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

[humbe]

We found that we could actually buy another set of side panels for the trailer for $1.500 extra, so we could carry a massive 18600 liters.


I just had to try it .. Didn't manage to get it out of the storage building with Fergie


Tempting to use the pickup. With 300 hp rather than the Massey Ferguson's 71, it's a whole lot faster. But the hitch is too low, and it's not intended to keep that much weight on it, so I hit gravel underneath the trailer at times. Also, while the Ford can accelerate it to higher speeds, it doesn't have traction or brake system to do it safely. I guess we should go for safe option.


It's not going fast, but the MF698 is pulling the trailer and does manage to get up the hills we need to go up faster than I can walk at least. It has hitch at correct height and can carry the weight.

Ended up with $15.857 for the potatoes. That's quite a lot considering the tiny field we had. That's like $48.000 per hectares which would earn us a ton of money on the other field. But just thinking about using the old potato gear for that larger field is making me sick.

$13.291 in the bank mid December after buying trailer and getting extra side panels. At least enough to pay for some more supplies. We could also get the TMR mixer, which would be nice. But if we're to afford to get the Bizon harvester for next years harvest, we need to start saving up. Priorities, priorities..

[humbe]

Winter has come. Not that much snow though. We're taking a well deserved break apart from caring for the animals. Been hunting a bit up on the hills. We've seen deer tracks up there.

	Looks a bit silly with the snow not coming into the horse pen, and the snow around buildings that aren't aligned to north/south direction looks strange. The american hayloft doesn't seem to have a snow mask. Funny as it's the only building storing stuff inside it that needs to be kept dry

[humbe]

Spring has come.. We see that the oats reserve is down to 25.700 liters. That means the horses have consumed 6-7 thousand liters of oats since we harvested mid autumn. How far will the supply last? I was hoping to grow something else than oats, as growing it again will give crop rotation penalties, but if we're using say 4500 liters per season, that's 18.000 liters per year, and it starting to look like we'll come up short.. We should have enough hay though. I guess it's not a huge issue if we don't have enough oats the entire time. I guess fitness will take a hit.

I don't want to grow oats with poor yield, so I think we'll just have to find out. I think we'll grow canola on both fields this year, if we get sowing conditions within spring. Otherwise, maybe go for soybeans.

Weather forecast doesn't look that promising.



With minimum temperature going all the way down to 1 degree late in March , we may need to wait until May before sowing the fields. Then it looks like temperature will rise, and there will be a little rain too.

	Two day season so March is Today and Wednesday, April Thursday and Friday and May Saturday and Sunday.

Sadly only two of our eight cows are pregnant, so it'll take some time before we get milk production out of most of them. There will be at least two calves this year though.

$29.211 in hand after getting money for horse care through the winter. We're feeling rich here. Having our own land is just something entirely different than being a hired hand. We were hoping uncle had a more modern farm, but economically it has gone better than expected regardless. We're no longer worrying about whether we'll have food on the table next month.

[humbe]

The soil temperature has reached 5 degrees, but the soil is dry at 9-10%, so better await until there are good germination conditions.

In the meantime, we used the spring to build a new hen house. The old one was getting way too small as the hens reproduce quickly. Doing it ourselves, we managed to build it for $8.255.

	Found no way to move chickens between pens, so ended up editing savegame to do it. We could sell and buy new ones but then all would be same age. Thought we'd keep the ones we had. This is the Chicken Pen from ModHub. https://www.farming-simulator.com/mod.p ... tle=fs2019 it cleared all the ground beneath it to be dirt, but we landscaped to add back a little variation to the textures. Not sure if I've mentioned it before, but in the back is the bale shed that came with the no mans land map. To make a low tech repair point I used the Workshop Trigger mod http://www.farmingsimulator19mods.com/w ... -1-0-fs19/ which I placed underneath one half of that shed. Was a tight fit to get space for the pen here, but nice to avoid wasting a lot of extra space, and it works. Good that we don't need access to more than one corner of it to work it. I've failed to use Farm Forward after building it though for some strange reason. Hope I figure out why..

[humbe]

Hrmpf.. There's a rift in the fabric of the space time continuum.

	Urk.. After moving chickens over to new coop, I can no longer fast forward using fast forward mod. Nothing happens when I press the hardcoded shortcut (left ctrl-k and left shift-k). I tried to take in save backup, but it still doesn't work. Nothing else should have changed in the meantime. Took a look at the game log and it was full of issues, but if I take in an old backup of the save, those issues seems to be there too..

[humbe]

Finally, in May we got some weather, and got some moisture in the soil. If we have learned it correctly, below 12% soil moisture risks drought and is not good conditions for germination. Feel free to correct us if that's not the case. Was wondering what to do if I didn't get enough rain. If I sowed in 8-9% moisture, would most of the field still germinate?



The tool for measuring the soil conditions is pretty useful to figure out when to sow.

The seeded looks better on the back of Fergie, but when seeding in the rain, lets go for a tractor with a roof.

"I'm seeding in the rain..
I'm seeding in the rain...
What a glorious feeling I'm happy again"



With the 100 liter capacity of the seeder, it needs constant refilling, so Kent is tailing me in the pickup with some seed bags. And doing quick repairs on the Ford when needed.

[humbe]

With both fields sown and already fully fertilized, what to do? I emptied the silage bunker for the remaining bits there from last year, and now we have around 635k liters of hay, 240k liters of straw and 159k liters of silage. Should we bother to mow more grass this year? We likely won't get enough animals to get anything close to using this up I think. I guess the closest one would possibly be silage if we started making TMR for cows and we kept on buying more. But with the current 8 cows, we estimate around 50k liters of food needed per year, and at that even if we make TMR out of half silage, that's still only 25k silage for a year.

I think we'll just let it be for now. So what's next. Harvest? We have 8 horses, and the horses likely should have the space they have in their pen, and the family have enough work with those 8 horses, so don't think we should add more. Cows are expensive. We have space for more, but we want calves. Think we'll let it grow naturally. Same with the chickens. Currently we have 18 hens and a rooster and we have plenty free space in the new coop.

Oh.. And 5 cows are pregnant now. and all should have calves before christmas, so hopefully we'll start getting milk sometimes in autumn and it will increase as we get more of them.

Currently we have $33.885 saved up. A self-propelled harvester for harvesting season would be cool, and we aren't that far away from that possibility. But should we use $52.000 for that now, when we can get another plot of land for $85.000? If we get another plot, we may get more logging income, and we'll have lots of new space to make fields for bigger gains every year. While a self-propelled harvester "only" simplifies our harvesting.

I'm leaning towards saving up for another land plot first. We're growing Canola just for selling, so we'll get some money for the crops. If we save everything else, we should get close to being able to afford another plot of land this winter. I guess we can start looking around and consider what plot to get next.

[humbe]

I dug up a map of the area:

• Plot 26 is of course ours.
• Plot 30 & 40 contains Ray's old farm and the settlement and is not for sale.
• Plot 56 contains the fancy shop down at the border. The area north of the shop is for sale, but it's smaller than the other plots as it contains the shop.
• Plot 1-11, 21, 31, 41 & 51 contains the hills to the west and north. They are for sale, and would be possible to farm, but with all the close to flat land in the valley, there's no need to buy these.

The plots east and west of us, 24 & 26 contains land that is easily converted to fields. However, there's not much forest in either. We've gotten so much money from the fairly small amount of trees we've cut down, so it is tempting to buy a plot with some forest in it.

The area north of us, plot 16 has a ridge that splits the area in two, which doesn't sound ideal. And the area south of us is the crossroads and some small hills with some large stones in it. Doesn't sound like the first choice.

Plot 12 or 22 seems tempting just for the large amount of forest there. Not the greatest place for a field, but we can start a pretty big logging operation up there, which will likely pay back the cost of the land several times. Logging is a lot of work though. Do we really want to start a big logging operation? It so, it's tempting to save up for more modern logging gear, but that would take away income we could use for the farm. We're farmers after all, so any forestry operation would be a side activity.

I guess an option would be to buy one of these areas just to log when we feel like it, and not invest in logging gear, but just use the surplus on the farm at whatever pace we manage to work it.

[humbe]

Oh.. And there was demand for eggs, so we sold the eggs we had. Not even 200 liters though, but got $440 for it. Everything helps.

[Dairydeere]

I like how you get your big daily entry in, and then it's like "Oh yeah, the eggs got sold"

Great thread, this is a great read

[humbe]

Thanks..

The summer has been slow. We've just had fun waiting for the harvest season to come and didn't even go for a grass venture. The crop was ready in the start of October, but it was late October before the crop got dry enough to harvest. Late harvest that is. Lets put in an effort to get it done before it starts to wither.



We used to be envious of who got to drive the brand new tractors as hired help earlier, but the next generation we were using back then is miles ahead of this old MF698. It's noisy, spews black smoke and looks a bit run down, but it's got charm and does the job if you have enough time. 9kph and 2 meter working width means it takes quite a bit of time though

We've got a massive $68k saved up, more than the family has ever owned, so we could have bought the old Bizon, but we figured we'd keep saving for a plot of land as we're close and that should bring us forwards much faster. If we get some trees to cut there, coupled with income from animals, we should afford the Bizon before harvest next year.

Oh.. And we've got the first calf and the first liters of milk on the farm. That should help our income through winter.

The "new" trailer helps a lot in that we can harvest a lot more before going back to the farm to empty, but we had some issues using it. Fergie isn't big enough to pull it, so we have to use the pickup (unless we want to keep switching trailers on the MF). The harvest trailer is also too small to get the pipe above the trailer if all three side wall heights are on, so we've had to lower capacity by removing the top layer. Still it's just within reach so a bit tricky to get the pipe in to unload.

[humbe]

Finally done harvesting. A massive effort. I hope and think this will be the last year we harvest our 2.9 hectares field with that old harvester trailer. Sandra sent me another drone pic, showing my effort here. We tailed the tractor with the new trailer, and driving headland #18 was the first time we managed to cover an entire headland before the harvester was full. We needed to empty it 30 times during harvesting.

Due to the trailer being towed to the right side, we had to drive headlands clockwise to not destroy crops, which was terrible with the island in there. Think we'll start looking for some explosives so we can get rid of that island at some point.



Currently we're doing 2.5m working width, storing 1500 liters going 9 kph. If we get the old Bizon we will do 4.2m working width, storing 3540 liters going 20 kph. That means we'll cover the field 3.7x as fast, needing to empty it x2.36 less, and driving 40% shorter. That'll be a massive upgrade. We'll skip the other harvester Stephen got.. It's way cheaper, can actually work at 22 kph and has a massive 5m working width, but the 1800 liter tank will be a major setback compared to the Bizon.

We ended up getting 3.828 liters of canola from field 1, 11705 l/hectares. Crop rotation indicates we should get -5%, in which the base yield should be 12.321 l/hectares.

In field 2 we got 40.754 liters, 13911 l/hectares. Here we're at perfect crop rotation and should have gotten 20% above norm, giving a norm of 11593 l/hectares.

Hmm.. Those calculations should have ended in the same values if everything was as expected. Well.. I guess base Canola yield is around 12.000 l/hectares then at least. A lot less than the 70k liters of potatoes from field 1 only, so was a lot easier to harvest that field this year.

Canola prices are actually not bad right now. Listed at $708 per 1000 liters, so if I sell immediately we should get around 31.5k in the pocket and we can afford a new land plot. No special demand, but can't remember having seen a better Canola price up here as of yet...

[humbe]

Waited until November started and sold it when price seemed to hit the roof at $720. $32.120 in total for that harvest. Hot diggity damn.. We've got a 6 digit bank account at $104.070. More money than my family has ever seen.

I can understand the potato equipment now though. Last year we earned $14.000 on potatoes of field 1 alone. With 2.9 hectares more, that would have been like $137.200 due to the massive yield. But it would have been an insane amount of work with that equipment. But limited to the small field, potatoes probably kept my uncle alive.

We have decided to buy plot 22, which is almost completely covered by forest. We don't expect to have resources to cut down the entire forest, but we'll have trees to cut and sell when we need to and we can make an effort when we need to or can muster some more.

[humbe]

Mom took the Ford out to the nearest town to buy the new plot of land. No local government branch office around here.

Dad wanted to start cultivating the fields, but the old Ferguson is pretty useless to drive the cultivator as it's too light. He constantly got the front in the air and couldn't steer. Me and Kent wanted to use the Massey to look at logging in our newly acquired forest. With some extra bucks, we decided to buy the old John Deere 850 Stephen had laying around. The old museum piece is from 1961 and not that much newer than Fergie, but it's quite a bit heavier and actually have got more horsepowers than the Massey, with it's 95 hp. Since it's old as dirt, dirty and the paint job is shoddy, we got it for $4.500, and we also bough the old cow food mixer for $7.000 with lose guarantees that it may still be working.

Might have made more sense to start saving up for a more modern tractor, but getting one this cheap, should hopefully make it a bit more livable until we do get one.



We argued with Stephen that we had to borrow his pressure washer to ensure the JD was actually green..



It actually looks to be in a pretty good condition. I'm guessing Stephen is a John Deere fan and have kept it in good shape..

[humbe]

Whaaaat?? No 3 point connection? What do you use this old JD for when we it ain't got 3 point connection to hook equipment onto? Stephen?? What did you sell me?

Stephen can't stop laughing. Hey.. I sold it fair and square. Ferguson invented the 3 point and JD hadn't picked it up yet in 1961. I'm arguing trying to get my money back, but Stephen has already used it.. Finally he says, ok.. I'll give you a 3 point connection. Take that rusty old pile of a Ford 3000 down there and use that instead when you need a 3 point connection. It ain't worth the parking space it uses in my backyard anyhow.

And that's how we came back to the farm with this piece of junk. Now we have 4 tractors, and still to get a half decent one



Dad's swearing driving this thing around the field. It's supposed to have 47 hp, and our cultivator is supposed to only require 25 hp to drive. Maybe the motor is so old it's actually doesn't have 25 hp left in it.. Or maybe the old tires have no grip left in them.. I dunno, but this tractor ain't nothing compared to our Massey.. But at least it manages to cultivate the field with some effort, which is more than can be said about Fergie.

	I hoped to add an old John Deere to the game and added this from the start, but I missed that it didn't have a 3 point connection in the back. With my current other gear that severely limits it's usability. The Ford was also in the running. But I didn't test them in action and the Ford have major issues with my cultivator. Many places it stops dead, even on flat terrain, and I have to lift it, and drop it after driving a meter again. Pretty annoying. Not sure if it's some bug/conflict, between Ford and cultivator, or it's just that it requires more power, either way it is annoying.