1 week away and everything changed!

Welcome back to another video, folks. I've just got back to the farm out the van literally 5 minutes ago, and I thought it'd be really fun as a concept to tour around the farm and show you what's happened in a week that I've been away. A lot has grown in a week and changed, and some new things on the farm as well, and I've got to go around checking out what's going on, so I thought it'd be great to bring you along with me. Well, I've had an amazing time, but it's been pretty wet and cold in Wales. But amazing to see beautiful Henbant again, to see Matt and Jenny and the crew. Chefs cooking amazing food. Tom, who's cooked for us in the previous years, as well as Bex and Nelly. Incredible food, amazing people. Great to see Helen just rocking it in the market gardens, and it's a beautiful place. And here's Mira, I haven't seen her for 2 weeks. But it's nice to be back in Sweden, and I'm going to take you around and show you how the farm's grown. Well, the first thing you notice is just how grown in everything is now. You're in for a wild ride. It's changed dramatically in a week. So lettuce is coming in. Radicchio. A lot of the brassicas going. It's a nice Asian salad mix there that we make some sides for the barbecue tonight. Just gonna roast some beef and some chorizo on the fire. Fennels coming through, and we got beets and daletso and hakurai peas are popping up on the nets now. So a bit slower than usual this year because we're not— we changed our entire crop plan based around the restaurant opening season as well as the timing of the team being here. Okay, wheat fields are popping up now. There's been a couple of days of rain the week that I've been away, but they really put on a lot of growth. So growth has taken off in here. There's a row of chili and 2 of cucumber here, but they're mostly tomato with lettuce and herbs, there's basil in here now. And salads, but this has put on a lot of growth in the last week. So this is the tree bog, and these willows are sucking up the nutrition that comes out the bottom of the tree bog. So it's kind of compost toilet that doesn't need emptying in theory. We pollarded this about a month ago, and you can see you can see just how intense the regrowth of this is. Next step is we are starting to pollard the windbreak into a ramp at different heights, and we were going to do that, but it must be done before a certain time in the year, probably around February most years, and we were a little bit too late, just Nora and I here, to be able to take that on. So that's next winter's job. So the sand gun has really grown in this week. And as always, it goes through a lot of shifts through the season with the colors and flowers that are in bloom. Right now it's a lot of irises and a lot of peachy sort of tones with some purples. But unbelievable amount of growth has happened while I've been away. This year I'm really excited to see it grow out more to its full potential. Some of the grasses can be huge and they're just very young, but they will probably grow significantly bigger this year than they have in the previous 2 years. So this is the 3rd season. Just look at that, beautiful. Give you a wide angle. This is just a haven for butterflies and other insects. Look at this beautiful swallowtail. Well, there's a lot of grass cutting to do up here and at the restaurant. I'll be getting on with that tomorrow. But the team— so blessed to have such awesome people coming here— they've been doing an amazing job. Keeping everything together and doing a lot of hard work, I think. Beautiful. So happy to see the butterflies. So in small tunnel, it's all put down to shishito and padron. Got little cardboard mulch mats around the because this tunnel has been used as animal shelter and all kinds of things. It's very weedy, and so this is just a simple way to just let it all go. Don't really put much maintenance into this, just come back and harvest a lot of padron and shishito and some, also some chili in here. So it's time to get all teaching spaces together, so we have a no-dig market garden course next weekend, and then we are going straight into our 9-day regenerative ag training as well as our internship starting. And week after that, the restaurant opens, concerts begin, so it's a full-on next couple of months now that people are here and the season is in full swing. Chalmer is here for all the hen banters. Hello, hello. And he's having a look at the boat motor. It's a good day for a barbecue today. We're going to have a barbecue at the lake and see if we can go catch some fish as well. So beautiful oaks that shade the yard have fully come into leaf, and Nora's done an amazing job of planting all of the perennials that we had grown from seed and put out in Siligarden, and that's filling in this bed. There's a hardy kiwi growing up the oak, and this is just like a nice driveway garden. We used to have it as a mushroom bed for Kingstropharia, Now it's a little perennial garden on the edge of the road. Beautiful. Well, recovery is very fast at this time of year. We're at the bottom of Frumpfield. This has been grazed to the ground a couple of weeks ago, and here you can see the cocksfoot is up to my thighs, top of my thighs. So regrowth really fast. We've seen recovery down even at about 14 days at this time of year with the weather conditions. We're getting a lot of sun and then one nice heavy rain or two a week, and so it's amazing just to see how rapidly it's regrown. But some exciting things to show you up in the field. Okay, the Richdale Roller Pens are out in full force with 1,000 birds on the field, and they've been out for a few days now, so they're getting used to the system. First time for both of those two for dealing with a large batch of boilers, and I'm just inspecting. They've done really nicely. Here you can see what we're doing. We're actually pinning the gap between each post down to the ground and pulling it slightly outwards so they don't sit up against there at night and get zapped. And it's obviously for fox protection too. The birds seem really good. So they've been coming up the slope here, and then the boys have put a 50-meter net coming down the hill, and we're using a 25-meter net around the pens back to the 50-meter net. So tomorrow morning, I'm guessing what will happen is we will— because we're at the end of the row— we will manually, with two people, lift these shelters up and move them across and start the journey down. And here we are in Nutfield. So this has been grazed heavily to the ground by the cows, and we want shorter grass like this when we're bringing broilers in because we want all that manure down on the soil surface where it will get synthesized. Okay, they think they're moving, but it's nearly time for feeding, so probably that's what's Getting them excited. But this kind of pen, you can find all of our designs in the Richdale Builds book, which you find in the links below. The Manual of Regenerative Agriculture is how to run all these systems, the economics, how to design farms in general. The Builds book tells you how these actually— cut lists and 3D CAD plans. I'm just moving away from that end because they're thinking that they may be getting moved. It's a very effective system when you have 1,000 birds. You can see we've got the nets quite in close to the edges. We don't want predator birds flying into here, but we've never lost a bird to a predator in this system. If you've got intense predator pressure, maybe Salatin pens are a better start for you. We've got, you know, €40,000 of chicken in here, so you do need to know what you're working with. Nut fields coming alive. Different species of walnut, some of which are common here like black walnut, and some that are unusual— Manchurian, English walnuts. There's also pecan, hickory, and Malus sieversii, the original Kazakh apple. Let's go and have a look over the road now. Okay, something's stirring in the two eggmobiles. So the hens were delivered when I was away. They're going to be very startled when I open this. Good looking birds, very nice. So these are the original Eggmobiles with their automations now, and we got 700 birds, so 2 Eggmobiles. These have been going for 10 years on the farm and still doing really well. So we're just settling the birds in. As always, organic feed, and they will go on to the pasture tomorrow. Then we will start opening them up. It'll probably be a few days until they start coming out onto the ground and really exploring their paddocks. Then they'll be out first thing every morning and producing the incredible eggs. So this is an enterprise that should be run with organic feed and moving every day or second day, as we've been teaching people for over a decade here.

Pause for a quick ad read. Most of my subscribers here and followers on social media haven't actually read my books, and this is the most condensed practical information and knowledge that I can share with you. My book Regenerative Agriculture is available on PDF as well as hard copy. We ship all over the world. Ridgedale Farm Builds is 3D CAD plans of how to build all the farm infrastructure you see around on our social media. That one's only available as PDF, and our farm cookbook that's focused on year-round nose-to-tail seasonal eating. It's just a joy to use and preserve all the food we have at the farm as well as what we fish and hunt. You can find them in the links in the bio, check them out.

So quick look over at the neighbors as I always do. This is land cut at the same time as our land is cut. Trees are a lot smaller, very dense, 2 or 3 species with still brushwood and forest understory species like bracken, blueberry, etc. And the dramatic difference over on our side of the road where we've used pigs as a climatic ecosystem trigger, followed by rest, followed by cows and sheep. Now this patch is recovering after the long winter with a lot of cows relative to normal, so it's still bare in places, but you can see a lot of things are germinating now. And in the background a lot of recovery. But what you notice is you can get down and you can see through the landscape here. The trees are much bigger from benefiting from the animal fertility, and there's many more species. There's over 100 oak trees per hectare here, and there are no oak trees germinating here. The climatic triggers just aren't there to get them to germinate. So we're using animals and Respecting their physiology and letting them do the work they naturally do. And there's all these benefits to it. So here we are in Topfield. Cows have been grazing down. You can see it was quite wet the other day there, and the cows are over there, and they are now going on to grass that looks like this. Beautiful. So just for reference, this is up to my waist, and that's going to be getting to the end of this field. We grazed the bottom of it with the sheep, if you remember. So now we will be going back through Front Field, if it's recovered. If not, we'll be going up to our neighbor's land right at the top of the hill, and then hopefully we can keep the cows entirely on our land this year because we've reduced their numbers. By a little bit. It's all kinds of beautiful flowers in here, but this is very nice. There's not been many weeks of growth yet, and we've still got a very nice healthy stand of thick sward. Okay, so the cows are in these reedy patches at the bottom of the side of Topfield. You might notice if you look closely, they're wearing interesting collars. These are from Monil in Norway, virtual fencing collars, and we're testing them out particularly to see if they work well in our unusual test case where we have very tight agroforestry, these silver pasture lanes ranging from 9 to 18 meters wide, and that's going to really test their systems. Depends obviously on GPS signal, but we want to see if this is a good system in our use case. Also working with forest-raised pigs, they're a bit curious about what's going on down here. Hello! They're doing good. And we're also working with virtual fencing for the sheep this year. The sheep are up at Silligorn and we're using the NoFence units for the sheep, so they all have their collars on too, and the boys have put a training test fence up at Siliguri. So there's a process of training the animals to the fence, and slightly different for these two different models, but I'm going to make separate videos all about that as well as post little shorts on Instagram. And we're just testing it out to see if it's useful in our system. Obviously there's a cost to buy these units and then a subscription to run them, but if you are moving animals around like this daily like we do, it's saving you a huge amount of time with fencing if it's working well, and so it pays itself back very quickly in terms of labor cost. So I'm very excited about it, I think it's a fantastic idea, and it's particularly useful for, well, all kinds of grazing applications to be fair, but what we don't know is if it will work in intensive silvopastoral systems like we have, so that's a big part of the test for us. I'm going to keep you posted on that throughout this season. You've seen the dung beetles just popping down in their holes. That's our paycheck. This is Ricky Baker. Ricky Baker.

And he's a little siskin and he decided to go inside. We tried to save him, but he decided to no live anymore.

So he's getting a Viking burial today.

So Nora made a lovely little tiny boat using eggs as the buoyancy. She used 10 eggs or something. So he's going to get a good send-off today, isn't he?

Yeah, super happy to have you guys here. Happy to be here. Well, that's it for a quick update. I'm super happy to have Mitch and Flynn mainly focusing on the gardens as well. There's Tom and Kyle as farm managers. They've been doing an amazing job to take the hens and acclimatize them, as well as get all the boilers out when it's quite a new experience for them perhaps, and to manage the grazing without me having been so much in touch with them. They've done a fantastic job. The gardens look great, everything's good. So time to get down to our local lake and we'll get the barbecue on. And enjoy this beautiful weather. We've got a whole week of sunny 20-degree weather, which is very refreshing after being on the hilltops on the coast in Wales. I've had a great time and I'm excited to be back now. The season's really short and intensive for us now, and I'm excited to bring you with me on the trip because it's an amazing place, and this place has been responsible for the initiation and empowerment of a lot of farms all over the world, and particularly in Scandinavia too. So I'm very happy to share, and I hope this year I get more time to share with you all, because there's just so much benefit that can come out of taking you along and explaining processes and decision-making and farm design, etc. So thanks as always for watching, folks, and look forward to seeing you in the video soon. Bye for now. Thank you.