Pallegney – May (Year 1)

The plan for this month was always going to be fraught – I knew my oat field was going to be getting an infestation of weeds and I knew I’d need a sprayer to deal with them before the crop got past the second stage of growth otherwise I’d damage the crop. That meant I’d need to earn a lot of money in the first week in order to be able to buy a Sprayer. Then, I had to get the grass mown and silage made… But that proved to be just the half of it – read on!

Priority then during the first week of the month was to hammer out some contract work – Baling…

…and Fertilizing…

…Lots of Fertilizing! By the end of the week I had enough money to get that sprayer and we were out by moonlight killing the weeds in field 5…

…I had to get that done before the crop grew too large otherwise damage would have ensued. Note how the cameras guide the release of herbicide only where it’s needed.

Although that purchase left me short of funds, I had to crack on with making Silage in the second week of May as rain was expected in the following week…

…Gathering up the mown grass from my fields by the river after cutting and windrowing. once more this involved all the farm’s tractors and some hired workers who are now being paid again after a bug fix last week. Here’s the rare sight of a couple of my tractors heading home…

…after completing the day’s mowing.

This is where I hit an issue. I thought I had emptied the bunker silo adequately to allow a new batch of grass to be deposited there and the process to begin all over but I found that I couldn’t unload the forage wagon in that silo. I went away and did some research – it seems that this is a bug that has been in every version of Farming Simulator since Methuselah walked the planet. It gets fixed each time only to get reintroduced with the next game release! Apparently, I should only use the silage fork to remove silage from the bunker 🙄There is a workaround… Demolish the bunker and build a replacement. two issues with that – the money from demolishing is less than the money needed to build a replacement. And, in this instance, the correct replacement doesn’t want to be built anyway 😅 I thought long and hard… Delete the game save and restart? I didn’t like that idea. No, the way forward had already been in my mind. I’ll be back in a sec on that one. In the meantime, I filled one of the other bunkers with the grass and treated myself for a leveller to complete the compaction properly…

The solution was to resolve a different issue – where do I refuel my machines. There are only two places selling fuel and they’re both to the west of the farm. I’ve had to deliberately drive that way for fuel on occasion. It makes sense that having a repair facility, the farm should also have a refuelling point. So, the bunker silo has been replaced by a fuel tank…

…I’ll probably put a washer down there too in the future – you know I prefer my tractors to be clean! In the longer term, I will probably move over to silage bales as that will make things a lot easier especially when I have more than I need and want to sell. I just need to replace the current baler. But, as you can see – money is in short supply and I have a field to sow too!

Some quick fertilizing work using the new sprayer helped and in week 3 I was able to sow Corn in field 25…

…although we were still walking a financial tightrope. Even so, I took the decision to diversify the farm a little more, building beehives…

…This won’t bring in much money to begin with but give it a few months! Actually, I think this may have been more about giving me some creature comforts 😅

The 4th week of May was about reclaiming the financial high ground and I spent it working on other peoples farms – Fertilizing…

…and weeding using a both a weeder and a hoe…

…Hoeing is a job that can earn a lot of money because of the size of the fields but can be done really quick because of the speed at which you can use the implement! I’ve ended the month with over €30k in the bank. Target for the not too distant future will be a silage friendly baler. But for now we’ll keep shunting milk from the cow barn to the fromagerie…

…In the hope we’ll see some produce soon!

See you all in June! 😎