farm

September – Autumn harvests and field preparation for winter crops…

The Canola has come through on fields 1 and 2 – so have the weeds. The Soya Beans in field 3 are ready to harvest too. The first week of September began with harvesting the Soya and applying weedkiller. Then I applied fertilizer to fields 1 & 2 – that completed the fertilizing for field 2 but field 1 will need another load in October to complete the fertilizing process. This is how the fields look after all that work…

My fields are small so that didn’t take too long. I was then able to pick up some work for my neighbours starting with harvesting in field 5…

…You can see why this field isn’t on my radar as one I’d like to own – some boggy patches in the centre reduce the crop yield. I moved on to do my first ploughing job of the Autumn in field 23…

…and with half the week still to go, I took a very large harvesting job over next to the grain store…

…That was a lot of work and, as the week drew to a close we were in a race against the rain. I was glad when I headed back to my farm in the late evening…

…The rains finally coming when I was halfway home. It was worthwhile – €7k earnt!😎👍

The second week saw me doing cultivation work for a neighbour before moving on to cultivate field 3. I sat there thinking for a while before I got started…

…I was thinking – ‘What if I cut down those trees’ – That would make the field a lot easier to work and increase its size. I shall have to go to church on Sunday and confess to such immoral ideas😅 Don’t worry, the trees are staying. I’m sure there’s a good historical reason why the previous farmers haven’t removed them. Anyway, I got on with the cultivating.

The third week and I started by sowing Oilseed Radish as a catch crop to pre-fertilise field 3. There were no jobs for other farmers that I could do except for a very large haymaking job that looked like 2 weeks work to me and I didn’t want to get tied up with that. Instead, I decided to mow my own grass and take the bales of hay to the biomass plant – that earnt me €1300. I’ll need to fertilise the grass in October.

With some free time I took a trip to a different tractor dealer over in Polowa. I wanted to see some possible replacements for our Massey Ferguson 178 and find out how they perform and what they’ll cost me. The dealer, a larger than life character with a handlebar moustache…

…was more than happy to demo them for me. Here’s the line-up…

We carried out the trial on a small field which needed ploughing and we tried each with a 3-blade and a 4-blade plough. The John Deere was immediately fine with both sizes of plough but both Massey Ferguson’s initially suffered from wheel slip with the 4-blade so we changed over to wide tyres and then they also performed fine. The John Deere 4240 would cost me €62k and the Massey Ferguson 3630 €68k. The 3630 is a more modern machine bristling with electronics and also has a front power out which the 4240 lacks. Time to go away and think while I try to earn enough money to buy one of these.

The final week of September and there is very little I can do. I took a large ploughing job which earnt me €2k…

…but now it’s time to put our feet up and drink tea while we wait for October to dawn🥱

Game Notes: – As you can imagine, a lot of testing was done before initially setting up the Osada map farm for this series. With the series in full flow, I can’t really carry out testing on the map where I’m playing, so to check out new vehicles I needed to create a different profile. I could have done that with the Osada map but there is a newer mod-map that I wanted to take a look at – Polowa. This is also a Polish map but unlike Osada, it is a representation of the real-world Polowa. It looks to be a very good map with lots of detail, so I may be setting up farm there for a future series. As for my tractor selection for the tests – Only the John Deere 4240 and the Massey Ferguson 3630 meet my age criteria being from the mid 1970’s and the late 1980’s respectively. The MF 3125 is a 1990’s machine. I also tried out the Massey Ferguson 253 as a possible replacement for both the Bolinder-Munktell Terrier and the Zetor 6245 but it can’t handle the cultivator so the Zetor’s job is safe 😅 But I will be thinking about one of the 200 series family as a replacement for the Terrier in the future.