Bure Valley Farm

Haymaking time – May-June in the Bure Valley.

When I brought my farming posts into sync for time of the year, I was concerned that the posts would largely replicate each other – What happened in Osada would happen in Saxthorpe. To a certain extent that has been true although, the two farms operate differently in sense of scale and equipment. However, the period of transition from Spring into Summer shows a key difference between the two areas. In Osada we’re already harvesting grain crops that over-wintered (As happens in real-world Poland). In Saxthorpe, the harvesting will not begin until July and stretches into October as the crops take longer to mature in the UK’s cooler summer. Author of the Saxthorpe map, FarmSimBrisco, has tried to replicate this in the map’s crop calendar…

…As you can see, there is a whole lot of nothing going on in June! Or is there?😉

May is time to make Hay. Big fields mean playing with big equipment😀 As I didn’t have any mowing equipment of my own, I was happy to take the ‘lease’ version of the harvesting contracts and learn about the equipment and fields in the area. Here’s a dedicated mower, the Krone Big M…

…Not exactly aimed at the suburban lawn end of the market! There were also examples of Mowing attachments for Tractors. Here’s an example of a Pöttinger set-up…

…This would probably be the way for me to go if I decide to buy one of the large grass fields in the Bure Valley. Next we have the tedders for drying the grass. You’ve seen our shiny new Kubota in Osada/ Well, these are on a different scale – here’s an example…

…Another piece of Pöttinger kit. Then we need to put all that Hay into tidy rows for the baler. There are some really spectacular Windrowers available from the store like this one from Claas…

…Looking like something that’s escaped from a sci-fi movie😜 There is also another type of machine to tidy up hay, a Merger…

…This example from Reiter. Finally, there’s the balers. Unless you want silage, you can go with a large square baler like this Case example…

…And finally, there’s dedicated auto loading trailers for square bales like this Arcusin…

…and also for round bales.

All this haymaking for other farms puts money in the bank. If you’ve been checking the numbers in the top-right of the screenshots, you’ll know that I’ve grown my account from €21k to close on €100k. In fact, by the time I concluded the final field in the first week of June and got paid, I had €133k! It’s profitable work making Hay and Silage😎👍

One thing leads to another… As you will probably recall, I have a small grass area of my own in the Little London area – Time, I think, to utilise that resource. I assessed what I needed to make Silage from that field… I need a mower, a windrower and… I’ve already got a baler and trailer because I needed those for dealing with the straw from my grain harvests! So in reality, the move into grass harvesting is now attainable 😀

I bought a Claas Disco 3600FC – A front mounted cutter to which I can add rear mounted cutters to augment the width at a later date ala the Pöttinger set-up shown at the top of the post. For my small field it will more than do the job…

…At 3.6m, it’s a tight fit through the gate!..

…Which is why I haven’t ploughed the grass in and sown crops – I think I’m going to be glad I didn’t as the rest of this post will show.

I bought a basic windrower like the one I use in Osada but with 5 blades. It allowed me to tidy up the edges of the field but I didn’t need to windrow the main area as using just a front cutter leaves the mown grass in tidy rows anyway, ready for the baler.

I returned with the Rollant 455 to create Silage Bales…

…And then collected them with the Anderson RBM2000…

Just 10 of them but it is only a small field and up till now has been left untended. That’s about to change! I then took soil samples, bringing the field into the precision farming fold and was then able to correct its pH level by applying lime. After that I bought another new tool, an APV GK300 M1. This is a dedicated grassland repair kit! I set to work improving the state of ‘my lawn’…

…Loosening the topsoil and sowing seed in any bare patches. you can see the difference where it has been used…

…The darker area on the left is after the APV has passed. Finally, I added the necessary amount of fertilizer and we’re good to let the grass grow. I hope to get another Silage harvest from this field in October.

When you make silage bales on your own fields in-game wrapping is no longer enough. You have to wait until the grass has fermented. If you look in the bottom righthand corner of the shot below you can see the bales are 7% fermented...

…It’s no good selling them until they’re 100% or you’ll only get paid for grass! It takes around 2 weeks (2 days) of in-game time.

Of course, while I’ve been doing all this mowing and baling, I’ve had time to think and plot the future. Now I have the equipment, I should move into my own Silage production more fully. To that end I decided to buy an unused area of land (Plot 54) not far from the main farm and create another grass field there – it would be too small for crops and there’s a gate issue too. I spent the rest of June working here…

…Ploughing, Sampling, Liming, Sowing…

…And I now have another grass field😎 I just have to wait for the shoots to appear and I can complete the work by fertilizing it. That will be a task for the first week of July. Thinking about Autumn (already?) and post harvest, I have decided to repurpose my smallest crop field, 41, into a grass field too. That will mean that by October next year I will have 3 Silage producing fields. I am able to do this mainly because I was able set up the triangle field back in March and re-purchase Field 14 in April which has given me more crop production than I perhaps need at this stage. I was even considering selling fields 41 and 42 to help with buying a larger field closer to the home farm area but I think this repurposing will be a better choice.

End of June and you’re probably wondering what happened to my Silage? I took it to the dealer mid-week…

…and those 10 bales made me over €10k😀👍 Currently I don’t really have anywhere to store the bales except on the trailer otherwise I’d be saving them for a better price in December – Some time soon I will have to buy an area of land with some storage. One thing always leads to another in Farming🙄🤣

Next post we’ll be back in Osada – See you soon😎👍