Pallegney – April (Year 1)

After the excitement of policing you might expect that this farming report would be calm and relaxing. But spring is a very busy time on a farm and the first week of April was about getting two fields sown with crops. I had already decided that field 5 would be growing Oats but I wasn’t sure what to plant in field 9. Ultimately, the class of crops I plant in that field should be different to the grain crop that grew there last year – it’s good farming practice to keep the pests guessing 😅 But the seeder is limited in terms of non-grain crops that I can plant and harvest with my equipment. I decided to bite the bullet and buy a planter. Now I could sow field 9 with Sunflowers – after all, you can’t have a farm in France without Sunflowers! Decision taken I and my workers went to work starting with cultivating in the Oilseed Radish catch crop…

…Using workers to cultivate, sow and roll both fields was hectic and ultimately all 3 tractors and the pickup wound up down there! Here comes the Claas Axion using the planter to sow the Sunflowers…

…If you look closely at the map circle on the bottom right you can see two active workers (the steering wheels), another tractor at the bend in the road and an arrow dead centre showing my location which is also where the pick-up is. I’ve brought spare seed and fertilizer in case it’s needed by the planter. By midweek the Kubota had finished its tasks so I took that away to do some fertilizing for a neighbour…

…I need to get some money back into our account and also stock up on fertilizer for my own fields! By the end of the week we had both fields planted and brought all the equipment home – The Claas Arion bringing up the rear with the roller…

The second week of April was haymaking time in the newly sown grass fields…

…The workers handled the haymaking itself while I dealt with the baling…

I assessed the rate of food consumption by the cows at the end of the week and decided that I could sell half of the hay bales…

…Taking them off to the animal dealer at the start of the 3rd week. With slurry slowly accumulating I decided to buy a Slurry Tank and use it as fertiliser…

…One of those ideas that seemed good at the time. It turned out that my cows are not producing enough slurry for this to be viable in the short term. so I cleaned up the tank and sold it back to the dealer for a small loss. I think the future will be liquid fertilizer delivered via a sprayer. I need to scrape together the money for one of those that is equipped at the least for weed sensing in order to meet the Precision Farming requirements. But for now the spreader will have to continue handling the fertilizing requirements. As for the slurry – In the longer term I’ll probably buy a slurry transport tank and sell the stuff to the biogas plant.

I took the time to spring clean the farm – refuelling the tractors and repositioning equipment…

…Things that can be parked out in the open, are. The seeder and planter are of a more delicate nature and have to be kept indoors.

I finished off the week by selling most of our straw bales – again following assessment of cow feed need…

The last week of April continued in the same vein – I sold off 20000ltrs of silage to the biogas plant…

…The good news is that as a result of the good Precision Farming practices that I’ve already started, my environmental score is on the up…

…and that means I’m earning a small bonus on everything I sell 😎👍

It seems we have some warm dry weather so I’ve ditched the coat and beret…

…Checking on the cows before getting on with the rest of the week during which I took on a sowing job for a neighbour…

…You can see I encountered an issue! The game is telling me that I don’t have access to the land I’m working but if you look at the bar on the top right I’m making progress on the seeding job I’m contracted to do. I’m definitely in the right field – 20 as confirmed in the map panel bottom left. ps – That’s one of my workers fertilizing my grass field in the distance. Anyway, the upshot was that despite sowing the entire field…

…I could only achieve an 87% completion so I had to go into the backend to change the status manually in the game files. I wonder if this issue is down to the tramlines introduced with the precision farming mod released by Giants?

I did a rarer type of job twice during the month – Stone picking…

…and experienced no issues completing those contracts.

During the first week of the month I had delivered my first load of Milk to my fromagerie and started the cheese-making process. In the final week I started up the butter making process. We’re making slow progress but it will be a while before we have any produce to sell…

See you all next month…