Oak Glen Farm

In my last post from the farm, I was heading up to my freshly purchased field with an equally new Claas harvester.  So now I’ll tell you about the harvesting of the barley crop we bought with the field.

I hauled the header up the lane behind the harvester but, as mentioned in the first post, things are tight around entrances to fields.  So, at the entrance I uncoupled the header trailer and then reversed the Tucano into a handy track.  The tractor was then brought up from the farm with the trailer which was the uncoupled in the lane.  I could then use the tractor to move the header to a more suitable position for the harvester to hook up……Here we are hooked up and ready at the entrance to the field to make a start on harvesting……The first task is to create an open area on this side of the field so that the tractor and trailer can drive in ready for when the harvester is full. Looking at an aerial image on google maps, it seems this is exactly what the real life farmer does too! Here’s our beach-head with the tractor on the land ready to unload the harvester…

After the initial clearing cut, I can then proceed around the field in any way I like. The crop will produce around 2.5 trailer loads of barley. It’s a good idea to keep an eye on the prices that the various businesses in game will pay for my barley as these vary over time. Here’s a screen that shows the various crop types in game and their symbols……and here’s the current prices……You can see that the best payment for barley is £559 but Willow Brook Stores’ offer is going up – neither represents a good return. With ample silo space on the farm, I can choose to store the crop and wait for the offer to improve and that is what I am going to do. Here’s the Arion dropping off a load at the farm silos……By the time I finished the harvesting the price was up to £615 and still climbing, so I’m going to wait some more 🙂

Here’s the last load going into the trailer……and then we can decouple the header and tow it back down to the farm……where the harvester can be parked up in the large shed…

In future harvesting operations I hope to have a second smaller tractor that will tow the header to and from the fields. I will be talking about buying that tractor, getting our Chickens and some of my other plans in the next post. In the meantime we’re left with a field full of straw that needs lime and to be ploughed before I can plant another crop.