Fresh Fields

Early Crop Harvests – June and July

This is the time when the overwintering crops ripen – Winter Barley…

… Wheat and Canola. With only €8k in the bank, I’m going to need to do as many harvesting contracts as I can, especially in the first 2 weeks of each month. Barley first then👍 Job followed job – there was a large field to harvest over by the old mill…

The new trailer was proving to be a very good purchase, halving the number of trips to the delivery point for each harvest and thus making time to fit in more work each week…

I really like the animations on this mod – very smooth operation👍

The work continued in the same vein through the second week of June, though the jobs were starting to dry up. I sold my stored Soya Beans which brought in €13k. Come the 3rd week and I found myself at a loose end so I made hay…

…The Canola in field 1 is looking good – I’ll be harvesting that next month. I baled the hay and took it to the biomass energy plant in the last week of June…

July brings the Canola harvest, including my own – Fields 1&2 were duly harvested as if they were a single field…

…While I stored my Canola to sell later in the year, the contracts for neighbours were going straight to the grain transporter. The second week of July saw the turn of the over wintering Wheat. I had already completed two harvests by the middle of the week when one of the largest fields popped up as a contract. It was worth working late to get that field done…

…as it put me in touch of purchasing one of my target fields. I could now afford field 15 and I almost had enough money to buy field 12 – the question was, which one. The logical partner for field 14 is field 15. However, there is a problem…

…Field 15 has a crop of Sugar Beet. I don’t currently have the machinery to harvest Beet. I could hire the machinery but it’s very expensive. Alternatively, I could plough in the crop which would fertilize the land ready for my next crop. I don’t really like ploughing in crops, other than catch crops grown for the purpose. For this reason, I ruled out buying field 15 for the time being.

To kick off the second week of July I took a couple of cultivating jobs further up the hill above my farm…

…The first of these – field 27 on the right – took me over the threshold to afford field 12. The second – field 36 on the left – put a little spare cash in the bank. I purchased field 12 knowing that I’d have to scrape together some more contract work to keep afloat until the beginning of August. At least it comes with a Sorghum crop that will be ready to harvest soon.

There is a problem with choosing field 12. Although it is right next to field 14, it’s actually a much larger field and fully capable of producing a good sized crop on its own. So for the time being, field 14 will continue to be a small field that stands alone until I can pair it with field 15. I guess that’s my next field purchase planned for me!

To finish off the month of July, I prepared fields 1 & 2 for their next crop, cultivating them and then sowing Oilseed Radish to pre-fertilize…

…and I took a short trip up the lane to check out the crops in fields 12 and 14…

…They’ll be ready to harvest soon enough – August promises to be a busy month! 😎