Pallegney – March (Year 1)

After battling through the Winter weather, March brought some welcome sunshine and longer days allowing more work to be done. It proved to be a momentous month for the farm!

Things started simply enough with jobs for other farmers to bring in some money – while simultaneously getting a worker to sow Oilseed Radish in field 5 to pre-fertilize it…

…You can see my Claas working in the distance while I weed field 6 in the foreground. Weeding jobs can be a bit confusing as they show up as around 90% complete when you take them – this is because only 10% of the field has weeds so you still have to drive over the majority of the field to complete the task.

Other farmers are making silage from their grass and there are some baling jobs to be done. One of these produced an interesting issue…

…Yes, that’s a bale in the river! In fact 2 bales had rolled into the water and had to be recovered before wrapping in order to complete the task. Another case where the Superstrength mod came in handy 😅

I popped back to field 5 to find the worker had just about completed the task…

The second week of the month brought some fertilizing contracts. At this time of the year it’s mainly freshly mown grass fields or crops in the first stage of growth and I can do those with my own equipment…

…although, once again I had to Superstrength the tractor and spreader over the fence for this task🤣

The baling tasks threw up an interesting piece of hire equipment in the Fendt GTA 380 Turbo…

…An interesting design placing the engine under the cab and releasing the front area for implements such as a liquid fertilizer tank. I had a long look at its larger sister, the Xylon, as a possible alternative to the Claas Arion and front loader with the addition of spraying equipment as an alternative to buying a separate sprayer. In the end I didn’t think it costed out.

At the start of the 3rd week of March, one of my questions regarding silage made in a bunker was answered – It takes around 3 weeks to complete fermenting. With the silage now ready I decided to have a go at making Total Mix Ration (TMR) in preparation for buying my cows. I found I needed one bale each of Straw and Hay and around 7000l of silage…

…to get TMR. I also added in too much mineral feed – I now know I probably need to use around half a pallet load in future. That mixture gives around 17000l of TMR – Now all I need to know is how fast the Cows will eat it. To find that out we need some cows 😅…

…It’s raining but the Cows don’t care! I bought 20 Holstein’s in groups of 5 to set up my initial herd. They quickly made themselves comfortable in the meadow behind the cowshed…

…This is new territory for me – I’ve never kept Cows before so it’s going to be a bit of a learning curve 👍

Late in the week we had a serious hailstorm…

…All I could do was watch and hope that it wasn’t damaging my Wheat and Barley crops.

In the 4th week of March I sent a worker off to sow Oilseed Radish in field 9 to pre-fertilize that also. Meanwhile I set about preparing another TMR feed so that I would have it to hand when the Cows had chewed through the first lot. Fortunately there’s still lots of Silage in the bunker…

…And I think I should be able to keep the cows well fed with the grass fields I currently own. The fields I converted to grass production should be ready for harvesting at the start of April.

I closed out the month with some more fertilizing and weeding work…

…I need the money to continue to buy the tools I’ll need for the cattle – I already bought a trailer to move the milk from the cowbarn to the Fromagerie…

…There’s some interesting information in the bottom right. My 20 cows have consumed around 1500ltr of TMR in around a week. In return they have produced nearly 700ltrs of Milk. But they have also produced 1500ltr of Slurry…

…That means I will need a Slurry Tank and they don’t come cheap! An unforeseen consequence of owning Cows 🤣 At least I can use it on my fields to help with fertilizing 😎👍 When the Milk reaches 200ltr’s I think I’ll try starting the Cheese production. Maybe that will happen next month – see you then.