Fresh Fields

March and April – Springtime rush in Osada and a couple of game mechanic lessons learnt too…

As expected our catch crop of Oilseed Radish in fields 12 and 15, was through and ready to be cultivated into the ground. I started in field 12 where I wanted to get a Barley crop sown. I usually have a crop in mind for each field but the late purchase of field 15 has thrown some of my plans into the air so I just went what I felt was right. After cultivating field 12 I carried out the Barley sowing. Then I moved on to field 3, which didn’t have a catch crop due to the late February snows, and sowed that with Oats. Here’s the Massy-Ferguson 690T with our Isaria Seeder resting on the track after the job was done…

I finished off the first week of March, cultivating the Oilseed into field 15…

…I intend to sow Corn in this field along with field 40 but that will be a task for April.

The second week of March and an opportunity to make some money fertilizing one of the largest fields in the Osada region…

…That took around 1100ltrs of fertilizer and a couple of days work but paid me over €7k.

With the recent growth of the farm and increasing field size, I have decided to upgrade a couple of machines. One of these is the roller. With fields 3 and 12 needing rolling after sowing, I traded in the 3m roller for a 6m one…

…This is certainly going to improve efficiency😎👍The rest of March was quiet – a lull before renewing the battle in April. The bees are back producing, so I did take a load of Honey over to Pol which earnt some welcome pocket money😅

April and time to sow the Corn so I pulled the Kubota planter out of the shed – it hasn’t seen daylight since last May! I took on a Sunflower sowing job for a neighbour…

…before knuckling down to sowing Corn in field 15…

…I had to remove a small tree from one corner because it was making the work too difficult. Even so, the last section of the field still required some hedge driving to complete as you can see in this ‘folding the roller’ shot…

If you recall, I have been using a row-crop hoe to remove weeds in my crops – the game allows you to do that, though it really shouldn’t, and I took advantage of that mechanic because there were no suitable weeders in the game or in the Modhub at the time. It was an expedient answer. Well, now there are some Weeder options and I decided to put my farm on an honest footing – buying one for my grain crops – meet the Gorenc Puler 6.0…

…Which you can probably guess, does 6 metres at a time😅 I used it on a neighbour’s field first and then set about my own field 3. Here I found a problem – It wasn’t removing all the weeds! If you look closely you can see some still dotted around on the right…

…In areas of Field 12 that I have already worked. Many have gone but there are some still there in the crop. Why? Time for a gameplay explanation; In the previous version of Farming Simulator you could only weed during the early stages of crop growth – the first 2 if I remember correctly. Your ability to remove the weeds was decided by the crop cycle. Past this period the weeds became large and you had to resort to herbicide to remove them. In this latest version of the game a new level of weed growth has been implemented – the Hoe period and the weed growth no longer matches the crop cycle beyond the initial germination. When the crop and weeds initially show, there is a short time when you can take a weeder to them successfully. Then they start to get too big and you get the situation I illustrate above. If you are wondering why everything went ok in the neighbour’s field – you are given the option of hiring pre-designated equipment to do the job so the weeds have to be compliant with that item of equipment! Back to the game – Clearly I left it too late. I think that in future I will need to be out there with the weeder immediately any crop shows through. I hope that will prove to be the answer! As for the weeds in fields 3 and 12; there are two options – spray them or ignore them. Both choices carry a penalty but the spraying choice looks to be the worst so I will stick with the weeds – perhaps we’ll have a nice display of flowers😅👍

The second week of April was spent sowing the Corn in field 40 after which I was glad of the extra coverage afforded by the 6m roller to finish the job…

The 3rd week and I set about doing a first pass of fertilizing field 3. This raised an unexpected issue with the Sleza 1001 sprayer…

At the end of the first run I decided to run through my adjacent crop to turn the sprayer round. Imagine my horror when I found that the sprayer was destroying the crop! Fortunately I had only just fired up the game so I was able to come out without saving and nothing was actually lost. This seemed strange – the sprayer appears to have narrow wheels as you would expect on an implement designed to work in a growing crop – and narrow wheels are supposed to not do crop damage in the game. I think the issue is down to the mod calling its wheels ‘standard’ rather than narrow and thus fooling the game into thinking they’re wider than they are – though I’m sure there must be a background piece of coding in a mod that would do this🙄 I was still able to use the sprayer to complete the first fertilizing pass on field 3 and subsequently to complete the fertilizing of field 12…

…But that is because both crops are in their early growth stages. I will not be able to do the second pass that field 3 needs because I will probably damage the crop. It seems I will have to get the money together to buy a replacement sprayer over the next couple of months – or I could turn off crop damage😜

I sold another batch of Honey in the last week of April and checked on the Chickens. We now have 60 adult birds producing eggs so I should start seeing more of a return from them this year😎…

That’s the end of a busy 2 months in Osada – A fun time aside from the game-mechanics issues encountered. Still, they are also part of the fun as is finding an answer to them! 😂 Next time I’ll be reporting from Saxthorpe – See you all soon😎👍