Fresh Fields

It’s August in Osada… The height of the harvest season but also a time for preparing fields for the next crop – will I cope or will something sneak under the radar?

1st week of August and fields 1 & 2 are green with Oilseed Radish…

…I’ll need to find time to plough that crop in ready for sowing – I’m planning on Winter Barley for these two fields. Fields, 3, 12 and 14 all have crops ready to harvest. Those will be my priority before turning my attention to neighbours fields. I sorted out field 3 first…

…Then field 14, then finally field 12. I got a nice load of Sorghum from that field…

All of my harvested grain went to the silo for future sale when the prices have increased. Harvesting done, I attacked the cultivating in field 1 to finish off the week…

…Field 2 was going to have to wait for the second week.

Week 2 and now I was able to help out with contracts for other farmers – here’s a Sorghum crop I’m harvesting in field 32…

…that was one of three fields harvested that week which brought in some good money. But I still had some unfinished business in my own fields. With rain forecast for the weekend I was working late baling the straw…

…before taking it in darkness to the biomass plant…

…80 bales between fields 3 and 14 – that earned me over €4k 😎

The 3rd week was more of the same – harvesting for neighbours. But I also picked up a cultivating job…

…which I combined with cultivating field 12.

Harvesting continued in the 4th week of August and this time I was cutting Oats in field 41…

…and Wheat in field 71. I closed out the week with some improvement work on field 12 – it came with a lot of large stones, so I bought a stone-bucket and set to work clearing them…

…They weigh a lot, so I had to be careful when tipping them into the trailer…

That covers the August activities on the farm but as usual it doesn’t tell all the story. There’s all the pre-planning / musings that go on in the background: –

My target fields – ones I’d like to own – increased. Having worked field 41, I can see the benefit of owning that field as well as field 40 – they’re both easily accessed along the track behind my yard. I also have some fields that I don’t want – in some cases that’s because they will be hard to work but in a lot of cases it’s because they provide regular work for me and the additional income is very helpful.

The yard is now overflowing and I wonder how long it will be before my grain storage reaches capacity. There are a couple of options to expand the yard and the storage for crops and machinery. The first is to buy the land adjacent to my existing plot and knock down the sheds, replacing them with silos and a more open-plan shed for machinery. The second is to build on the grass field in my existing plot, possibly removing a couple of the trees from the boundary along with the fence to allow access. Then fencing the area with an access point to the lane at the back. This latter option has cost advantages although it would result in losing my income from Haymaking. It would also put Sheep farming on hold but I could possibly do Chickens instead. Lots of thinking going on…

Oh! and did I mention that I’ll be able to afford a planter come Spring for Corn and Sunflowers – I just need to prepare fields 12 and 14 for those crops. I think field 3 may get sunflowers too 😎👍

September will be a little quieter but I’ll still have a bit to do 😅👌

Oak Glen Farm

Lots of work being done on the farm and a couple of unintended purchases see my working balance stable at around £110k. The first of these purchases was a weeder – the Einbock Aerostar-Rotation 1200, which as you might guess clears a 12m swathe of weeds at a time. Early in game I chose to do my weed removal using the Hardi sprayer that I have shared images of in action. The reason for choosing to buy that first was the nature of weeds – the pesky varmints can show up on your fields at any stage of crop growth and herbicide can be used to remove them at any time. A Weeder however can only be used before the crops get to their second growth stage so if you can only afford one means of dealing with weeds, herbicide is the way to go. With stable income now assured on my farm, I can afford to add a weeder and that in turn means I can take jobs from other farmers that specify using a weeder. Here it is unfolding for just such a job for Mason in field 36……and ripping out the weeds……The weeder requires 130HP, so the Fendt Favorit will handle it. Job finished and weeder folded up I head back across Field 13 and I can see that my crops in 14 are ready to be harvested……So that’s going to be my next task.

Field 14W turned in just over 17000l of Canola……but the price wasn’t as good as I would like so that went to the Silo at the farm to be sold when things improve. 14E produced just over 13000l of Wheat, most of which went straight to Empire Stores for a good price with a small quantity held back to feed the Chickens – overall profit from that field, including the straw collected after harvesting, was over £16k. The Oats in Field 4 were also ready and, again including straw, returned over £10k. This was a very good return from a small field but the harvesting was very tricky with such an irregular edge, so I have decided to return that field to grass for hay and silage production. To that end I prioritised, fertilizing, cultivating and sowing field 4 before working on any of the others. Here we are in Field 4 – the sowing is complete……that’s field 36, where we were weeding earlier, beyond the hedge. I limed both the fields in plot 14 and harrowed the lime in ready for fertilizing. Lime is an expensive necessity that fortunately only has to be done every 3 harvests. That was the end of my in-game day. Early to bed for an early start harvesting our original field next day.

Sun up and back to work…..harvesting the Barley crop. This produced a huge amount of straw – 21 bales. I decided that I really needed to cut back on the number of journeys when I do have a lot of bales to shift. So that other new purchase mentioned at the start was the Anderson RBM 2000. This cost £50k but I was able to get £26k back on the Ursus T-127 bale trailer so the net cost was £24k. It’s a great bit of kit capable of carrying 24 bales at a time. Here we are collecting the straw bales after the harvest……and loaded up ready to take them for sale……That’s 6K earnt from something I don’t have a use for 🙂 Last task for this post was fertilizing the plot 14 fields ready for our next crops. I was able to tie that in with fertilizing field 36 for Mason which earned me over £8k after buying some fertilizer. Looks like he has a good crop of corn growing there – a harvesting contract for that could be a good excuse for me to buy a corn header 😉 Something to think about. And I need to think about another field to buy – Field 13 could be back on the agenda 🙂

Oak Glen Farm

Okay – The expected community event in Euro Truck Simulator is underway. I will be reporting on that soon. However, the way the event is set up means I only have to do short jobs which allows me to carry on working on the farm too! So here’s what’s happening.

In the last post I told you about our grinding work schedule – ploughing a new field and then preparing it for a crop before actually seeding it with Soy Beans. Now I’m stuck with nothing to do. The new crop hasn’t sprouted yet and the Oats in the other field are still in a growth phase. I need something to fill my ‘spare’ time. Some of that time was taken up by thinking – always a dangerous use of time. I realised that the existing trailer was going to be too small for harvesting the new field so I decided to get another Metaltech trailer, a TB14 that can handle 17000l of grain……I also took the DB8 to the shop and reconverted it back to open sides – it will now exclusively be used on transport type work. To fill in the gap between work on our own fields I drove the Massey, now wearing the front lifter and pallet forks, over to the sawmill with the DB8. We took a delivery from there up to Hill Top Stores – it was a bit of a struggle but we got it done. On the way back we checked out the new field and our Soy Beans have popped through……No sign of weeds; Yet!

By the time I got back to our farm, the Oats in our first field were ready to harvest so it was time to fire up the New Holland TC5.90 and get stuck in……I was able to fit all the harvested Oats into the new trailer – which was a slightly disappointing yield unless I was expecting too much? However, selling the crop earned me £14400 which was good. The bonus was the straw – I set the harvester to produce straw and we got lots of it. My tractors patrolled that field after the initial harvest with the Kuhn Baler and the Ursus pick-up trailer and retrieved 20 bales of straw……which netted an additional £8362. So the overall earnings from the harvest were over £22k 🙂

Another check on our fields and I see that field 14 west has now got weeds so I head over there in the Fendt with the sprayer. I was a bit low on herbicide and couldn’t quite complete the field in one load so I took the Massey to collect a fresh 2000l canister of the stuff from the shop……That should keep us in weedkiller for a few more infestations! After completing the spray, both tractors went back to the farm and a check on the Silage price revealed that Oakfield Farm was offering £362 per 1000l. Time to sell a small batch of my silage bales. I loaded up the Ursus T-127 trailer with 8 bales……and took them over to the neighbouring farm. That netted me £11614 🙂 I’m going to drip feed the rest of them to the buyers to try and keep the price high, so back at the farm I loaded another 8 bales but left the trailer parked next to the bunker.

Now I need to prepare the field opposite the farm again, plough the new crop area over in field 14 East and keep an eye on the price of silage which is creeping up at the Stables too! Money is starting to come to me, but only because I’ve worked very hard 🙂 I’ll leave you with a shot of the harvested Oats being loaded up for sale with the lines of straw…

Happy farming everyone 🙂