A second chance - Yet another farm blog - Where noone else dared to farm

[humbe]

We bought a pressure washer to finally start cleaning some of our gear..



Without all the dirt though, the Ford's horribly botched paintjob is clearly visible. All that driving around on gravel for years have set its mark. We got some paint from Stephen and did a repaint job. $1.050 is expensive, but it's nice to look a little presentable when driving into town.



Wow.. It looks brand new again.. I bet mom is a bit happier driving into town to sell eggs the next time around. Not having to lean out the side window to see forwards will certainly help

Some of our old gear looks to have bigger issues though. Wonder how they'll look once we start getting them cleaned.

[humbe]

To fill out the missing pieces we decided to buy some more of Stephens junk.. It's cheap anyhow, and major upgrades for us.. Once the farm has outgrown these tools we'll have had more time to figure out what we need to really invest in.



There's the old FMZ Bizon Z056 harvester. 10 kph working speed with header, 3540 liters of grain storage. 4.2m working with for grains, and the Capello Quasar F4 corn header that comes with it too has 3m working width. While it's an old piece of junk with rust everywhere, holes in the roof and God knows what, it's also a very, very cheap self-propelled harvester for $52.000, especially with the headers to boot. We likely need to try and repair it right away though. But if we manage to repair it, it should be a good deal. We do have an old planter laying around, so we can plant corn now if we want to.

The sprayer and the plow is foreign gear with names I can't pronounce, but I hope they work. If the sprayer works, it should be miles better than raking the weeds. The plow isn't a lot wider than our existing plow, but with so little working width, every little improvement helps. Getting a bigger plow is one of several good reasons for getting a stronger tractor at some point.

All in all, our improvements ended up costing us $125.400.. We managed to keep the costs down for now..

Code: Select all

  Bizon with headers:     $  52.000
  Kuhn Espro 3000:        $  28.000
  Bruns MBA 12000         $  24.500
  Flex-Wing Rotary Cutter $  12.500
  OP-2000 Sprayer:        $   3.000
  Unia Grudziadz 5 Plow:  $     900
  Pressure washer:        $   4.500
  ---------------------------------
  Total:                  $ 125.400

We can then afford taking $1.000.000 and move it to a long term investment account. That way we know that we should be ok in the future financially, regardless of what happens.

That leaves us enough money to buy 4 more land plots. To still have something saved up, we buy 3, and we then have $102.902 remaining in the bank. Wow. A million dollars stashed away, and still we ended up with major improvements, and 3 land plots and a good amount of money extra we can invest later. We bought the plot just west of the farm, and the 2 plots east of the forest plots we bought earlier. There's still a few plots in between, but we're getting close to owning a large connected piece of land here.



(Plots 12 & 22 is the forest plots. Plots 13, 23 & 25 we bought now. Plots 26 & 27 is the main farm.)

	There.. Money spent and wasted, and we don't have all new gear.. By setting aside the mill for security and buying up some land plots we're not planning to exploit a lot for logging income, we should hopefully not have logging income waste any interests in other incomes. There's still some trees in the way on the new plots though. Would be sad to not get to use any of the old harvesters I found, so lets give the Bizon a try. With the sprayer we can turn weeds back on. The plow is actually no wider than I can customize Fergies plow to be, but sounds like cheating to have a 20 hp requirement plow at that size, so sounded better to get this crappy one. Was wondering whether I should include the Weba 6M plow which is so cheap, wide and require little power, to simplify carving up new fields, but felt too much like cheating for now.

[humbe]

So what's next?.. We need some herbicide I reckon.. We forgot that when buying consumables earlier this winter as we haven't been able to use it before. Dad's on the case.. He'll try to get in contact with that border shop manager to see if we can find some there.

We also need to find somewhere to park the new gear. I guess we should get rid of some of this old gear that we no longer need, and see what we have space for. We might need some new shed though.

February is soon over and the weather forecast is sub and plus degrees from the start of March, so might not take that long before we can start to work. We've got some new land. Would be good if we managed to carve up some fields there in time to seed this year.

The chicken pen actually got full this winter. We forgot to do a headcount a while, and we noticed quite a few male chicks there. I don't like to slaughter animals, but those male chicks was sold, and their destiny likely wasn't great where they ended. Now we've got 30 hens and a rooster left, and all but two of the hens are fertile. We've got space for 50 in the new coop, but we'll quickly get back there I think.

We now have 14 cows, meaning 6 of the 8 cows have given birth to a calf. Amazingly all of them are female calves so they will hopefully grow up here until they can give us milk too. The last 2 cows are also pregnant and once they give birth, the barn is as good as full. We'd either need to start selling of further offspring, or see if we can invest in a bigger barn. We already have almost 8.000 liters of milk saved up again, so need to sell it off again. A bigger milk trailer would be good at some point.

The horse paddock is splendid. All our 8 horses are in perfect health. Riding and training them takes a while though, so think we'll rather not expand that way, as we want the activity to be fun. Too many would become a chore.

[humbe]

Kent did 4 milk runs to the settlement. The little milk barrel doesn't take more than 2.000 liters, but on the upside, it's easy to pull with the pickup. Kent is finishing these trips twice as fast as I would expect him to though. I guess he still needs to learn to slow down. Too tempting to speed here in the wilderness with noone around.



Oh.. And the milk barrel cleaned up nicely with a wash

We've gathered all the gear we no longer need, to make space for the new stuff beneath a roof. Sadly, the parts in the picture is less worth than the fertilizer left in the fertilizer wagon there. Around $450 in total is all I've found someone willing to pay.. Not that it shocks me, but I was hoping for the Fahr harvester trailer to go for a bit more. It's old though. It's tempting to just leave it behind a barn and forget about it, but I guess we will never use them again anyhow, so would be good to not create another junkyard..

	Hehe.. The items ain't worth stuff since I added a ton of operating hours and lots of years for them, trying to make them fit how much they'd be in use if they had been used since they were built.

[humbe]

Clearing away trees for the new field west of farm, mom and dad took a turn to show us kidsters how to neatly stack the trailer. Cutting logs in 6 meter lengths instead of 8, the trailer neatly fits two stacks.



The logs you see in the picture is the logs we cleared out to make space for the field. Random trees around the meadow, and a small forest area in southwest and northeast ends.

The dolly has some electrical error though. We can't get the trailer electrics to work like they should with the dolly. Would be nice to get a truck. Both for a simpler connection to these larger trailers, and to get some extra horsepowers.. The Case is really struggling trying to drive this large trailer. When it's a slight inclimb it almost grinds to a halt.

	There seems to be an issue with the trailer autoload bits and the dolly. The shortcuts doesn't work like they should and the names of the shortcuts are also wrong in the F1 overview. To actually manage to stack it like this, I borrowed a truck just to test it out (though I had collected and unloaded everything with the Case first). Also used some time before I figured out how to move the loading point. I first had to show it, and then I could move it around with the mouse. Did it by accident first time

[humbe]

Dad's plowing up the new field west of the farm, and mom is testing out the scorpion king in our new land plots east of the forest plots we bought, possibly opening it up for a large field.

She found a glitch in the space time continuum. This is probably why we should have bought that stump cutter with connections to attach it to a front loader rather than a 3 point. Will be interesting to remove the stump after this tree.

[humbe]

The oilseed radish have yet to grow up, and the soil temperature in first half of March is only 1 degree, so we're not starting to seed yet. In the meantime we continue to clear space for fields in our lands. Cutting some more trees to make space, trying to get rid of stumps and plowing up new ground.



A new big field to the west of the farm is ready. We could plant oilseed in it, but not sure when they'll pop so I guess we might instead fertilize and then seed. Though, maybe we can grow some crop we can plant in June, and then oilseed should work fine too..

We've cleared the forest area and got trees from the meadow next to it out of the way too, and have plowed borders of a new huge field. Not sure if we're to plow it up immediately though. Quite a bit of grass meadow here, so if we wait until June we could mow a lot of grass her. Possibly we could try to plow it up fast and sow it while it's still June, or we could get another grass harvest in this year, and have it plowed up and ready for next year.

Getting rid of all the stumps is a pain. They're hard to see in bushes and grass, and there's a lot of them. The new stump cutter we bought helps a lot compared to the old one, but it still requires some fairly precise maneuvering to get it cut down. We initially thought it was so large it would be really easy to cut the stumps.

Still a lot of stumps left, though we won't be able to get all before we start plowing, so we probably have to keep clearing them while plowing efforts finds them. Hopefully staying a bit ahead of the plow to take out the easiest ones to spot.

The fields around this farm sure has grown since we got here last year.

[humbe]

We still have around 570.000 liters of hay and 148.000 liters of silage left though, so we should have enough for a while. With our 14 cows, current estimation is that they need 70.000 liters of food in a year, and as half of that food is hay, we should have silage for quite a while yet too.

On the other hand, maybe we should build a real cow barn and get more cows. Milk production seems like a good income.

I think either way, that we are free to plow up the new field. We can get a new land plot to get grass if needed too.

Clearing out the remaining trees in the way from the new land plots have gotten our bank account back to almost $500.000 so we have more money to spend. A big cow barn and more cows might be a good option. A stronger tractor is likely also a fairly high priority.

[Dairydeere]

17k hours on the pickup?! I wonder how many miles that would equate to

[humbe]

...
17k hours on the pickup?! I wonder how many miles that would equate to

The speedo says 613.067 miles. That's around 35 mph on average As it's a '72 model, that's about 12.700 miles per year. Our family even bought it used, but I think the engine has been totally overhauled a couple of times. When you're poor you use what you have.

	This is due to me trying to look at production year of gear, and guesstimate what a fitting operating hours for that would be at current time, to make the starting gear worth squat, and up the maintenance cost a bit. I guess my playtime in game should be off the charts

[humbe]

Time is ticking and plowing up the big field with a small plow takes forever. I think we estimated, that if we drive continually and never run out of diesel, we'll need 9 days to plow it. So we're clocking some late shifts in hopes of completing while it's still spring.

	More than 14 hours game time and 48 hours is one month. Courseplay will run this tractor much of that time. I'm letting it run a bit while I'm not using the computer too, but I need to refill diesel several times too, and I haven't managed to find all the stumps yet, so it might stop on one of them. Usually it seems to work though. Most of the stumps are cut very close to the ground, and I can plow over them. After plowing over them they will be easy to spot when the light comes back.

We really need to get a stronger tractor and a bigger plow to plow up such large fields. We do have a lot of money saved up from selling all the wood here, so maybe we should buy one sooner rather than later. I guess we should try to plan how to spend this money.

Should we go big and buy a new large tractor? Or should we try and go a bit more in between and try to get a cheap one considerably stronger than the ones we already have?

Dad's a big JD fan and I'm sure he'd love to have a 6R, 7R or 8R tractor to drive around in. They do look very nice and have lots of nice gadgets, but they are far from the cheapest work horses. Dad saw an older John Deere when he was on the last trip though, which have 215 hp. If we managed to get that one for a good price, we'd have a tractor that's strong enough to pull quite a bit more than we can pull today, and it would likely be considerably cheaper than buying a new one. Personally I'm a big fan of the Fendt Vario. There's something about German build quality, and the Vario is fast, strong and have a lovely automatic transmission making it a pleasure to drive. That's not a cheap tractor either, but then we're sure it'll be strong enough for whatever we throw at it. I think Kent would very much like to get a Massey Ferguson 7700 or 8700, which are also very nice utility tractors. The Case 7250 Pro might be the most sensible way for us to get in more horsepower for a reasonable price, but Mom had an accident in one so it's out of the question.

[humbe]

Plowing the new field takes forever. I can see dad's getting tired of plowing up there, and me and Kent decided to take a little trip and see if we could surprise him.. We got a hold of the farmer he had talked about having an old John Deere 4850 he didn't use anymore, and managed to cut a deal with him, and then we bought a much bigger plow. This'll seriously cut down the time we use to plow up the new field, and make us able to finish before March is done.



This beast has 215 horses and a top speed of 45 kph. Like the Case, it has front 3 point and PTO and a front loader attacher, but unlike the case, having the attacher mounted does not hide the front connections, and it may have enough horses to actually connect equipment in both ends at the same time.

The plow is amazing. It's got a massive 6m width, and being mounted straight behind the tractor it is easy to drive around with.

Now we've got two good work horses And dad's ecstatic about the Deere..

	The tractor is from the John Deere 4x50 mod http://www.farmingsimulator19mods.com/j ... v1-0-fs19/ The plow is the WebA 6M mod https://www.farming-simulator.com/mod.p ... tle=fs2017. If feels like a cheating mod, enabling an easy to use 6m plow for only $17.000, requiring just 180 hp. The Salford 8312 in base game has 6.2m working width requiring 360 hp for $77.000, so it should at least cost that much. The JD was way overpriced at $204.400 though. I could have bought a new 280 hp, MF 7726 with front loader attacher for $212.500. That's marginally more expensive for a brand new tractor with 65 HP more. And I could have bought for instance the Fendt 1000 Vario and the Salford 8312 plow easily with the money we have stashed away, but thought I'd add this older JD instead for now, as it seemed to fit my game better.

[humbe]

Was originally considering not liming until my "old" fields also needed it to easily keep track of which year we add lime, but the new fields are massive compared to the existing ones, so we'll rather skip liming them until 3 years more have passed and lime the new ones now.

The new lime wagon sure fits well with the new JD. It quickly got dirty with the plowing though



While I'm liming, Kent is removing the remaining stumps from the field. Nice to have a second usable tractor. The old MF698 was not only weak, but with the front axle it was easy to screw up.



Sandra sent us another overview photo of the valley. They had noticed the increased activity in the valley, and the people in the settlement are excited. Some of the people that had moved out have come back, and for the first time in a long time, people think stuff is happening here, and the population is increasing. We've even had some youngsters visiting wondering if we had some work for them during the summer. We'll see if we can find something for them to do. I think mom and Ira hired two of them to help look after the horses.

	The lime wagon says it has 24m working width, but I guess that's just for fertilizer. 12m for lime. It seems to have some functionality to automatically turn itself off when passing bits already covered, but this makes it a bit tricky to patch over small holes I failed to cover compared to the Bredal model I'm used to from earlier saves. But as long as I'm keeping speed up while driving it seems to work.: I just use some more lime to cover the holes..

[humbe]

Soil temperature is not high enough to seed yet, but we're keeping ourselves busy. We've started liming our biggest field, and we quickly see that we are going to run out of lime, so we call for another shipment. Ordering two truck loads now. Additionally, we have decided to use some of our money to build a new modern cow barn, so we have hired some local carpenters from the settlement. One that just moved back, and he dragged along another fellar that moved in too, when there was work to find.

We've cleared a few trees behind the shed, and will build the new barn back there. Hopefully it'll be ready when summer comes, depending on how many other hire hands we can get a hold of to speed up the work.

Thank god we bought a better seeder, but while the working with is 50% more, we still will use around 30 hours to sow the next biggest field with oilseed radishes. We figured we'd try to sow oilseed and see if they came up in time for us to sow. With the old equipment we'd use almost twice as long seeding, and then twice as long to cultivate before seeding, so we're using a lot less time than we otherwise would though.

The two truck fulls of lime ended up costing us $21.240 for the lime and $2.000 for the transportation. The barn we estimate will cost around $90.000.

[humbe]

Our current tractor selection (somebody wanted a photo):



Sowing oilseed radishes in the new big field will take some time, even with new equipment. But at least it's feasible. There's some very strange weather effect here though, that makes it looks like only this corner is limed, while in fact all of it is.

	I think the graphics in the game is of generally very good quality, but the transitions between what's closest and in highest quality and what's further out are sadly lacking for parts of the game. Not rendering small objects from distance, and rendering bigger objects in worse resolution is as it should be, but some bits just look totally different in the transitions. Especially noticeable for field states, as the field state is critical to see when you work it, and it breaks immersion to be in a circular bubble on the field. Also, snow isn't that great in transitions, so while all the valley looks perfectly covered in snow from a distance, within the closer circles, there's grass with snow underneath, so the snow seems to disappear as you get closer. If the transitions were better done, especially for the fields, I would have no other want for graphics for next version. Here it is impossible to see what parts you haven't limed or haven't harvested yet. This field is just big enough that if you sit in the middle, you see a perfect circle of lime around you.

I wonder when the oilseed radish will grow up. But harvesting this big field with the Bizon will be some work, so I'm thinking we'll at least stay away from high yield crops to cut down on the number of times we need to empty it. Soybeans sounds like a good alternative for a crop we can sell for profit with low yield but good price per liter, and those we can seed all the way through June, so thinking it is very likely that the oilseed radishes will grow up in time for that at least.