Saxlingham – Crayola Red?

The month of May – Always a hectic period for farmers with lots of ‘between’ chores before the crops ripen and harvests become our priority. In some ways I’m the lucky bunny – I have no crops or fields that need my attention at this time so I can look at where the future might take my farm. In some ways the decision was always going to come down to what jobs were available come May. Will I expand into Silage or will I buy another arable field?..

And there we are…

…It’s grass mowing and silage making time. With mowing jobs aplenty I decided to splash the cash on a mowing set-up. And I didn’t skimp – Short of buying a Krone BiG M450 mower, the Pöttinger Nova Cat mowers are the best but that comes with a big price tag. That’s £88k of mowing gear sitting on my MF 8S. You’re wondering why it’s worth that money when there are other mowers that do an equal area for half the price? If you’re doing Silage, this lovely piece of kit cuts out the need to windrow after the cut. That’s a saving in hours and fuel. The extra cost has also saved me buying an additional item of equipment. Unless I’m intending on making hay for animals, that’s a lot of money that will be saved over time and this purchase will probably pay for itself in the course of the current season. It also opens up the road to owning grass fields and doing silage – I now have all the essential equipment to do that. Here it is in action…

…Note the carefully swathed grass ready for baling.

I did a lot of mowing in the first week of May. As you might expect, there was a lot of baling going on behind me and the second week saw a lot of Bale Wrapping work. It was really foggy in the early morning…

…as I went seeking some fields that I hadn’t been to before. I think I confused the cows in the local dairy farmer’s field because I passed them 3 times in under an hour as I went round in exploratory circles😅 Anyway, ultimately the jobs were done. By mid-week it was time to get the tractor and wrapper serviced – Nearly £500 in maintenance costs!

Time for a quick chat about a contentious game mechanic: The maintenance costs of all the tractors in the game sky rocket after they’ve done around 100 hours. It is a much steeper gradient than in the real world and it can really take a big chunk out of your earnings in a manner that doesn’t feel right. It could really do with some adjustment to match real world escalation of costs.

When the newer, more powerful tractors in the fleet are costing a fraction to maintain it gets your attention. I looked at the trade-in value of the Claas and decided it was time to let it go. By the time I went back out for some more bale wrapping later in the week I had a new Massey Ferguson 6S.155…

– Now that’s Crayola Red 😅

It’s been a period of rapid change on the farm and I’ve worked very hard to progress the machinery side. Hopefully we will now see some stability and growth. For the record, my tractor and harvester mix is not an unusual one for the East Anglia and Cambridgeshire area. Massey Ferguson’s are a popular tractor whilst Claas are often a harvester of choice. The Valtra is less common but as an AGCO product, it has a lot of commonality with the MF’s.

The 3rd week of May and there’s a lot of weeding to be done – I’m out doing a contract in the massive Versatile 580…

…Ripping up weeds in a big field. It’s making me lots of money but I have to say I’ve never seen one of these behemoths on a country lane in East Anglia – It’s got a turning circle that makes a Kenworth W900 look like a ballet dancer 🤣 The fields may be large but the lanes certainly aren’t! Much more realistic is this Deutz-Fahr with an Einboch weeder…

And so the work continues. We weed, we fertilize…

…I worked out that a 3rd of my earnings when doing a fertilizing job is spent on the fertilizer but the pace at which this work can be done makes it a good earner.

Into the 4th week of May and there’s yet more mowing…

…Weeding and Fertilizing. Sometimes it seems like the week will never end but if you can knuckle down the farm will profit from the work being done elsewhere. Here’s a particularly big fertilizing job to give a sense of scale…

…I’m not even sure that a field of Onions will benefit from this type of fertilizing but I’m getting paid so it’s not for me to ask questions!

And the irony at the end of all that is I still don’t know whether I’m buying a grass field or an arable one to start the expansion. The grass tools are paying for themselves just working for other farmers and as long as that doesn’t dry up then I’m still able to look at arable as my growth route. See you next time 😎👍