Bure Valley Farm

Spring moves into Summer in Norfolk – The months of May and June are a time of haymaking and preparations for the forthcoming harvest season.

It may be time to make hay but May started quietly – no contracts to harvest grass for hay or silage. I was surprised and a little disappointed – I had hoped to quickly earn the money I needed for that more powerful tractor. However, there was a job to harvest some weeds – Field 11 required purging and although it doesn’t pay well, the first week of May found me down amongst the weeds and a corn crop…

…I had been leased a JCB Fastrak – a machine I had considered as a higher powered tractor for my farm but ultimately rejected. It doesn’t quite meet the horsepower I want and, as I found on this job, its steering is quite a handful! The field I was weeding was field 11 – one of the largest and most awkward in the area. Thank God they gave me a very large weed-whacker!..

…For those wondering, the domes beyond are the biogas plant of which more anon. No sooner had I weeded the crop but I got offered a fertilizing job in the same field! Now that’s more to my liking and something I could do with my own equipment. That completed the first week of May.

The second week of May and the grass jobs are rolling in – It seems everyone wants to make silage. That’s good from my point of view as I will make a lot of money from those jobs. It was also a time of learning for me – I didn’t know that some of the mowing kit can produce swath rather than a spread of grass. So here I am in field 4 windrowing the grass ready for baling…

…If you can pre-swath the grass when you mow…Bingo – one less stage to making silage and a bunch of time saved!

Gaming note: Always keep up to date by watching play-though and tutorial videos as sometimes things change. Back in FS19, it was possible to get a mod for the Pottinger Novacat mowers that caused them to swath the grass. I had been watching for that mod to appear without realising that the in-game version of the Novacat in FS22 now includes that ability. I also was unaware that the Krone Big M mower also swathed – you learn something new on every play-through!

So here we are on another mowing job in field 6 using the Pottinger Novacat pairing to cut and swath the grass…

…behind the Case 340 tractor I’d been leased. Please note that you can set the mower to spread the grass wide should you want to make hay. As this takes a whole step out of the process of silage making – a huge time saving – You can imaging why I decided to sell my Claas Disco mower back to the shop and buy into the Novacat.

But that wasn’t the major story for May – The silage harvests and the excess bales produced put so much money in my account that I was able to buy that new tractor. I have been keeping you in suspense -There were several in the frame. The serious consideration fell on the Claas Axion, Massey-Ferguson 8S and the Valtra Q series. In the end I chose the Claas Axion 870 which gives me a 295HP tractor weighing 9.1t at a good price. Here it is about to leave the yard in June with the Rollant baler…

After that purchase, I was glad that I still had field 3 and field 7 to do contract work on and boost the cash in hand again. I experienced a delay in getting paid for some silage bales I delivered to the Biogas plant. It seems we overwhelmed its capacity to process the silage!

Game Note: – Certain production facilities have a limit on how much product they can process immediately and it looks like they haven’t taken your delivery. But if you check your cash it will be slowly increasing. Checking the silage bales in this case confirmed that one of them was slowly decreasing in volume. I have experienced this also at a spinnery when delivering large bales of wool.

I finished May by harvesting my own grass in the paddock after which I ploughed the existing crop in…

…Why? – you may be wondering. This field had never been ploughed and was not producing as much as it could if it had been. I inherited it that way so, with the Triangle field now growing grass as well, I felt I could plough and reseed to improve the crop of future harvests. I did hit a problem though – my seeder won’t fit through the gate so I had to hire a smaller Tume seeder…

…I have to say I was very impressed – just 2.8m width but, because it attaches directly to the tractor, so quick to align between rows.

In June I used all the extra money being generated to buy the full Pottinger Novacat set and put it to work harvesting field 7 for one of my neighbours – here we are being a good citizen and allowing traffic to pass…

By the 3rd week of June I was able to turn my attention to harvesting my Triangle field…

…I netted 23 bales of Silage from that and took the opportunity to check out my Barley crop in field 44 on the way home to the farm…

…I’ll keep this last batch of silage for when the price is high😎

July awaits and it will be the early harvest season. My Rape crop is in flower and my barley fields are looking almost ready. July will be a busy month😅

There are a number of future ideas for the farm. I think my next option is to buy another mid-sized field – probably field 9 as that is around the same size as field 1. I also know that I will need a sprayer for weed control next year and that is probably the top priority. I also could replace the plough that I have with a slightly larger one. I’d like to buy up one of the other grass fields as I now have all the equipment I need to run those effectively.

In the longer term I have thought about getting into Sheep but there isn’t any market to sell to. I also looked at market gardening and met the same problem. Perhaps I might set up a farm shop to sell tomatoes, lettuce and other produce? I need to do some in-game research on how that will work.