The updates haven't been as frequent. Partly because I'm now settled into a fairly neutral routine on the farm; and partly because I've been playing less. I'll still keep plugging away, just not so often, and bring notable highlights.
Contract job - the rear window helps - a lot - on Calmsden.
Gathering for the 2nd field to be harvested (OSR).
Harvesting. I think the header is 12m?
Jacki helped for a while, and I drove the truck. It kinda worked out.
A little rain shower so I switched to ploughing my own field.
Then disaster. During cutting this down, an, "object", popped up. I wasted a lot of time trying to deal with it, even so much so I switched time to 0.5x but nothing could shift it (and its still there). I guess I'll have to live with this bug.
I even tried this tree cutter thing, wasting about £20k on its hire - nope, no cutting down of the thing.
Never mind.....more contract spraying, to try make up the shortfall.
Sowing oilseed radish in my own field.
Some late night contract work.
And on to September....more silaging.
A new present - a bigger drill which also fertilizes. I can't get it to work properly though, might leave it until October.
The new shed/area is proving useful. I hardly need to pop into the old farmyard now.
So...the yearly calendar is now quite settled. I'm doing 3 cuts of silage instead of 4 for 25% less work and only a small drop off in yield, which is more than made up by being able to work more grassland (now I can afford it). The silaging takes about 5-6 hours. The year looks like this:
Mar: silage fields #1 1st cut
Apr: silage fields #2 1st cut
May: other work inc contracts
Jun: silage fields #1 2nd cut
Jul: silage fields #2 2nd cut
Aug: other work inc contracts
Sep: silage fields #1 3rd cut
Oct: silage fields '#2 3rd cut
Nov: other/forestry
Dec: forestry
Jan: transporting & selling
Feb: catch up jobs
With an estimated >650 bales of silage to shift in January, I'll have to make ~27 trips, so its now an all day job. And I've planted about 140 trees and more to come, so next winter or the year after's forestry will go up a gear too. Also the sheep and chickens are ticking along - there is some VERY weird data in keeping sheep in FS22, so its still in the data gathering phase.
For example in FS22, the sheep stocking density (land required to produce the grass to feed them) is about 400 sheep/Ha. In real life this is ~24 sheep/Ha so the figures are severely unbalanced, it might be due to the 1 day/month thing though. But it means I could in theory support >6000 sheep, although I think the wool pallets would drive me crazy. Also, the price of wool in FS22 and the fact that its profitable at all, is incredibly misleading. I've been focusing my data on lamb production, eg best time to sell lambs etc and ignoring wool so far. I'll need to keep going long term to properly gather the data on sheep - I did a thorough internet search, the info isn't out there so its worth a post elsewhere once complete.