About making money with silage bales 1.3

I will explain how to get profit early by making silage bales and reduce the annoyances of the process to a minnimum.

Introduction

Greettings!
I will be showing you how to make some quick cash in FS17 without missions or hacks.
We will be making silage round bales.

For this guide Im using a new save, no mods, Normal difficulty in Golcrest Valley.

The Process

First thing to do is to lease some equipment. What you need is:
- 1 big tractor.
- 3 small tractors.
- 1 Grass mower.
- 1 Loading wagon.
- 1 Round baller.
- 1 Bale wrapper.
- 1 Round bale autostacker.
All this can be leased with $80,000 dolars so just get a little more money from the bank.


The process goes like this
01 Use the big tractor with the mower and the loading wagon to get around the map getting grass. You can also seed grass on your field but more on that later. A good spot for grass is the area around field 19 and 24.
02 When your wagon is full I recomend to take it back to your farm and work in the space in front of the house, is flat and has enough space.
You will want to set cruise control to 6Km/h and unload there to make a big line of grass.
03 With the grass ready you will take a tractor with the baller and star making the bales by driving repeatedly over the grass. When its full back up and unload the bales close by.
04 With the bales ready its time to wrap them. Use the wrapper to pick them up one at a time a let it process them. After around 15 seconds the bale is ready and just unload it to process the next. This is the part that takes most time.
05 With the silage bales ready now its time to pick them up and get them to the barn for sale. I recomend to line them up in front of the sale point and them push them all at once.

And thats it! Pretty simple. In this guide I took the biggest loading wagon with a capacity of 50,000L. Thats equal to 12 bales. In normal difficulty every bale is sold for $2,646.
That means this batch got me $31,752, and all before mid day at x5 time scale.

Different Setups

Another way to get grass is to use a forage harvester. This are expensive to buy and maintain but can grab the grass directly using a universal cutter header and toss it into a big tipper carried by the harvester itself. This setup is especially useful when you get grass from around the map and the terrain has obstacles or is irregular.
A warning though, when the tipper is full the harvester will continue to cut grass but it will dissapear, it won't go to the ground. Therefore the moment the tipper is full you have to stop the harvester to avoid waisting grass.

The most simple setup to make is probably this one (KUHN DLC required for optimal setup):
Mower + Tractor + Baller/Wrapper

With this setup you can get grass for two bales, go to barn to sell, get another two and so on. Useful when you plant grass on the closest field to the barn and want to make some quick cash.

You can also make square bales. To do this you need equipment of the KUHN DLC though. Using the square baller from the vanilla game you process the grass the same, then the wrapper comes in and you have a square bale worth the same of a round one. The main difference is that the square bale collector can hold 16 bales at a time (intead of the 8 of the round bale collector).

Becoming more productive

To make more money you need more grass. The easiest way is to just plant it on your fields and get it all at once. For this you can have a tractor just for cutting grass, another with a windrower to concentrate it for the loading wagon and so on.
Take into account that the right moment for maximum yield of grass is when flowers appear on it. Before that you are getting less grass.

The one other thing that can speed up this process is certain equipment avaiable in the KUHN DLC Pack. Too bad it's in there but is worth it. There is a baller that wraps the bales in one go.

For example, having grass on starter fields 12 and 14, get you 3 full loading wagons of grass (150,000L) and and extra. With the 150,000L you can make 37 silage bales that equals to $97,902 in one go. Having all 3 fields will give you 250,000L of grass, which is 62 bales, $164,052. All this can be processed within one single in game day even at x5 time scale.

Also with the plant growth speed set to fast the grass will be grown back up the next day.



An important note:
Grass will grow by itself after you harvest it, no more maintenance required. But, if you fertilize the field the game will treat it like another crop and give you more yield depending on the level of fertilization.
In my experience setting the fertilizer stages to 1 in the settings and using the big solid fertilizer spreader are the simplest way to maximize your grass production.

If you have access to manure and/or slurry this will work too.

About mods....

In the end decided to include one in this guide that deserves a mention at least.
Even though mods can get the game cheaty, this one is quite nice and realistic. It's the Goweil LT Master mod.

This mod adds the Goweil LT Master baller/wrapper machine to the game. You fill the back with grass , be it with a loading wagon, tipper, conveyors, you decide; and the machine makes round bales AND wrappes them in one single cycle. Using this machine can speed up a lot your bale making.
(A full guide to the machine is provided in-game with the mod)




Another fact is that unlike other wrappers, The Goweil LT Master requires you to replenish both mesh and foil for the machine, both of which are bought from the store in pallets. Dont worry because they last several big harvests of grass before it needs replenisment.

Another fun fact of this mod its to set it up like this at the barn and get your bales sold automatically.

Conclusion

Silage bales are a nice way of making money with the fields you get to start with. Is pretty profitable even when leasing all the equipment. Also unlike other products the sell price is locked when selling them on the barn so you will always get the same value for each bale.

Thanks for reading and I hope this guide has been of use to you.

Here's a video of some nice real world silage bale and silo making.

Changelog

1.0 - Guide published.
1.1 - Typos and more screenshots.
1.2 - Added "Different Setups" section.
1.3 - Added more information and screenshots here and there. Also added "About Mods...." section

[Psycho]

Great guide and comprehensive easy to follow instructions, great work! +1 for the standalone baler, with some belts is becomes quite the unit and much more efficient than chasing bales.

In mods as a low cost alternative I recommend the Fortschritt E 303 mower Pack. It is a beast for mowing in FS19 (can tow loading wagon/windrower/tedder), and while it can't do that it's still really good in FS17. For sneaky trimming your neighbours' lawns I highly recommend the Wild Grass mod. There is a cultivator+grass seeder you get by default(?) which can use this to plant grass wherever you like, and as a bonus it will grub out those annoying bushes while converting swathes of public land to beautiful pristine grasslands.

[frost.tempest]

Thanks for the comments! Just expanded the guide a little if you guys are interested.

[Mopic5]

You made it into a smooth operation. Might spend a night or two harvesting my neighbors fields so that I can afford to buy much of this equipment outright. Thanks for the tutorial

[Hassel]

Gonna try this out! Looks promising indeed!