testing

Once more I find myself posting about my FS22 experience a bit earlier than I had planned. A new update was released yesterday by Giants and brought with it ‘Precision Farming’. Although precision farming was introduced in FS19, I never really got to try it because I was using mod maps and didn’t want to corrupt them. I guess we’d better start by explaining what precision farming is – here’s a video from Giants…

Now I’m guessing that has left you with more questions than answers – it has me! 🙄 The news post gives more info and there are new help pages in the game. I will be able to farm ok with precision farming installed and activated, but initially I will not be able to get my sustainability score up to high levels. I’ll try to explain why as we go along.

Conveniently, I have only just harvested field 17, so I will be able to begin using the new methods straight away. The first step is to get the soil sampled. You can do this either by purchasing a soil map or by sampling the field yourself and sending the samples away for testing. Buying a soil-map is cheapest in the short term because the Isaria soil sampler costs €17K, but I noted that on the soil information pages about ph and nitrogen levels there is an Outdated Data possibility – that suggests that you will need to resample the field from time to time in order to maintain data integrity (don’t you just love having to second guess?). I decided to buy the soil sampler and the daytime crop sensors that fit to the mirrors. I guess buying another field will have to wait a while🙄 Here I am taking samples on field 17…

…It took just 4 samples to map the entire field and this is the map I got back…

…Using the table on the right you can see that this is a nice field consisting almost entirely of Loam soil – just a bit of silty-clay along the southern side. Loam is the best soil for reducing your use of seed as shown in this table courtesy of Giants Software…

The environmental score for the field has gone up too – from 50 to 57. I can now see the PH and Nitrogen levels of the soil too. The PH is pretty good…

…but the Nitrogen level is bad…

…That’s understandable as we’ve just harvested a crop from that field and all the fertilizer will have been consumed. Here’s what the figures look like on the ground – see the infobox on the bottom right…

At this point, if I owned cows or pigs I could lay down some slurry on the field to bring that level up a bit. It would reduce the amount of chemical applications later in the crop cycle but it’s not an option for me. I can improve the PH level though by adding some lime. This is my next change from the old game-play. Normally the game prompts you to lime every 3 years and you just do a blanket spread across the field. I’ve fitted the Isaria Crop Sensors to my Massey 5S…

…and they should adjust the rate of lime distribution to the amount needed for the correct PH level. So, now I’ll be liming as and when I need to bring the level back up rather than once every 3 years. They seem to work well.

At this point I need to talk about changes to plans. Before Precision Farming was released I had been thinking of letting field 17 lie fallow until next spring and possibly grow a Potato crop. That plan has changed now. I think instead that I will plant Canola in this field so that I can get on with testing working with Precision Farming. So the next stage was to continue preparing the field by cultivating it…

Cultivating and ploughing are not a good thing in the Precision Farming mantra – both of them bring up weed seeds from deep in the soil allowing them to germinate and thus requiring more use of herbicide. Additionally, ploughing is hard work for the tractor and burns a lot of fuel. The preferred approach is abandon the plough and use a direct drill seeder, thus cutting out costly processes and reducing the use of herbicide. I don’t know about the weeds, but I’ve brought up another load of rocks that I’ll have to remove🤣 If we take another look at the soil map screen you can see that my field PH is now almost uniformly 6.750 but in the Environmental Score box, on the left of centre, we’ve dropped back to a score of 51 because of our use of the cultivator…

…If you look closely, in that same box, it says that the environmental score does not affect sell prices. It remains to be seen whether it affects my yield though!

I haven’t soil tested field 14 yet – I’m not going to disturb a Sorghum crop that is nearly ready to harvest. We can take a quick look from the side though…

…This field has been farmed under the old methods so I think the yield percentage appears a bit lower as a result. When the crop is harvested next month I’ll be able to get the sampling done and move forwards. I’m planning to sow Barley in this field next.

Precision farming may mean change on my farm – old implements may be sold and direct drill seeding become the norm. But this is a working farm and money doesn’t grow on trees – the process of change will be slow. I’m guessing that mirrors the real world!

Time to try out another map in Farming Simulator 19. This map is based on a real location in Cornwall called Bessy Beneath. Like most maps it offers a choice of possible starting farms from the main dairy farm in the area to a couple of very small sheep farms. As far as I can see, all aspects of gameplay are present and the scenery is well crafted although it’s probably not quite as good as the Oakfield Farm and Six Ashes maps which I have been playing on.

Perhaps it’s time to tell a bit about what happens before any of my Farming Simulator 19 series. There’s a lot of background work goes on in this game before I start to show you my posts. I test some options, try out owning various farms on the map that I’m hoping to build a series around. Some maps fall by the wayside during this testing – not because there is anything inherently bad about them, they just don’t suit my style of play. A classic example would be Marwell Manor – created by the same modder as Oakfield Farm, the removal of all the farm buildings if you choose to play as anything other than New Farmer doesn’t sit well. But a lot of players only ever play as New Farmer, so it fulfills a need. The West Newton Farm map has the issue of all that farm equipment sitting there if you choose to play somewhere other than the main farm, whatever mode you choose to play in.

Then there is the decision of whether to play with Seasons activated. It took me a long time to cross that bridge but I’m glad I finally bit the bullet with Boundary Farm on the Six Ashes map. Now it’s time to push on to the level that the Season’s developers feel gives the most realistic feel of time passing – that’s using nine in-game days to represent each 3-month season and setting the clock to 5x speed. I’ve been playing Boundary farm in real time, so this will be quite a change.

To assess the change I have tried several starts on the Bessy Beneath map and after testing I think I can say that the 5x speed probably reins in the amount of work you can achieve in a day to a much more realistic amount. From mixing and matching different types of work and earning up to £70k per in-game day, I may get two fields ploughed and earn £8k before the light goes during an early spring day. That’s quite a hit on the potential finances of a farmer trying to start from scratch!

During testing I’ve taken some shots that I hope will give a basic idea how the map looks in early spring…

…And it’s clear that there’ll be a lot of dawn starts and quite a bit of working into the late evening. And there’s also the opportunity to do some submarine ploughing too 😉

I’ve decided to play this map alongside the Six Ashes map – so then you can see just how quickly I move through the seasons on Rosland Farm compared with Boundary Farm. It will also display the much harder financial task facing me as I play at the faster clock speed. If you’ve been watching the monies in the top corner of the screenshots you’ll know that I’ve been doing a good job of keeping my head above water on Boundary Farm and I expect to have almost all the money I need sitting in the bank when it comes to harvest time and I need to make that big purchase! Rosland farm will be so very different and if I want to progress I will almost certainly need to take out a bank loan.

On this map, I’m going to be a Sheep farmer with some arable work thrown in. That will be a learning process too! I’ll tell you how it goes over the next few weeks 🙂