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

[humbe]

February 1979

With new machines, we are having trouble finding a decent place to store them over the winter. Considering just storing a lot of the old stuff outside, but figured we could invest in another shed. $4000 for a shed is fairly cheap, though we're not totally happy with all the beams in front, making it pretty tight to get some of our equipment in, and the biggest bits don't fit at all..



We put in some lights too, hoping it will be easier to look around in the evenings.. Finally, we invested in a trailer customization for our truck, so we can easier haul wood. We cut down a few trees to make space for the extra shed, and those netted us another ten grand.

After all the investments, we're still left with $53136. Nice with a reserve. We need some for seed, fertilizer, herbicide and possibly lime during the season at least.

March 1979

A lot of snow in March.. Taking it easy and just tending the animals. Built a small shed over by the mill so we have a convenient way to store our pallets until we are ready to sell them...

[humbe]

April 1979

And now we're cooking with gas...



Mowed the field in no time at all.. Once we realized we had to remove the mulcher for the grass to not just be buried into the field. We need hay though, and our small and old tedder makes the tedding a tedious job.. Especially after seeing how fast we can now mow. But we haven't found an alternative yet. At least we don't need that much hay, so we don't need to do it all too often..

With the new and bigger grassfield, a bigger windrower and a bigger loading wagon would also have been nice. I guess a baler could be an alternative to a loading wagon.



Nooo.. Hay on the field and it started raining and thundering.. Sadly doesn't seem to matter at all in FS22. With FS19 and seasons grass would rot away at least.

The darker green patch in the corner is from before we realized we had to remove the mulcher.

[humbe]

Think we got just above 50 thousand liters of hay from the harvest, but we'll make hay of the next one too, just to be sure we have enough until next year.

With the new 4440 we can actually pull all our 3 grass rollers too. So guess we'll hang onto them. Was considering dumping two, as we've only managed to use one until now.



With helper, we're making 11 kph average, and their working speed is 12 kph. Driving manually though, we're down to 4 to 5 kph with all three onboard. So still quite a haul.

On the mulched part of the grass field we see we have +100% yield now. Lets monitor if it stays like that across multiple harvests which we suspect. If so, might be worth it to mulch the entire field once before starting to use it for grass harvests. Will take a lot of crops to make up for the crop destroyed though.

Wool prices are $1804 and still rising in the train yard. Monitoring the price, and delaying selling the wool for now, but we'll sell within April. We have around 22000 liters of wool to sell, so that should make a nice income.



In total $41743 income from the wool, at $1821 per thousand liters. And that's all for April I reckon.. Hmm.. After selling wool, we might have enough money for a landplot.. Decisions decisions..

[humbe]

Hmm.. With 88 thousand dollars in our pocket, we decided to buy the landplot south of us, listed for 85. That leaves too little cash for fertilizer, herbicide and vehicle maintenance and the like until we have gotten to a good sell time for more goods, but we figured we can likely sell some tomatoes or something to get a bit of extra cash..



Getting started early to create a new field, means we'll be able to grow a crop on this which we can still harvest this year, which should net us some extra cash.. So we decided to put in some late nights and surprise the family.

May 1979

Bud: You bought another field !!! I thought we agreed on getting bigger tools and such instead..

And we did. We got an awesome tractor, a self-propelled fertilizer, a mower, and we recently got a big disc harrow and a new seeder. Isn't that enough? I also decided we'll test out using liquid fertilizer and herbicide to see if we can save some work on the field.

Bud: Yeah.. Sounds pretty decent actually. But I'm not spreading lime on that new field by myself..

Bud's right.. Our lime wagon isn't up to snuff. With a 3 meter working width and only 1400 liters of storage, it takes a lot of effort to add lime.



With team effort, we are almost complete with the liming though. We had 4 big bags stored, and bought 5 more, and still it looks to be just enough.



Running our new seeder with the seed tanks on the new 4440 is smooth. Just a bit more than an hour listening to the radio. It takes a bit of time though, with the limited working width, but with the tanks we don't need to stop to refill that often.

We're seeding Sorghum. Which we should have time to harvest in time for seeding Canola in autumn.

After buying lime we're pretty much out of money, but we cut down a few trees to make the new field fit in, and to be able to drive around field 6, so lets sell those and see if we can earn money needed for fertilizer and the like..

[humbe]

Still looking for a better lime sprayer..



We had high hopes when we saw this, but this one is sold, and while we do find GMC C7000 trucks and some other GMC and Chevy trucks, we are unable to find a fertilizer spreader bed to put on top of it..

Ich.. A time fitting US vehicle, but it seems noone has implemented a time fitting fertilize spreader that fits on the back.. If anyone has a suggestion for a time correct lime wagon, either for a truck or for a tractor, that preferrably has like 6-9m working width and at least 5000 liters capacity, hopefully around 10000 liters, let me know. If I don't find any, I guess I may end up bringing something that looks the part, possibly not time correct, but with european origin. The Agromet RCW-3 seems like the closest I've found yet.

[humbe]

June 1979

June has come, and our barley is ready for harvesting.



Handling the straw is our most tedious task when harvesting. With only 7000 liter capacity of the loading wagon, that's quite a lot of drives back to the silo. Fairly easy to automate the harvesting if I want to, by using courseplay and autoempty into truck.. Straw handling is more tricky automate. Have not tried.



Mulching with the new mower is quick and easy. Didn't cost us much in vehicle maintenance either, but then the tractor is new, so maintenance is cheap. In the back you see our "new" shed to house pallets from the mill. We just used some leftover material to make a shed.

Hmm.. But how much barley did we end up with? Did we calculate correctly to have enough chicken feed until next years harvest? Looks like we ended up with around 58 thousand liters of barley. That should hold until next harvest and then some.. Especially due to someone seeding the wrong second field with barley. No biggie though. We just get some more stored than planned.

Field 10 needs another layer of lime sadly, which I then reckon fields 8 & 9 also will. Well.. Not that we could afford another lime wagon currently anyhow, so I guess we'll have to get our small wagon out again.. There's no rush to prepare it for seeding again, but with canola harvest up coming up next month, I guess we can prepare the two fields for sowing this month so they are ready.

[humbe]

July 1979

We're harvesting Canola on our small fields, and also doing a grass harvest on our grass field. The Canola was quick, but the grass harvest is more tedious with our small tedder/windrower/loader wagon. Will be looking at options here in the future, but haven't managed to find other available options.



The Canola don't make straw, so we spray the remains back out on the field, almost as wide as the cutting width. If we leave a bit narrow lanes, we end up spraying over the entire field. Though that doesn't seem to matter at all. Was wondering if that could apply a fertilization layer, but I guess that's only straw crops where you don't collect the straw.

After harvesting the Canola, we used the new mower to mulch, and that worked out great. We also ran the disc harrow after to get that done. I guess we could spray a fertilization layer too. We ain't got enough money to buy liquid fertilizer though. I guess we may need to look into selling some tomatoes or something even though the price isn't awesome currently. We have quite a bit of flour stored away, but flour prices are horrible right now.

I don't think we're in a rush to fertilize though. New crops won't start growing much before next year anyhow, and our new sprayer looks to have pretty narrow tires and should hopefully not hurt crop much even if they grow up a bit.

For the grass field, we decided to not bother windrowing at all. With a 4m working width windrower, it feels a bit useless as the loading wagon fills up pretty quickly regardless with it's 2m working width.

We ended up with 54 thousand liters of hay. Now at 94000 liters total stored.

[humbe]

August 1979

We started harvesting early, in case we end up needing the time. We can also sow Canola, so might end up wanting to seed too. Also, we're doing the same on many fields, so might make sense to join some of our fields together. Canola seems to be a good plan, as we don't have to mess with straw, and we can make canola oil. Some barley to make money of the chickens is also nice, and grass to get wool and milk.

[humbe]

As talked about earlier, we're kinda specializing a little bit now:

• Growing canola and turning it to canola oil in the mill, which we can sell.
• Growing barley for chicken feed and turn them into eggs we can sell.
• Growing grass as feed for sheep and cows, to get milk and wool to sell.

In addition, the greenhouse business is fairly small and not much work for us. Going big here would be easy, but income not requiring work sounds like cheating and doesn't sound fun either The horses are not really earning us anything, but they earn back what we spend at least, so have let them be for now, to avoid the discussion with Brenda.

I guess we could further specialize, but at least 3 different activities, gives us a bit different things to do at least.

But what is mentality in the US? Go big or go home! We decided it's about time to join some fields..



We're joining fields 8, 9, 10 & 11, and trying to adjust some edges around it. We're making it big, so we need to handle headlands separately, and that seems simplest if there are no sharp corners in the field. We'd prefer it the field was convex all the way around, to simplify working it, but due to the forest on the south side, we have a little concave part there to avoid cutting down trees. We might get rid of them at some point.

Fields 8, 9 & 10 all needs lime applied this year, and we've handled field 10 already, so we get going liming the rest, including the new parts we plowed up in between them. In three years time when it is time to re-apply, we should have a bigger lime wagon. At least more lime storage.

It's a bit messy with the new field being in different states here and there.. After applying lime, we no longer saw the difference between plowed up areas and the mulched areas we needed to prepare for seeding. And it's harder to get any help from AI helpers

We'll sow Canola on this entire field, hopefully this month if we make it. I think it might be close to 9 hectares. The old fields 1 & 2 I think we won't bother seeding. They're just too small to matter and create a lot of work per hectares. Possibly also field 5, we'll see. We'll likely join field 6 and the new big field south of the farm into one big field too later, which leaves us no reasonably sized field to grow Barley on for our chickens. Either we need a simpler way to handle straw and possibly ramp up with more chickens to make use of barley on a big field, or we'll find an alternative solution. I'm thinking we'll buy the land plot to the west when we get income during winter, and use that for barley production later, as there's not enough space for a big field regardless. We likely don't have barley to hold two years currently, so maybe we'll use field 5 and possibly field 6 and delay joining it to the bigger field south of it, to grow barley, or maybe we'll use Sorghum from new plot after winter to feed the chickens in the meantime..

[humbe]

Seeding the new field we see the proportions.



If we can't find a bigger seeder, I think we'll have to get more so we can have multiple on the field at the same time. This takes ages. On the other hand, it's fairly easy work, as the field is big, so don't need to turn that often. Grabbing enough headlands to be safe, we also stay clear of the trees surrounding the field..



A photo from the air shows how the fields look now. We were currently seeding when the plane went by and took this photo, but it's hard to see the small tractor there.

Actually seeding this field was a 3 hour job in real time.. Gonna have to cut that down

We went out of money to get seed and fertilizer, but we sold some trees we cleared to better fit in the field, so we got enough cash to get seed, solid fertilizer for the seeder and liquid fertilizer for the second layer. Now we're broke again, but all we lack is herbicide.

September 1979

Finishing seeding in August, we were so tired of working, that we forgot to roll the field. Sadly too late once we realized it. Woulda felt better to apply herbicide first here, to get rid of the weeds, but as we don't have money for herbicide right now, we're laying in fertilizer first..



This little machine is excellent. 14m working width is way more than we used to. This machine fits our big field I thought we'd have to refill to cover the field, but it turns out it can spray the entire field and still have almost 40% the tank left. Will be interesting to see how much fertilizer we used per hectares. In either case, we have then bought plenty of liquid fertilizer, so it'll be a while before we need more. Actually, we bought 7 tanks, but initially only found 4 at the shop. Turns out we had accidentally set location in store deliveries and got 3 delivered somewhere else. A bit too easy to set the location by mistake. I guess I might disable the mod when I'm not testing out other mods, which is typically what I use it for.

I think milk prices might be decent now in September, so I think we'll sell what we have of milk, and use the money to buy herbicide. Oh.. And we've got a Sorghum field to harvest, and some barley to sow. And more canola on the big southern field I reckon.

[humbe]

The Ford has worked well for all the various jobs we've used it for.. Just have to be careful in corners here



That should be enough herbicide for now. After testing it out on the field, it looks like the amount of herbicide used is the same as the amount fertilizer used, so we can basically try to calculate liters per acre for both. 10 hectares with canola should give us up to 116 thousand liters, which, after converting to 58 thousand liters of oil, should net us well above a hundred grand, so while the liquid fertilizer and herbicide is a bit more expensive than the alternatives, it doesn't cut into the profit margins that much.

[humbe]

October 1979

All that no remains before winter is a final grass harvest. With all the canola and other products, we suspect we'll earn 150-200 grand over winter, waiting for time to be good to sell our products. A lot of the canola won't make it into oil this autumn though, so I guess some of the income should be delayed until next autumn.

Taking a break

Right now I think it's time for a break. I really wanna test out the Rennebu map, and I'm a bit tired of this scenario due to the following reasons:

• I'm not all satisfied with the map. A totally flat map doesn't fit me, coming from hilly Norway. All roads and streams being 100% straight lines also doesn't feel right.
• It's tiresome to find time correct machinery. Was really looking forward to '82 I think, when I could use the MF direct drill, but other than that, it's pretty hard to find anything suitable in lots of categories of equipment. As fields grew bigger, I'd really like to have more options of bigger machinery. There were big farms in US at the time, but old and medium/large machinery seems very limited. Especially as I tried to stuck with gear that was likely to be in US at the time.

Might continue a bit later, but as of now, I wanna try out a Rennebu scenario.. Probably posting a new thread for that.. I guess interest for these threads aren't high with the forum being fairly little used too, but as long as noone minds, I find it adding to my game, to try and blog a bit about it

But before the break, a quick review of learnings from the game:

Short comments on most notable mods used or planned:

• 1972 Ford F100 - Awesome pickup. An American classic I'd think. Fit my scenario great. Only issue I found was not being able to refuel it, but it had a large fuel tank, so haven't needed yet.
• American Farm Buildings Pack - Nice set of extra buildings to make a nice looking farm.
• Amazone D1 - Great old seeder option. Didn't really fit this scenario, but felt a lot better than using some really ancient tech.
• Agromet-Pionier Z609 - Old potato harvester - Worked out great, and thankfully also cut the top. But without any other way than a bucket to get potatoes of the ground, sadly too tedious to use.
• Adjustable Mirrors - Awesome mod. Sadly not in use much in this game, as few vehicles had mirrors fitting into my view from the drivers seat.
• Autodrive - Tested it a bit. Used it to drive a bit too and from shops and selling points, but nothing advanced. Think I preferred courseplay from FS19, but worked out ok.
• Cambridge Roller - Nice old option for rolling.
• Case 5100 - Great direct drill seeder made from 1982 and onwards I think. Sadly haven't gotten that far into time yet.
• Case IH Axial-Flow series - Looks like a great harvester option for early 80s gear options. Didn't get here either. From the specs, it doesn't seem to be better than the 7700 JD harvester, but they look a bit newer and more updated at least.
• Chicken Transport Crate - Great to be able to not teleport chickens.
• Classic 2 Row Planter - Great old option for planting.
• Concrete Rollers Pack - This required way more horsepower than expected. Would expect them to be useful with less.
• ContractorMod - Awesome mod. Ported from FS19. Sadly got a few bugs. Appearance of main character kept getting screwed up on save/reload, and if I switched characters while riding, I was in some bugged view when switching back.
• CoursePlay - Way less functional than in FS19, but still very useful for field work. Will be using it more.
• Damage Bar Selection - See how much damage selected gear has, instead of average of tractor and all connected gear. Nice.
• Damcon PL-10 - Oldest option for sowing trees I found at the time of game start. Now there's mod for sowing by hand though
• Diesel Canister - Always great for when you run out of gasoline
• Fill Level Limiter - Limit how much to fill from a silo. Really useful for my horse enclosure, with common storage for hay and oat, to be able to not overfill with one or the other.
• First Person Horse Riding Camera - Fun.. But i got motion sickness from the up and down movement of the camera
• Follow me - Another great mod to be able to make a drive train down the field.
• Free Landscaping Tools - Used it to paint wear on the ground. Very nice. Though would be nice to be able to easily toggle on and off, so I could pay for when I was planning to do actual landscaping work on the farm, opposed to making up for changes not automatically handled.
• Fuel Level Warning - Saved me from going empty, at least once.
• Hand Plant Saplings - What I shoulda used to grow trees had the mod existed when I started this scenario
• Handsaw - Another cool low-tech mod, that I think didn't exist at game start.
• Hobo Farmhouse Pack - Nice simple options for farm house / sleep triggers.
• Homemade Liquid Tank - Simplest option of selling milk. Other old options typically only carry water. But 1000 liters of milk at a time, got way too tedious.
• IndoorCamFirst - Better immersion, by keeping view first person when entering vehicles.
• International 06 Series - Where I got the IH 1206. Great mod. Tractor sadly slid around a bit with engine on and breaks engaged at zero speed. Not sure if related to mod or not. JD harvester did the same. Very maneuverable. To the point that I think it confused courseplay.
• International 37 - Disc harrow option i didn't end up using. Nice one though.
• International 720 plow - Awesome plow for early option.
• John Deere 110 12ft disc - Great disc harrow. Only minor issue being hitbox being a bit wider than actual graphics. Didn't work to park in my garage, that looked wide enough but wasn't.
• John Deere 1630 And Tools - Yay.. Great mod for old JD tractor with fitting front loader and all.
• John Deere 250 - Sadly didn't get to new enough times to get this sprayer. First in '85 if I remember correctly.
• John Deere 40 series - Awesome tractors available from '79 and onwards.
• John Deere 400 Rotary Hoe - Which is weeded and not hoe as in the name. Confusing. Worked great, though wide to drive around with as it can't be compacted anything when not in use.
• John Deere 6000 - Self-propelled sprayer - This thing was awesome. And available early enough that I got to use it too.
• John Deere B 12ft Grain Drill - Another great old JD mod. Worked like a charm.
• John Deere HX20 - Mower with decent working width. Another great old option. Probably worked too well for a mulcher. Mulching better than the modern gear
• John Deere New Generation Combines - Great combines from the 70s. Very good farming simulator stats. If I went for the 7700 I wouldn't need to replace it before going into big and modern gear.
• John Deere Saddle Tanks - Great to get extra seed and fertilizer with seeder. Without it I wouldn't have bothered seeding my bigger fields. Not sure what year these were manufactured though.
• John Deere Weight 900 - Fit my 40 series tractor well.
• Large Outdoor Chicken Coop - 1000 liters grain storage and space for 500 chickens. Didn't really add up. I modded mod to have more grain storage to not grow insane, though I guess space for 500 chickens is far from realistic with how it looks. (Unless I actually modded that limit too. Can't remember, but don't think so
• Lizard Animal Trailer - Oldest option I found for carrying animals. If I remember correctly, I had to mod it to allow horses to be carried too.
• Lizard F-600 V8 Truck 1961 - I guess they weren't allowed to call it Ford. But looks the part
• Lizard GHC Avare - Nice old mower. Worked out ok for a while, but later I had issues having enough hp to use it for some reason.
• Lizard Gucio NO-26 - Nice small option for fert spreader.
• Lizard Kal3m - Nice small lime spreader.
• Lizard PB5-032 - Great roller.
• Lizard PH Mini Sugar Beet Harvester - Same story as the potato harvester. Fun option for old sugar beet harvester, but too tedious to get the product off the ground afterwards.
• Lizard PN-20/1 - Nice little slurry spreader.
• Lizard Z525 - Small tedder. Though for some reason I needed way too much hp to get this working as the game wore on.
• LumberJack - Another great mod. Hold in ALT to get superstrength. Thus, only get superstrength when you really need and want it, and not have it mess up other things by accident. Also, can allow you to remove tree stumps with the chainsaw. Used that as an option, as I found no old-tech tree stump remover.
• M82-Waterhose - Looked much better for cleaning vehicles as a 70s option.
• Massey Ferguson Small Classics - I really like the classic looking old tractors with no cab.
• Old Chainsaw - Nice with a chainsaw not looking too new for my scenario.
• Old Grain Mills - Cheap mill options. Maybe a bit too good, as I could build them fairly cheap, and they could really up what I got from selling my products. Could process a lot of different produce too.
• Old Water Trailer - Looked the part. Though sadly small. Ended up drilling for water to avoid needing water for cows and sheep as I needed so many trips with this one per day.
• Painy and Terraform anywhere - Nice when trying to build a scenario on the map.
• Player Position Saver - Great little mod to avoid teleporting. Start where you left of when loading game.
• Prikolica za drva - Nice little self-made looking log trailer.
• Repair Place - Nice option to make repair shop. Reuse another house with no function in it by putting this on the floor. Had a bit of issues using this one. Might have put it too close to other triggers, but for some reason, it typically worked when none of the other family members were inside vehicles when I tried using it. Not sure if it was an issue with this mod, contractor mod, a combination or mostly about my placement.
• RelightV1300 - Improves lighting in game. Not tried a lot back and forth, but think it was a decent improvement.
• Sam 3M - Nice small cultivator option.
• Seed/Fertilizer bag - Cool with small options, but quickly too tedious to load onto truck from store. A bit too cheap too maybe.
• Sicklebar Mower - Nice little mower I could brand in various ways.
• Small Cattle Barn with manure heaps - Nice little barn. Worked out well. Though a lot of work with cows for little money when you only have a few.
• Small Horse Pasture - Great looking old horse pasture.
• Stone bucket - Best old-tech option I found for removing stone.
• Traditional American Barn - The barn I used. A bit too narrow to store stuff in there, but looked the part, and great with having hay silo included.
• Through the Years - Interesting for my scenario, but didn't work out as well as I hoped. Not being able to look ahead in time in game to see what was coming was annoying. I preferred manually skipping through the too new stuff.
• The Western Wilds - Nice map.. I liked the gold options.. Though, too flat for my taste. And a bit strange that the train station gave +50% prices. Made all other sellpoints pretty much mute.
• Vehicle Control Addon - Great mod I've used a lot. Improves tractor driving. Being able to peek left/right is great. Looking backwards when reversing is great. Makes it more feasable to drive from 1st person view.
• Vehicle Salesystem Customizer - Used this to be able to get more than 4 used sales offers at a time. Really useful as otherwise all used sales offers would always be from gear I couldn't use yet.
• Vehicle Years - Great little mod for showing manufacturer year in game, if year is recorded. Shoulda been in base game so all gear, also from mods, had it recorded.

Phew.. And that wasn't even all the mods.. This game really needs a better way to organize mods. I want to be able to sort them into folders and enable/disable them in groups.

Other learnings:

• A mill was really useful to get more from crops before selling them.
• Greenhouses are a bit too easy income, as there's little work involved.
• A scenario going through time was interesting, but sadly hindered by availability of options for a lot of gear categories. Hard to dig up info on manufacturer years when it comes to implements also. Tractors/harvesters was a lot easier to find data on.
• Stones are annoying. Think I'll disable them for next playthrough. I always ends up working around them, by only using tools that bring up none or small stones so I can roll them away.

[UncleRico]

I enjoyed following along thus far and will continue if you choose another and blog about it