Don't try to unload the hay bales in the barn...





... it's a bit of a sticky wicket.

Ugh, that happens to me all the time.

+1

So...

Who says Pb_magnet doesn't play DCS anymore? Here he is...

Checking cows Aussie style.

TL;DR: It's good.


Hoo boy, who even uses metric for this stuff?
After much converting..


I assume the yield on the cereals are the grain and not forage. Also assuming it's dryland (not irrigated) because otherwise you'd silage it or put it in hay to capitalize on the water.
Anyway, the Barely and Wheat is really good, both over 200 bushels/acre. In my area 180 is considered very good on dryland. The conola is also excellent.
Can't speak much about the rest since I'm not into those crops.
The bushel weight on the Barley is almost 13 ibs which is decent.

Thing is though, and I don't know if the game models it, but quality is at least as important as yield. I was able to math out the bushel weight but pump (how fat the seeds are) is also a big deal.
Some fungus or seed deseases like ergot are extremely toxic and even very low concentrations in feed will kill a cow outright. Obviously it's then useless as feed or food and you probably don't want to seed that either.

For conola, the only time it's fed to animals is if something went wrong. The biggest thing is yield and making sure you're not getting other seed (weeds) in with it. Seed conola is a specialty crop which requires male and female plants to be seeded separately in rows and bees to pollinate. The males are mowed a couple times in order to get more flowers for pollination. Then before harvest the males are mowed again because the female seeds are what you want. Again, purity is good because conola is such a fine seed that you can't just screen it. You also can't contaminate your seed conola with bees pollinating it from a neighboring conola crop of another variety so you need a mile distance to any other conola fields.

Another thing to note is that you'll always be getting some chaff or other impurities in with the grain. Elevators will test how much there is and knock a certain (sometimes arbitrary) percentage off the total to account for that.

So yeah, yield is one thing but all seed isn't equal.

Not sure what you guys have going on with the pricing there but as long as you're hitting your goals and covering your inputs then you're good right? Markets will market.

Does the game allow you to store your crop and sell it when you want? Does it do feature markets too?

I might have gotten carried away lol.

lol, I thought it was an interesting read.

If we're going to get in to simulating farming, let's simulate some friggen farming here.

Brilliant! Enjoyed that analysis!

Ergot. You don't mean that same fungus that grows on rye, which is processed to create ergotamine, the migraine headache cure (which I have taken in the past), and in a darker, more "mystical" preparation, lysergic acid diethylamide (which I have NOT taken, lol!)?

BTW, where are my Doors and Jefferson Airplane records these days?

Yes, we have silos to store the grain until the market prices rise... and dumping the product does cause the price to tank.

Heck no, that was great!

@cygon I have no idea if it's the same stuff. Probably is. It kills by cutting of blood to the brain so it's similar to what you're talking about.

Sounds like it. Migraines are supposed to be caused by local vasodilation, and ergotamine is a vasoconstrictor. I read up all about it out of curiosity when I used to get severe migraines in my late teens / early twenties. Doc prescribed this stuff, and said the headaches would get fewer with age and eventually disappear, and they did.

It raises an interesting point, though, and something I never bothered to ask when I lived on the farm in England. How do you detect this and other anomalies in a crop? By eye, or do you take samples of a crop for analysis of various toxins? And if a toxin is useful for something else, as this example, is there a secondary byproduct market open to you, like pharmaceuticals, for instance? Or is it just not worth it and they have their own specific source?

Farming Simulator, if it doesn't already simulate it (I only played it a few times, so don't know), needs a plug in for this sort of pest and fungus threat. LOL!

Yep, we check by eye. A seed with ergot will be shriveled up and black. When you sell grain to an elevator they'll take a sample and decide on its quality using various machines to check for deseases, impurities, plump, bushel weight, and moisture.
At the farm when we buy it from another farm or a broker we'll also do the same, just with less fancy machines.

If we find ergot we'll reject the load. There are color sorting machines that can sort out black kernels from the rest so it's not a complete wreck if you end up with some. The sorters actually pretty cool how they work- maybe there's a good YouTube of it. Basically the grain comes down a chute which gets it all falling only 1 seed thick in a wide stream. There's a section where the seed free falls and high-speed cameras watch the flow for any abnormal colors. If it spots one, tiny air jets will blast it out of the stream, usually getting only the single kernel without taking anything else. It's pretty impressive.