Bure Valley Farm

The first snows in the Bure Valley as November flows into December and Winter bites…

I was intending to just do a post for November keeping my farm series in sync, but circumstances colluded to change that plan as I will explain. The main target for the month was to prepare fields 41 and 44 for crops and then to sow Oats in those fields. The Sun wasn’t yet up and the Moon was low on the horizon when I set out to plough field 44 at the start of November…

…After that field was done I then drove over to field 41 and ploughed that too…

…There is often a logic in the order that I work my fields – the machinery currently has to go back to the dealer for maintenance, so it saves some time and effort if I can conclude the work in a field close to Saxthorpe. Sometime in the future, I may build my own workshop but that’s not financially possible currently.

With the ploughing out of the way I put my new Lime Silo to good use…

…Loading the spreader and setting out to correct the pH values of Field 1…

Second week of November and I was out sowing fields 41 & 44 with Oats…

…and that was about all we could do that week. The 3rd week saw me completing the planting by running the roller over both fields…

…and that concluded all the work I could reasonably expect to do in my fields – I wasn’t ready to plough field 1 as I won’t be able to sow that field until Spring. Let’s have a check on our field status…

…Fields 42 & 43 have crops growing and are fully fertilized. Fields 41 and 44 have been sown but will need fertilizing when the crops come through. Field 1 is limed but un-worked. As the Oats won’t sprout until the beginning of December, I decided to take a job harvesting Sugar Beet. The fields here are large and I was going to have to bite the bullet sometime to find out just how long such a harvesting job will take – after all, I shall be moving into Beet and Potatoes myself at some stage in the future!

The harvesting is done using what I can best describe as a mobile factory unit…

…It removes the tops before digging the beet from the ground and storing them in a large hopper from which it can unload into a trailer…

…The problem is that the working width is just 4.5m and the field is nearly twice the size of my largest field. Then, as Beet fills the harvester and whatever trailer you use really quickly, there are a lot of trips to the sell point! No wonder this is a long job – 36 in-game hours in total, which equates to over a week’s IRL harvesting without taking a break. I’m assuming that on a real farm the work would be done by shifts of workers to get it done while the weather held good. Anyway, the upshot was that by the time I’d finished the contract, I was into December and the die was cast for this post.

Back to my own farm and December’s work. With the snow falling and settling, I decided to sell my sprayer – it needs a lot of repair work and won’t fit with our modern farming practices…

…Fortunately I don’t need to replace it just yet but I may need to sometime in the Summer. I used the money generated from this and the crop bonus from the Beet harvest to buy myself a Land Rover as a runabout. Given the distances between fields it will be useful for checking crop states and potential jobs and I put it to use immediately to check on my Oat crops – initially to see if they had sprouted and then, to see if the snow had cleared to allow me to fertilize them…

That was the first task for the 2nd week of December – fertilizing fields 41 and 44…

I also decided to sell my Barley as the price was close to its potential best. I had a think about replacing the old farm buildings as they are not very useful for modern machinery but apparently they are listed structures, so I contented myself by installing a solar panel…

…Probably the first of many😅

This seems like a fitting time to look to the future before completing December’s workload. It seems that if I want to expand the farm, I will either need to buy another plot with sheds in situ – there are several locations in the area. Or I could expand into the area north of the farmhouse…

…Land to the west of the brook that I already own – Unfortunately, it’s not very flat. The other side of the brook isn’t mine…

…but, being flat, could be a worthwhile purchase. With a ready supply of water to hand, I’m picturing greenhouses here!😎

Looking at the fields around, most of them are very large and equally pricey. I am considering buying one of the grass fields down by Saxthorpe as that would give me a route into the Silage market. I could afford to re-purchase field 2 which I see has now been harvested and ploughed – I could lime that in preparation for a spring crop. However, that would be cutting the finances a bit fine. I’ll be taking a look at the other options over Christmas and into January.

Back to December’s work. Time to get field 1 ploughed. I decided that I would employ a worker for this task. This will be one of those key differences between Bure Valley and Osada – alongside hiring equipment to do contract work, I will be hiring workers to free up my time for other things. At this time in December, I’m busy keeping track of the prices being offered for grain so I can get a good return on my stored crops. So, it makes sense to get someone else driving the plough…

…I did go to check on their progress during that 3rd week before taking my corn off to sell at the start of the last week…

…I’m hanging on to my Wheat crop because the forecast is for a higher price in January – Though I have a suspicion that might prove to be a red herring – We’ll see.

My worker continued the ploughing of field 1 for me in that last week and here they come with the job nearly finished…

…All I had to do was a little tidying up around the edges and then take the tractor and plough for some eye-watering maintenance – close on €1500 after such a grinding job. Maintenance seems quite expensive in Saxthorpe 🙄 The worker seemed a reasonable outlay for the time saved – allowing me to get on with other things😎👍