2022 at Ridgedale. Choosing a simpler life

Welcome back to another video, folks. It's a beautiful, sunny winter's day. It's crisp and it's getting cold now. We had the first snow, but it melted away. But I wanted to make a little video talking a bit about what I'm planning to do over the next season here at Ridgedale. Ah, it's beautiful here. Had an amazing few days with my friend Marco. He's gone back to Luxembourg. I'll be joining him next week. We had a great time playing music, eating amazing food. We got a visit to the west coast and got to swim in the sea. Very bitterly cold but really worthwhile and beautiful landscape there that I always enjoy. But before we get into the video, I just want to say the biggest announcement I can make this winter is my online Regenerative agriculture masterclass Runs January and February next year, but tickets are on sale for a short time only. And so if you want to join us for the broadest, most in depth dive into regenerative agriculture that you'll find anywhere online, then make sure you join us for this masterclass. We've got an amazing mentor team who are there constantly in our social group to answer your questions from their direct experience and live questions and answers with myself weekly. It's a program that runs for eight weeks and it's lifetime access to all the material. You can find out more on the website we have and we've had thousands of farmers around the world in our program and you can connect with all of those across the social group that we've got dedicated for you. And you can also rejoin any live edition of the training anywhere into the future, which means you can have the support of myself and mentors again many times into the future as we revisit other enterprises, et cetera. I'm very proud of the masterclass. It's the most broadest in depth training of its kind. There's over 80 hours of footage not on YouTube or any of the other platforms, as well as digital downloads and spreadsheet templates for all the different enterprises you might want to run. So I think I've alluded to some of the big changes going on. For those of you that follow me carefully, it's just myself now and my daughter Grace is coming to live full time with me in Christmas time and Ragnar's with me half the time and his mother's living close by that we can organize that quite nicely. It's been exhausting for me the last years and I'm very relieved. I'm very happy to have focus and energy back, but I'm putting that focus in different places. Some people have made comments recently, maybe not understanding the situation fully, but I'm putting down commercial farming for me, my other businesses and my priority to focus on building up social relationships, investing in my other interests and hobbies. Fishing, hunting, spending time on the west coast is really important to me. I've put in about 120 hour work weeks for the first five years of this farm and then 100 hour plus weeks up until this point and it's exhausting. It's non sustainable now. I've not ever just been a farmer, I'm an author. I've written three books in this time. I've produced an epic online training, I've produced YouTube videos, hundreds of videos for you all and a whole bunch of other resources as well as consulting, working on bigger projects and collaborations with other people and getting out and about teaching around the world at the same time. It's been a lot and I've put in a career's worth of work hours since I started my journey at agricultural school when I was 18. And so I'm really taking the back seat. I want to connect back into what excites me about this landscape that I created. And homesteading is going to do that for me. Now some of you will know I'm on a strange diet. I'm on an animal focused diet. I'm trying to do what you could call an ancestrally appropriate diet. I'm eating mainly meat and fat and salt and honey, a bit of fruit and not eating grains. I'm not eating vegetables and I haven't done for months now. And I feel fantastic. My body is slimmed down without any carbs and I weigh what I did since I was 18, which is when I stopped physically growing in size. And I feel fantastic. My mind is sharp, I'm having a lot of creative ideas and I'm really enjoying playing music, doing art, things that I've loved all my life but haven't had time for. I sacrificed a lot to build up the resource base and the resources here on the farm and I paid a price for some of that. One of the biggest prices is not having much time for social life. I've had a lot of people come through here, thousands of people and all beautiful, amazing people. Well, mostly, but it's very different to having quality long term friends. And I'm in a situation living in Sweden where most of my friends are scattered around Europe and the rest of the world. Having Marco here for a few days, for example is just blissful. And I want to invite a lot more of that back into my home. And I really want to make my house a home. So one big job that I've got to do is paint the house, paint the buildings. Now, this house has been the main view I've had from working out in the field over the years. And I just hate the color scheme. The gray and the blue around the windows and this red roof that's falling apart. I showed this on Instagram. I just did a test patch with this nice pastel green and then refreshing the white that was already there with a dark red on the trims. And I've got a spray painting rig for doing roofs. So I'm going to aim to paint all of the barn roofs and paint the barns again with the traditional red color, the fallow red, it's called here. And I want to paint the house and just get everything up to shape. Now, it's obviously a very big job. I wanted to do a test batch now so. So I can watch it over the winter and, you know, just really see how that looks in different light with snow, etc. And see if I really like that color before I undertake the massive work of preparing the surfaces and getting this place painted and spruced up to how it should be. Basically, most of the vegetable beds will be sitting empty. I might further propagate some strawberries. I am eating fruit, but I'm thinking to grow a lot of melons and things in the tunnel spaces and I don't need that much fruit anyway. But it's the sort of thing when I look at the resources that have gone into making this and incredible market garden. It makes me wonder sometimes if I should not sell this place on to a group or family that want to continue under the epic banner of everything that Ridgedale is. But I told myself I wouldn't make any major decisions in the next year or two if the right people came along and everything was right. It's something I would consider, but it's not something that's immediately pressing, that's for sure. I did tell you that the channel will be changing and I'll be focusing a lot more on the things that I want to pursue with life, with fishing, spending time on the west coast, hunting. And I want to document those things too. For me, the whole thing with YouTube has been to just document my life and have those memories to look back on. I'm just bringing you into the tunnel space. I've just got a few hens left in here. I'm only keeping 15 for myself and they're quite happy in here and will be through the winter. This space is going to become pretty epic for melon production. Other soft fruit, maybe I'll grow some cucumbers, things like that, but I'm not eating tomatoes, other fruit like that. So I think these spaces will change a lot in how I manage them. I'm keeping the hens just the Loman browns that we used to run commercially. But I'm thinking once these folks have had their one bad day I will probably turn to heritage breeds so they're much better suited for our climatic region. And we'll see that's the future of all the animals here will be to find just breeds that don't necessarily have to be so economically focused in the way that they have been on the farm, but things that just interest me or better suited to the environment, etc. I've had a lot of inquiries from people on all the different social media platforms about whether we're running internships, whether we're running trainings and I notice I'm saying we as a figure of speech but I mean I. And no, I'm not running internships but I will run educational programs. I've got the structures up here to be able to host a lot of people after years of just having very little private space. I actually want a simple quiet life. Most of you might be surprised to know that whilst you might know of me from YouTube or some speaking at conferences etc. I'm quite outward going in many ways. But actually I like to spend my time very quietly, alone, thinking a lot. I like writing a lot, I like art, I like spending quiet time and so that's what I want more of in my life. But I do think that I've got a very strong role to play in farm design, farm planning, business economics. So I'll be running our two week farm scale permaculture or regenerative agriculture design course. I'm going to run one or two of those next year. I'm also still wanting to follow up this natural swimming pool build and I'm thinking I'll run that as an educational training that will leave people confident how they could go away and build such a structure on their land up near the house there. That's a dream that I've still got. And I might do some pop up events with famous chefs from the Nordic regions, really celebrate some of the food. The big teepees that I've installed can seat a couple of hundred people in a pop up event, so that's something I'm exploring. I've got the kitchen wagon to do it and so we'll see. But I'll be putting that up over the winter. I'm also looking to do trainings abroad. I'm going to go to Cattle's Farm in Ireland and run a regenerative agriculture design masterclass there and we'll put details out about that soon. That's likely to be the second half of June next year and as I said, I'll still be doing my online trainings with the masterclass kicking off in January and February. Now I've got four ewes and five lambs. They're just free grazing with the cows. You can see the cows in the background there now. They're not really taking any of the bushes, so I'm more than happy to leave them like that. Now, obviously there'll be snow cover soon. That will stay. Hey, there you go. And so they'll be on silage. I've got my. It's kind of hayliged, really dry silage. And I'm putting up a new winter shelter, sort of arc, metal arc for field shelter. Even though these animals are hardy and they will choose to be outside come rain or snow, you have to, by regulation, have a field shelter. So I'm putting that up in the next few days before I go to Luxembourg. But I'm thinking to let these animals free graze across all the fields until they can't graze any longer, then they'll be on their winter feed. I'm not planning to breed on these sheep. I want to move right now. I'm thinking I'll move to Gotland Sheep. And I want to design this farm so that I can basically meet my food needs with 20 minutes, 30 minutes work maximum on a daily basis. And so sheep is a good answer for me. A couple of cows is good for me. These two in the background will be ready to slaughter at the end of next year. The sheep I will just keep for lawn mowing and take them when I get hungry. But I've got half a ton of meat in the freezer, so there's no rush with that. But I want them to graze a lot less intensively managed so that I don't have to be moving nets on a daily basis. I haven't worked out exactly how I'm going to do that yet, but it has made me consider that I'm not going to keep pigs. Now, that's a big one for me because I love pork. Hey. But That's a twice a day feeding job that I would rather pay someone to raise pigs for me. And so that's something I might do in collaboration with neighbors, etc. So that's the plan for me, is to keep this farm as a homestead in a very, very low key manner. The only addition that I need is bees. I've got obviously all of my fruit, berries and trees that just need harvesting when it gets to that. But that's what I'm really shooting for is to have a incredibly low input farm that supplies my family needs and then I can spend a lot of my time with the kids and getting out to the west coast, using my boat out there to go fishing, etc. And that's what I'm shooting for for now. I've got a couple of other books in my mind that I would like to work on at some point and just getting into a new rhythm with being a full time single dad. And that's something that's really exciting for me. It's something I haven't actually done before. It's such a pleasure to have this incredible place that I've built up to be able to enjoy and reconnect to all the things that excite me. I had the best summer. I've said it hundreds of times now, but it was so incredible to spend the amount of time I did with the kids in the beautiful places like this farm and Kleta over on the west coast, as well as to be able to get out on the boat, pursue fishing, pursue other interests. And it's something that I just have not had time for here. Farming is hard work at any rate, but when you're writing books and mentoring people and doing all the other things that I've been doing, it's very hard to achieve balance. And that's just, yeah, it's been life changing to just realize that I can put that down and I've got the resource base to support me. By taking it much easier and by putting the farming down, I can concentrate on things that matter more to me and things that will have a much bigger impact through my online education, etc. And so I'm really grateful for the decisions I've made. I feel super well, I feel really happy and whilst I'm here alone on the farm most of the time, I feel less lonely than I have in a long time. Go figure. Okay, that's it from us folks. I just wanted to give you that update and to make sure there's clear information coming out there just from reading some of your comments. I think some people not necessarily following me on Facebook, etc. And so don't see all the announcements that I make. We've got the online course ticket sales opening tomorrow. Don't forget you can find all about that in the links below, as well as my books and other offerings. See you in a video soon folks.