Bure Valley Farm

September / October in East Anglia – A time of harvests but will it also be a time of growth?

As the calendar moves into September, I start my second year of running Bure Valley Farm. The first year has gone well and has included one or two surprises, not least the purchase of the Little London yard and its associated silos.

Game note: One of the compromises in the game is the storing of multiple crops in a single silo – IRL it’s normally one crop type per silo although some silos have a dividing wall allowing two crop types. The Unia cluster of 4 silos and switching unit at Little London allows me to be more realistic. I can store 4 grain crop types there and in a rare season when I have a 5th crop type, that can be stored in the single silo in the old yard.

Another surprise was my decision to get into grass harvesting early on. Then there was the disposal of the Fendt 515C – A hard choice given that it’s one of the best all-round small tractors. But that decision helped create the opportunity to upgrade to the Claas Axion 870 – the first step towards root-crop farming (although that is still some way in the future). Enough reviewing last year – lets return to the present…

I start the second year in a reasonably good place – £136K in the bank, close on 100K litres of stored crops, 35 silage bales and some straw bales too. My environmental score is now positive and I get a bonus on crops I sell of 4%. I also have a clear objective in mind for the upcoming Winter – I want to be able to purchase another field around the same size as field 1 – Field 9 looks to be a good option at around £265K. To achieve that objective I will need to work hard for other farmers during the late harvest season.

But first, I have to harvest my Soybeans in fields 1 and 42…

…This is a big task in terms of my farm as field 1 is the largest I currently own. However, if you look in the bottom left hand corner, it’s already becoming clear that the yields are significantly improved over the previous crop. In fact, between them, these fields produced close on 52 thousand litres of Soybeans! That is better than I could have imagined and will earn me a lot of money when the prices go up in the winter.

I spent the rest of September harvesting for other farmers…

…using whatever equipment was leased to me. It is all useful experience as I will ultimately need larger vehicles as the field sizes grow. I did have a thought though – when I have massive fields that demand big harvesters, what will harvest my small fields. Do I sell those or do I keep the small harvester – another of those bridges to cross when I come to them🙄

In between, I was able to carry out essential work on my own farm, like liming Field 1…

…The background soil information allowing me to use far less than I would using traditional farming methods.

The work carried on throughout the month, earning lots of cash. Here I am harvesting another field of Canola in a Claas Trion…

…Then we were in amongst the Corn harvests…

…Goodness knows how I’m going to choose what big harvester to buy when the time comes! 😅

By the end of September I had £235K in the bank. I was also getting a 10% environmental bonus on any crops sold because my score had risen to 84. Mostly this was driven by my yield results…

…Every field a shade of green on the map. I’m now so close to getting the funds I need for field 9 – you can see it just right of the Triangle field. Just one big push needed at the start of October. Meantime I’m praying that the current owner isn’t going to sow it with Potatoes🤣

In the first week of October, another corn harvest followed by a fertilizing task…

…Left me with the amount of cash I needed to buy field 9. To cover for any contingencies, I decided to sell some of my bales – taking a mixed load of Silage and Straw to the animal dealer…

…Which gave me a £20k buffer.

I now have a very busy time during the rest of October – Starting with testing the soil of my new purchase…

…And I have to redraw my crop sowing plan as this will significantly change.

The second week of October saw me mowing the grass in the Triangle field in preparation for making Silage and taking on a Hay making job for a neighbour. For the latter I set the mower to spread the grass…

…rather than creating a single central swath. I was using my own equipment as this field, 7, is the smallest of the main grass fields and I wanted to get a feel for whether my small tedder…

…and old school windrower…

…would handle it. It went quite well although I think if I was going to buy the field and make Hay, I’d prefer larger implements. I wound up completing the baling and collecting the Hay bales in the dark which was a good opportunity to try out the lights of the Claas Axion…

…A late night but at least my bank balance was increased to a healthy £40K. I’ll need the cushion as the rest of the month will be spent working on my own fields with just the income from the farm grant, solar panels and the mobile phone mast.

In the 3rd week I employed a worker to sow Rape in field 44 while I completed the Silage baling in the Triangle field. I then mowed the grass in the Paddock. With field 44 sown, I directed the worker to field 42 to sow that with Rape as well while I baled the grass from the Paddock to once more make Silage.

Field 42 is not an ideal field for the ai workers, it’s a bit of a triangle and they get confused. So I wasn’t surprised when the worker downed tools with some work left to do…

…I took over to complete the job before returning to the grass fields to collect the Silage bales – 36 of them. These have all now been stored in Little London yard…

…that’s 60 bales ready for when the price is good😎

The last week of October found me working in the field 9 – I decided to clear the weeds by mulching them back into the soil…

…using a Kerner X-Cut 500 that I bought back at the end of August. In game terms this achieves nothing – I just needed to scratch an itch😅 While I made 9 look neat and tidy, a worker was rolling field 44 to complete the sowing process. Then we swapped over and I rolled field 42…

…while the worker mulched the stalks from last years Rape harvest along with the weeds in field 43 – Mulching the stalks does improve the yield (or so the game claims). Both tractors and the associated implements then went to the dealer for some (expensive) TLC before heading back to the old yard for refuelling and to park up for the night.

That concludes the work of early Autumn on Bure Valley Farm. A lot of money was made and quickly spent. Then, by judicious use of workers I achieved getting the first crop in the ground while harvesting my grass crop. But there’s no respite – I want to get field 9 limed and sown early in November. If my plans come to fruition, I will be growing 5 crops this year, so I’ll need all the silos. Lets see how things pan out as we move from Autumn into Winter in the next post😎👍