Welcome Home

Before you do anything else head to your Farm - which is located south of Field 29.

When you get there, walk around and check out the different facilities - each of which is marked by a Question Mark Icon. You will see your:

• House and Sauna

• Chicken Coops / Pens

• Hay and Straw Storage

• Barns and Sheds

• Fertilizer Tanks

• Seed Storage

• Woodchip Shed

• Potato and Sugar Beet Conveyors / Storage

• Silos and Silo Hopper

• Water Fountain

• Phone - to access the Help Line

Now that you have taken a look around there are some chores you need to see to immediately. Begin by hitting the Start Button and then RB or LB to the Settings Menu and changing the time from 5X to Real. That will keep your crop that is ready to harvest from rotting.

Now bring your far-flung equipment home to the main yard by the sheds on YOUR farm so you can get a good idea of what you actually own.

With that managed, use the Harvester to complete harvesting that field of Wheat - and then deposit the two trailer loads into your own Silos.

See What You Have

Tap down on the Left Joystick and change to the Storage - Prices Menu - that will show you what you have in storage on the farm - which includes a quantity of almost every type of crop minus Silage.

Here is the thing - if you are playing on Normal or above you need to generate some money - and you can do that by selling the crops stored in your storage, starting with the Sugar Beets - you take those to the Freight Yard, and the Potatoes - which you sell to the Shipping Office or the Transport Company.

Those two alone can pop your bank balance up to very near $11K. Sell the Corn to the Transport Company and you bump it to nearly $15K. Selling the Barley to the Grain Elevator will net you a balance over $21K, and selling the Canola there will boost it to over $30K.

Note that you cannot sell your Wood Chips right now because you need a front loader in order to load them into your Trailer - but there is actually a reason we want to wait on that anyway so do not worry about it.

Now that you have some funds it is time to make the first crucial purchase towards improving our farm -- and that means taking your free Tractor (the one that has nothing attached) to the Shop where you will be purchasing a Sprayer so that you can fertilize your crops. This is wicked important!

Buying a Sprayer

Since we do not have money to burn we will be going with the least expensive one for now - that is the UF 1801 from Amazone, which costs $29,000 - yeah whew!

This is a critical purchase for a number of reasons, not the least being that you need to be able to fertilize your crops to increase their yield - and early on here everything about the yield is important.

Picking Your Crop Type

The choices you make in terms of Crop Type (seeds) will ultimately have a decided impact on the profits you make depending upon which basic crop strategy you use. For our purposes there are two basic crop strategies at this point: Held Crops and Sold Crops.

Held Crops are just what they sound like - crops you grow and then store in your Silos or Bunkers while you wait for demand to kick in so you get a premium for your crop.

Sold Crops are also just what they sound like - crops you sell immediately. Whether that means checking the market and delivering the crop to the highest paying buyer OR simply selling it to the most convenient buyer in terms of distance to tip, it all amounts to the same basic strategy of instantly turning your crop into money.

Deciding WHAT crop you will grow though, well, you need to consider the profit margins and costs for the basic crops to decide on that! We thought you might be interested in this small study on the basic crops as that will help you decide what you want to grow...

For our purposes we will be using the smallest field on our main farm for the study - Field 29...

The study uses the following equipment, and we include the collected breakdown costs (Labor, petrol and etc) for its operation as part of the assessment:

• Deutz Agrostar 6.61 Tractor + Kockerling Trio 300 M Cultivator (Maintenance = $460 + $5 for $465 / day)

• Deutz Agrostar 6.61 Tractor + Pottinger Vitasem 302 ADD Sower (Maintenance = $460 + $70 for $530 / day)

• Hillmann H 488 Tractor + Amazone UF 1801 Sprayer (Maintenance = $270 + $40 for $310 / day)

• Hillmann H 488 Tractor + Brantner E 8041 Tipper (Maintenance = $270 + $10 for $280 / day)

• Sampo Rosenlew Comica C6 Harvester (Maintenance = $480 / day)

The following are the cost break-outs per crop:

From the results it seems that Barley is the best crop thanks to its higher price per yield - that said if you are banking crops to sell when they are in higher demand you can get slightly better results from Rape - Canola...

First Crops

You should have harvested the Wheat that was in the field - then you need to run the Cultivator over that filed to prepare it to be seeded, and then use your Sowing Machine to plant a new Wheat or Canola Crop.

Once it is seeded start on the second field (24) that is next to your first (29) and then fertilize it too. Now you just have to wait for the crops to mature so you can Harvest them!

Rinse and Repeat for Upgrades

Now that you have established your base farm it is time to rinse and repeat so that you can build a large amount of funds in order to accomplish the following goals:

1. Retire your Loan. If you are playing on Normal you will owe the bank $100K;

2. Purchase a Power Washer so you can clean your equipment (or not);

3. Replace one of the lower-powered Tractors with one that is higher power and that has the ability to manage a frontloader/bucket. The Steyr Multi 4115 is a very good choice - it features 84 kW / 114 hp and can manage a frontloader whereas the H 488 you are replacing offers just 66 kW / 90 hp.

The Multi 4115 is also cheaper to maintain - costing just $100 a day over the $270 of the H 488. Once you have purchased the new 4115 you can sell the H 488 but, bear in mind that the new tractor is the one that you use to tow the Tipper Wagon, not the other kit, as it cannot support the counter-weight that the others require.

4. Now that you have a tractor that will support a frontloader, it is time to buy a Frontloader - we think that the Stoll Universal Bucket (#900) and the Stoll FZ 30 ($5,400) are the two best choices. That will allow you to move bales and the like for the latter, and load Wood Chips with the former. Actually you can just get the Universal Bucket for now since Wood Chips is what we are after.

5. Load and sell off all of the Wood Chips in storage to help offset the costs of these Upgrades.

6. Purchase additional fields - at a minimum you want to get Fileds 25 and 30 since they will allow you to focus your efforts on one area for more efficient farming....

Stage One Conclusions

As you work through these efforts you will secure your farm and improve it, and improve your income. You will also unlock the following Achievements as you do:

• Longplayer (60g) Your playing time in a single savegame has reached over 10 hours
• Sower (20g) You have sown more than 10 hectares.
• Fruits of your Labor (20g) You have harvested more than 10 hectares
• Mobile Farmer (20g) You have covered more than 100 mi with vehicles
• Out of Debt (40g) You paid back the entire bank loan

The next logical stages for our farming efforts are Missions and Coin Collecting - so we shall do those next!