May – Busy month with contracts available throughout the month. I started off by applying a second dose of fertilizer to my Sorghum…
…and Soya Bean crops. These will now grow through to harvest time without further intervention from me unless some weeds appear.
At the start of the second week I looked up the available contracts – clearly it’s Haymaking time for a lot of the local farmers, though there were also Silage jobs. I can’t take Silage work because I don’t have a Bale Wrapper but Haymaking is right up my street. Each job is, in reality, 5 tasks – so they pay well. And there’s the bonus that you are contracted for a set number of bales – any additional bales earn money for you!
Here’s how it goes – First you mow…
…That’s quite a long job with this old-school cutter. Then you Ted the Grass – turn it over to dry it. Here I am crossing the river with my Tedder on the way to the field…
Once the Grass has dried and become Hay, it needs to be Windrowed…
…that’s always a dusty job😅 Then we have to fetch the Baler and package up the Hay…
…This field produced 67 bales…
Finally, we have to pick up the bales and transport them to the buyer…
The work alone earned me €5700 and then I got paid an additional €1800 for extra bales! 😎 But, As you can see, Haymaking is an intensive process – imagine doing that with Scythes and Pitchforks! Even with my mechanical aids, this field took me the equivalent of a week’s work and that’s why the work pays so well.
…That’s the story of May told in just one job. Time to head back to my farm at the end of a hard day’s work…
…I took Haymaking jobs on similar sized fields for the last 2 weeks of May. I ended the month with €44k in the bank account and that means that the dream of a better Combine Harvester is almost within my grasp. June should see my Barley crop ready to harvest and probably some harvesting for other farmers too👍 As an aside, I’m amazed at how quickly I have become adept at manually loading bales onto that trailer – that’s one gaming skill I never realised I’d be learning😂
Images from Finchley 