Fresh Fields

Spring in Osada – March to May.

March was a quiet month with little work for other farmers – I did get to sow some Wheat for a neighbour early in the 1st week and then I turned my attention to field 14. I sowed Oats in this field – A fast growing crop that will be ready to harvest in mid-Summer…

…The shoots were through just two weeks later. I checked but there were no weeds growing. Weeds are an issue. I have decided to invest in a weeder – It will be better than spraying if I catch the weeds in time and it will also allow me to take weeding work for other farmers. But first I need to make some money😅 Fertilising jobs to the rescue! I picked up several of these throughout March and into April. Here I am one early morning in the third week of March heading off to do another fertilising job…

…and passing one of the villagers out for a constitutional😎 I noted during this flurry of activity that every €1400 spent on fertilizer earns just over €3000 so there’s around €1600 profit in each purchase and usually enough left over to cover my own fertilizer needs too👍

Things quietened down again in mid-April and I decided to mow the grass in my meadow…

…making hay and taking that to sell at the biomass plant…

The weeding jobs started to appear in the last week of April and I bought a John Deere 825 for €5600. It will take a year or so to fully pay for itself, but I made a good start on recouping the cost…

Technically, this is a row-crop cultivator designed to remove weeds between the rows like in the field of Sunflowers above. However, in-game, it can do all sorts of weeding jobs – the game doesn’t differentiate. This is at odds with ploughing contracts where you have to use a plough despite being able to use a Subsoiler for ploughing tasks on your own fields!

Several jobs to mow grass popped into the queue but they were all silage jobs and as I don’t have a bale wrapper, I left them alone. Finally, in the 3rd week of May, a Haymaking job appeared for Field 53. It was a big field – definitely a whole week’s work, possibly longer. However, it was paying over €6k and that means a total payout of over €8k once any extra bales harvested are taken into account. I decided it was ‘head down and go for it’ time! The Zetor 6245 did the Mowing…

…Tedding and Windrowing. Then the John Deere 4240 stepped in to handle the baling…

It was while doing this job that I realised it was time to think about trailers. A dedicated bale trailer would speed up the final task of haymaking a lot – bringing easier loading and allowing more bales to be transported in one trip. The money made from this job would pay for that trailer!

So I bought a John Deere 1075 Hay Wagon for €8k and it went straight to work on this job – here we are with all the bales loaded late in the evening…

…One trip instead of four!

Last week of May and, having made the decision to get a dedicated bale trailer, I followed through with more transport changes. Here goes the heavy old trailer on its final trip to the dealer…

…Even the JD struggles up the hill with it. I sold it and bought a Fliegl trailer as a replacement…

That’s made a big dent in my finances! Fortunately I have some Soya Beans to sell next month when the price is good. Also, the harvest season is not far away when the benefits of having a larger but lighter trailer will be realised – halving my trips to the delivery point👍

We’re ready for summer now and it’s nice to walk up to field 14 and look across the valley – enjoying the beautiful scene…

Sometimes, things happen in my gameplay almost without warning. A set of job opportunities can trigger a decision to act there and then as in the case of the weeder and bale trailer purchases in this period. It would be wrong to conclude that they happen without any pre-action thought – I’ve usually had a particular action planned in advance. You may recall I mentioned a need to replace the trailer in the previous post. While some changes happen suddenly, others are a long time in the planning (or maybe plotting would be a better word?). I’m still looking to expand into another field. Although field 40 remains the long-term aim, either of the fields flanking field 14 would be a good next purchase, allowing me to double up the crop regime rather like I am now doing in fields 1 & 2. Then there is the purchase of a planter to allow me to start growing Sunflowers and Corn. Finally, I have another possible future project – Sheep. I am considering using a section of my grass meadow for a pen. Here’s what I’m planning…

…The pen could hold up to 30 Sheep and the area that is left could be used to provide hay for winter feeding. Of course, I might need to buy another grass field if the food supply proved to be insufficient. I think that’s a long time in the future of Osada😉