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This is the first of my new Farming Simulator 19 series which, like Trucking Digest and Birdshot, will appear as and when 😉 Let me begin by saying that the farm that you saw images from in my last ‘Save Slot post has since been consigned to the recycle bin along with a couple of other early farms during my discovery period in this game. I learnt a lot from it and have started a bit differently this time – you’ll notice an absense of farmhouse in my shots from the current farm for example. Further down the series I’ll explain some of my starting decisions born out my early experiences. For now, I think we’ll take a look at a fairly typical day on Mill Valley Farm which comprises of fields 21 and 22 on this map…

Very early morning and it’s tipping down with rain – any plans on making an early start with harvesting are put on hold. Instead I make an early run to the farmers store for some essential supplies. We got Fertilizer, Seeds and Herbicide…

I need the herbicide to kill off some weeds growing in a crop of Barley which was in one of the fields I bought. At least weed-killing and fertilizing can be done in the wet…

Then it’s time to tidy away the machinery before breakfast – a place for everything and everything some place of the other 😉 At least the rain seems to have almost stopped…

With the sun drying the crops rapidly, we’re off to do some harvesting for neighbouring farms which earns us a payment for our time and the wear and tear on our machinery. We also get a share of the money from the crop – so it’s in our interest to make sure we don’t miss any. This is the first field and you can see what happens if you don’t deal with the weeds – it may be pretty but that crop of oats is going to be around 20% down on what it could have been…

These fields are larger than mine so it takes several runs with my trailer to deliver the harvested grains to the selling point…

On to the second field where the farmer has taken really good care of his Barley crop. I think that took 7 runs to the grain elevator before the job was complete. You really don’t want to be walking behind a Combine Harvester! …

Back to my own farm where I find that my newly sown Oat crop is growing nicely. I’ll have to prepare the other field by ploughing and adding lime in preparation for my other crop which I think will be Canola…

End of the day and it’s time to wash all the mud and dust off the equipment – we all like a shower after a long day’s work don’t we 🙂

More details about equipment and other choices in the next post.

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Well – I had hoped to be fitting in a post or two about other games or with some photography but…

Hot on the heels of the Renault T being released into Euro Truck Simulator – and this post will have to serve as the promised review of that truck – On Tuesday SCS announced on social media that the World of Trucks servers were coming down for maintenance. Experience tells us that this signals a community event. They happen a few times each year, sometimes specific to ETS2 or American Truck and sometimes both games. Sure enough, when the servers came back up, we had a new event to take part in. However, this was an event with a difference. We were going to drive for a charitable cause 🙂 The chosen cause was Breast Cancer and full details of the charity bodies to initially receive donations can be found on SCS Software’s Blog. All I can say is Wow SCS – What a great idea!

Needless to say, the community responded very positively and got stuck in straight away. By the time SCS hosted a twitch-stream that afternoon, over 5000 copies of the dlc’s giving the special paint jobs for the event had already been sold and over 130k deliveries had been completed towards the 1 million total target. Bearing in mind that this is mid-week, I would expect activity to peak from Friday to Monday when our fellow virtual truckers who can’t drive during the week are active. So hopefully there will be many more DLC’s sold then and lots of money made for the charities.

We’ve been encouraged to also highlight Breast Cancer Awareness Month on social media using our trucking screenshots from this event, in the hope that it will also bring this cause to a wider audience. So, here’s some shots from my participation. Firstly the Renault T in Europe…

…and now, the Peterbilt 389 in America…

I completed my personal goal of 12 deliveries last night – 6 each in ETS2 and ATS. As usual, I will now continue to deliver the special cargoes to help the community complete its delivery target – as will a lot of fellow drivers I know on Twitter. That’s why SCS often refer to us as the Best Community 🙂

My Peterbilt 389 will retain her Maroon metallic Ribbon paint job…

The Renault T has reverted to our company metallic Blue but retains the Breast Cancer Ribbon of Hearts and gets the hanging boxing gloves as a souvenir of her involvement…

What about the Renault T? This is a beautifully modelled truck with a very distinctive engine sound. One of my twitter colleagues has driven the type IRL and reckons the sounds are accurate. The gear ratios combined with the 480HP engine I selected seem well suited to the mix of european roads for normal cargoes. I’m really enjoying driving it – and it will be one of the mainstays of my fleet 🙂

At the time of posting the community had achieved over 250k deliveries 🙂 Keep the shiny side up!