Oak Glen Farm

It’s a time of change. New theme for my blog and I think it may be the end of the road for Oak Glen Farm in its current format. All of the thinking about the next steps – which fields to buy, etc, had left me wondering if I should restart with a different strategy. The final straw came yesterday when I tried harvesting my Sugar Beet. I hooked up the Rooster to the Massey 7726 and set off…

The first problem I encountered is the capacity limit of the machine – even my small field fills the basket before I reach the end of a row. So there I am sat in the middle of the field needing to unload into a trailer. OK – I’m thinking – there’s going to be a lot of trailer runs for this harvest! Then I hit the big problem – taking a trailer into the crop destroys the plants as you go. Fortunately, I hadn’t been playing for 15 minutes when I made this discovery so by exiting the game without saving I was able to reset the clock back to before the harvest. Next I try manoeuvring the rootster down the side of the field – this too incurs crop damage whenever I depart from a straight track and also leaves some beet unharvested. I decided at this point that I’d show you the combined effects harvester and trailer on the crop, so I deliberately drove the trailer over to the harvester……having got there I thought I should at least show the Rootster unloading…

I have looked for trailers that can be given narrow crop-friendly wheels. I’ve tried using a small trailer that has narrow wheels – it still wrecks the crop 😦 There is a solution of course. I could turn off crop damage in the settings but that sort of goes against the grain for me. Instead I’m taking this away as another lesson learned in the game that will guide me in future field / crop choices. Sugar Beet are best planted in a field with a straight side that has room for a trailer to come alongside the harvester without driving across the crop. There was another option I could try in future, remove the tops first then run the harvester over the crop (with narrow tyres on the tractor) – that approach could reduce the risk of damage by the harvester. Then it would be easier to create a bridgehead in the crop for the trailer because the harvester only configuration would be more manoeuverable. And why haven’t I discovered this issue before? It hasn’t been a problem with my previous crops because they just don’t return 6000l in a single row, so there’s always been room to bring a trailer alongside!

So what will I do now? I really love the Oakfield Farm map and it has swayed my thinking about what type of map I prefer to play on. Whatever I choose to do next, it will be on another real-world based map. That rules out doing the Holzman’s Farm idea as that is on a fictional map. Oak Glen Farm is in Gloucestershire. I have three other maps in mind as alternative venues for a series located respectively in Hampshire, Shropshire and Ayrshire.

So these are my options going forward:-

1, Carry on regardless (with the crop damage off for this one harvest) – Oak Glen Farm continues.
2, Do a Start from Scratch on this map – adopting a different approach to the field creation method used in this series – Oak Glen Farm continues but differently.
3, Do a Start from Scratch on a different map, creating a totally new series – New Farm / new series name.

So I have a lot to think about! I’ll leave you with some shots from recent activity on Oak Glen Farm…