Bure Valley Farm

September – As the days start to get shorter, the tasks seem to take longer…

A quick gameplay reminder – A day in the game counts as an IRL week and every month has 4 weeks…

The first week of September and we’ve a lot to achieve. I applied for and was granted the ‘environmentally sustainable farming’ subsidy. Over the next few months I’ll be working to improve the sustainability of the farm using modern precision farming methods. I think a quick look at the map will illustrate the current situation…

…As you can see we have an environmental score of 38, and we’re about to take a further hit. I sold field 14 with its crop of Potatoes as I don’t have the means to harvest them yet. Left with just the 5 fields and the patch of grass in Little London (Bottom centre), the poor yield figures dragged us down to a score of 35. Now the work to improve the farm begins and it will be a bit of a slog, but first we have to deal with some other things that need selling. First it’s the Massey Ferguson 3670 and the Amazone Seeder/Harrow combo…

…That’s put some money in the bank! Time to get busy harvesting our fields of Straw. I bought a Claas Rollant 455 Baler for this – future proofing for when we want to do silage and haymaking. I got fields 42,43 and 44 baled in short order with the Fendt 515C powering the baler…

…before heading off to tackle field 1. I’d just completed the first row of straw in that field when the rains came. No point in baling wet straw! Time to dispose of another piece of unwanted equipment – I took the Hardi Sprayer and its extension tank off to the dealer…

…using the John Deere 7810. Once more it’s time to spend some money and buy a Bale Loader. For the round bales produced by the Claas Rollant, I find the Anderson RBM2000 to be a good option for this work. Here we are after picking up the last of the initial batch of bales, giving way to a motorist on the B1149…

…by which time the rains had passed through and I could get back to baling in field 1…

…This proved to be a long job and I decided to take a break and get some rest at 8pm. Quite a lot accomplished in the first week.

The second week of September started with completing baling in field 1 and taking them off to sell…

…Because of our current environmental score, we are penalised when we sell our farm produce at a rate of 4% so, on each 5000ltr bale we were docked around £14.75 – a good incentive to improve!

In the second half of the week I turned my attention to ploughing my fields – they all need to be done! The plough needed fixing before I set about the work. First done was field 41…

…I will be entrusting some of this work to farm helpers (ai) as then I can get other things done and speed up the process. The helper did quite a good job of ’41 and I only had to do a little bit of tidying up at the end. This is because it’s a rectangular field with few obstructions at the field boundaries. Other fields will present challenges for the ai – here’s the situation in, triangular, field 42…

…Some strips not done and ‘job finished’ at the apex of the triangle🙄 But it still saves some time and lets me get on with other tasks like buying a soil sampler and sampling the soil. I also bought a spreader – I decided to get one of the Bredal range…

…and after sampling the soil in field 41 I was able to apply lime to adjust the ph level ready for crops. I ended the 2nd week by sampling field 42.

I decided that I needed a change from ploughing, so in the 3rd week I took a harvesting job on another farm – Wheat in Field 17. This is a massive field and would pay nearly £17000 for the work being done. I used my field 44 to park the equipment and hook up the harvester’s header before starting…

…That looks like a big job and it was. I was working until midnight…

…and back to complete the job in the following, 4th week. I don’t use helpers on contract work because I’m being paid as a helper myself – it would be a case of money in – money out! However I probably could as on a field of this size there is a substantial crop bonus – The extra harvest in the last full trailer load netted me over £7k and there was another 4000ltrs of Wheat still in the field after the job was deemed complete, that I could take back to my own silo. With the contract complete, I took the tools down to the dealer for maintenance…

…There’s nowhere along this bit of the B1149 to pull over with a harvester, so the cars will just have to be patient!

That was lunchtime in the 4th week. I set a helper ploughing field 43 and carried out some other tasks myself – liming field 42 then refilling the spreader before parking it in the Biogas Plant behind field 43 ready for its next task. Then I collected the Soil Sampler and parked that up in the BGA plant too. I had to assist the helper on a number of occasions but there was an overall saving of time for the money spent. With field 43 ploughed, I moved the 7810 and plough to field 44 and once more released a helper to start the work while I sampled the soil in field 43…

..Then after parking up the Fendt for the night back at the farm I went and took over the ploughing of ’44…

…Finally getting to bed around 22:00 to close out the month of September.

Here’s a view of the overall map of the area with Field 17, which took up so much of my time in the second half of the month, near the centre…

…Fields 41 and 42 on the right are ploughed, sampled and limed ready for sowing. Field 43 in the bottom centre has been ploughed and sampled – its ph will be corrected by an application of lime in the first week of October. Field 44 has been ploughed. Field 1 on the bottom left needs to be ploughed. The work I’ve done so far has restored us back to our starting environmental score of 38 and that should improve as I complete the ploughing, sampling and liming. I will need to buy a direct drill Seeder in early October to begin sowing our crops and I will probably need to do some work on other farms to keep the monies coming in as we continue to add essential equipment. In the longer term, I hope to repurchase field 14. The next post from Bure Valley Farm will tell of October’s work – see you soon 😎👍