buy some lime. He'll be in the vicinity mid-April he says. If I'm going to buy for at least $1000 he'll meet me down there.

	First I was thinking cutting 5% of the price the game gave me, but once I stop having shadow economy and starts using in game one that will make it harder. And as I saw no reason I should get less than in other games, I just figure Bob's cut is taken already when I get the price from the game. Wondered a bit how to price the used gear. Prices of mods are sometimes way unbalanced. And while the gear I bought would be really sketchy in the real world, in FS19 we know it is as good as new and will never break down, just with a marginally higher maintenance cost, so being old and worn doesn't deduct usability in any way. I decided it isn't really a big deal. I sadly have to fake so many things for the scenario anyhow, so it's very far away from a competetive challenge. I'll see what things cost as new. Possibly deduct maintenance cost and repaint cost and possibly adjust the numbers a bit if it doesn't seem to fit.

[humbe]

Having a stump remover, I guess we can dare to take down this lone tree close to our field. It's not on our property, but noone will know it was here if the buy the property, and even if they somehow may, we can argue we thought it was on our plot. Sad to have this single tree make it hard to turn around and drive back when doing fieldwork.



Even with 71 hp, all of the engine power is used when turning on this stump cutter, and I can't drive at all with it on. Checking the manual, I see the stump cutter requires 70 hp. Lucky break when I didn't check that in front Keeping the front loader on while using it seems to make sense to avoid tipping backwards. This stump remover is fairly massive for a small tractor.



Now did we get them all? I don't see anymore. Hope I won't get a bad surprise when harvesting.

[humbe]

I was hoping to leave the stump cutter behind when loading as its controls interferes with front loader and log fork controls, but I need some weight back there. Especially with the unsteady front axle of the 698. I guess I should find some other weight at some point. Using this old tractor is far away from driving the JD 8245R I used when working as a hired hand last year, but on the other hand it's miles ahead of using the old Ferguson tractor here. I finally have a working radio, and we do catch some radio channels up here.. Country Radio FM is a winner.



This could have ended up badly, but we managed to just lower the front loader and get back on all four wheels without breaking anything. Oh.. And I switched out Fergie with my Ford to pull the log trailer. The Ford has a ton more horsepowers than the tractors anyhow, and that leaves the Massey for stump removal and loading while Fergie can stay on the farm yard and just do minor bits around the animal pens.

The log form helped a lot to load the logging trailer, and now that we also have a stump cutter, we thought we'd clear away some wood to earn some money, and make it easy to drive around our new field. We might even extend field into that NW corner we didn't get to because of the trees.

Have already moved a very full trailer load of logs to the drop of point and more will come. Maybe I should look into resowing forest too..

[humbe]

Job well done.. Took down a handful trees up at northwest corner of our plot of land to make our field cover it all up there, and getting money from logging to boot.



We don't want to take down the forest right around the farmyard which protects us when there's bad weather and add atmosphere.. Thus our field up there is as big as we can get it right now.

Seems like the weather forecast have changed. We might be able to seed soon.

[humbe]

Have delivered more logs to the pickup point and called Bob asking if he could pick them up, and wondered if it was some way we could arrange it so I got money faster. We're short on money, so waiting a month for critical income is sad.

It seemed the sawmill could give me a course to evaluate the correct price, and let me evaluate price myself when dropping logs of. Then they would send me the money I evaluated it would be worth, and they'd send me a bill for the difference after the fact. Then it was their business how fast they came and got the logs. If they see any misuse though, they'll shut that deal down pronto.

It seems our second batch of wood that we got after clearing the northwestern corner, and some space to turn around in, in the southwestern end of the field, gave us another $20.250. Massive income from this logging business.

I met up with the manager from the border shop too, and managed to buy 6000 liters of lime. 3000 would probably have been more than enough, but when I first got him there, better make sure.



A bigger trailer would be nice at some point. Max 3000 liter capacity could get annoying when harvesting in autumn. While we had him there, we also bought 6000 liters of seed and 3000 liters of solid fertilizer. We chose to buy big bags this time. Both to be able to move them closer to refill point as our tools have little capacity, and because for some reason buying big bags are considerably cheaper than bulk over that the border shop. Sounds like they wanted to cheat me with those bulk prices, while the big bags they had to sell at standard price.

$2700 for the lime, $5400 for seed and $5760 for fertilizer and our bankroll is back to a massive $9.916. But now at least we should have plenty seed and fertilizer this season.

	Removing the shadow economy, and adjusting in game values to fit. As the game don't have delayed income, I thought of the above to simplify. Enabling negative property income for me and Kent now, setting <incomePerHour3>-18.94</incomePerHour3> for the log cabin. (Which will end up with $500 per day, or $1000 per season. $500 for me and $500 for Kent. Strange calculation though. Seems we get hourly income 26.4 times during a day)

[humbe]

Time to make some plans for the future. With all the logging income, I'm tempted to tell my whole family to just scurry up here. But we haven't grown back trees, and we can't afford buying another land plot to log more, so it's not sustainable. I better ensure we've got sustainable income first, before making dad resign his current jobs.

We still got quite a few trees on the farm, but they shelter the farm nicely from northern winds and I would like to avoid clearing them all out. Also, they are kind of money in the bank. If we get in trouble, we can always log some more trees to get some income. So for now I'll leave them be.

When we can afford to get more land, we can opt for buying a plot with lots of forest on, if we want to resume the logging effort and get income that. With the massive income we've already seen, we should be able to get back the purchase price of land back several times on the most forest heavy plots around here. Getting money to buy more land is definitively a priority.

As to animal husbandry, we would like to get some milk cows, as milk would be a good steady income. However, it takes some time to get that going. We need money to buy cows, and we need food for them. I'm going to mow meadows around here for some free grass, as I don't think anyone would really mind. They'll likely grow back before anyone notice anyhow. That should hopefully suffice to get hay for cows and horses. I don't have a baler yet. Not sure if it's possible to make silage out of grass in bunker, but currently we have no way of picking up wet grass from the ground, apart from using the shovel or the new front loader, which would be tedious. A baler and bale wrapper would be nice to have.

What should I grow this year? The horses wants oats and we're running out. The chickens want wheat or barley. Currently we have plenty for the very few chickens we have, but we could opt for buying a bigger chicken coop and convert barley into eggs for a decent income. Either would generate straw which might be useful for both cows and horses. Would also be fun to test out the old potato gear here. Figure out what the yield for that would be. It looks like a lot of work though. I saw a forager up in Stephens junkyard too. If we got that we could grow corn and make corn silage in the bunker. This would be great for cow food I guess, and then we could make silage without baler, but we'd use up our fields to do it.

I think we'll try to grow potatoes on the small field in the farmyard just to test it out, and then divide the new field in two, and grow oats on the bigger part and barley on the smaller part. That way, crop rotation there will stay the same, and we should get plenty food for both horses and chickens at least.



Sandra has gotten a new drone toy by the way.. Sent me this aerial shot of my farm. The plot boundaries are along the borders of the new field, and then it cuts over the southern end of the island in the pond, forming a rectangle. We see that I could thin out the forest on the eastern side while still being covered decently for the weather, and I do have some space in the southwestern end of my farm. Leaving it for possible farm yard extensions for now. Both the plot to the east and west would give me a lot of extra field space.

[humbe]

Sowing potatoes in farmyard field. I thought the potatoes I had left in the shed would be sufficient to seed the field, but I needed to add additional seeds. They didn't last as long as I expected.



This old potato seeder is actually usable by Fergie, trotting along at 6 kph while seeding. Tested the MF698 too, expecting it to reach max operating speed of 9 kph, but staying at 6 there too for some reason.

Fergie has weight issues though. If lifting it with potatoes, there's virtually no traction on front wheels and easily puts them in the air, and turning around with the plows lowered is tedious. That worked a lot better with the Massey.

1.6 m working width at 6 kph makes even the farmyard field seem big

Ended up using 4 loads of 470 liter each, first with my own stored potatoes, rest with bough seed. Had 265 liters of seed afterwards, so that's a total of 1615 liters of potatoes used to seed.

	Sadzarka Agrozet v1.0.0.0 FS19 - A potato planter http://www.farmingsimulator19mods.com/s ... -0-0-fs19/ This was in fact the only potato harvester I could find that Fergie manage to use without modifying either Fergie or the seeder. It states that it needs 45 hp, but there's no power requirement implemented. It looks the part, though it doesn't get dirty or worn, so always looks the same. What I found out though, is that the only way I can fill it with potatoes, is by using a seed bag. I could not use the silo I have with seed. I could not use the MF shedpack silo I had potatoes in. And I could not use the shovel to shovel them into it. I only have seed in bulk in this game, so I ended up editing savegame to move potatoes into it, and converting some seed to a bag to be able to load seed into it.. Too bad. Don't suppose I'll use it again after finishing sowing this, unless I start a new game and start using seed bags. Also figured out something else curious. I've been using Store Deliveries mod to get stuff where I wanted it when setting up the map, and right now to switch seed with a bag I could fill from, but then I noticed the 2.5% Store Deliveries cost is added to vehicle maintenance, so no wonder the chainsaw maintenance above was higher than I expected them to be. I was wondering why those costs didn't match up with costs of repairs I did.. Well.. I'll just leave the money lost and say I used them for myself