A review of short and intensive season on a mixed farm and restaurant/event space in Sweden

Welcome back to another video, folks. I've just arrived back last night from Cape Cod in Massachusetts where Nora and I took a break for 10 days. She's there for a couple more weeks. I'm alone on the farm. Tom and his brother Will have been looking after the farm exceptionally well while I've been away, and they left early this morning to explore the West Coast on their way back to the UK. So I'm alone now with the laying hens, the cows, the sheep, as well as got The market garden and the wheat field behind me to deal with. Got potatoes to harvest, I've got all the tomatoes to can, and I've still got a lot of cucumbers and veg in the garden. I've got to deal with the grain behind me, and there's a whole lot of packing down to do after our season. So I wanted to look at some of the chores, have a look around the farm, as well as give you a fill-in of how this season has been. It's been very intensive running the restaurant all the weekends, so I've literally not had a day off until I arrived in Cape Cod. About 10 days ago. I've had an amazing holiday and a lot has been going on, so I want to fill you in today. So last day in Topfield. Now the cows have been in here way longer than typical, and so have the hens. It's been dry all over Europe. There are wildfires and droughts. And there's no exception here. It's been a very dry summer, second driest summer since I've been here, and the grass is just simply not recovering. So we've wanted to hold the animals back as long as we could. But before I went away, we decided that we would leave the animals much longer in some of the paddocks here and give them access to bales, so winter feed, which we'd never done at this time of year in July before. So you can see they've really heavily impacted, but also Very evenly manured and urinated all over the ground here. Tom's done a lovely job pruning the black walnut here to make it easier to get the fence in by pruning some of the lateral branches here. Very nice job. It might not come out on camera, but it's been hard to get close up to the trees here. So that's gone really well. And so the cows have been basically working their way down top field since before I left. We are continuing to reduce animal numbers. We've got some animals being picked up in about 10 days, and I'm also potentially selling a couple of the younger animals. We've been far too overstocked, and so reducing cow numbers has been important to us this year. And we've got the sheep over at Silly Gordon still, and so they're going to stay over there probably till later into the season just because grass is not recovering Up in Nutfield, it's nearly ready to graze again. Front field's looking great, we'll have a look. Same with the hens, we decided to make more of an impact in this field to allow increased recovery time everywhere, which is what you've got to do if the grass is not growing fast. You've got to slow down the grazing. So we had that option to use some of our winter bales, which we have excess of this year because we've reduced the animal numbers. So that's been a good strategy, I think. It's hard to really compute. We still are green. I've seen a lot of friends and farmers in the UK, for example, just grazing on yellow dusty fields. And I think it's drier than it was in the ground in a lot of parts of the drought year. And I think it might be because we've got less poultry than we used to have. Not sure, but it's challenging. And I know it's really rough for people further south, but We're recovering slowly, and I think it was a good strategy to hold the animals back despite them having a higher impact here. The rest of the farm is recovering well, which is fantastic. So I'll open that bale up later today after they've had a nibble on the fresh grass, but there's a lot to do. It's just me on the farm for the couple of weeks, and then Nora's going to be back, and we've got a lot of clean down to do, obviously, after having a lot of people deep cleaning kitchens and storing things for the winter. It's a lot to do, so Better get on with the chores. Hungry ladies. Hens are doing great. They're laying really well. Perfect health. Let's get them some food. So whilst there's still a few months of the farming season left and a lot to do, it's very relaxing for me to be alone at the farm and to just potter around cleaning, doing the chores, and it's a very relaxing time for me. expend a lot of energy managing people and organizing things when the team are here, as well as this year with the restaurant open all weekend. Basically didn't take a day off for a few months. And so it's been super nice to be in America with Nora's family, and we had an incredible time. And Ragnar's back to school now in next week, so it gives me a time to just unwind, decompress, And evaluate things further. So the plan was always to have a short season because of the intensity of last year with taking on the restaurant as well as the farm.

And pretty quickly I realized that was a pretty bad design for the season here.

The farming season is the same length whether or not there are people here, and so it front-loaded a lot of work onto Nora and I, and at times just myself, setting up the market gardens.

Uncovering all the beds, doing all the starts, raising 1,000 broilers that Nora and I slaughtered before people arrived here, and getting ready for hens and grazing the animals. So it was pretty busy before people even arrived. And once people arrived, we jumped straight into our internship program and then opening the restaurant Saturday— Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. So it was pretty insane. We quickly stopped Opening on Sundays to allow a day of rest.

And it went well, but it was exhausting. And by the end of the season, I just felt totally spent.

And it's just a lot to manage, and a lot of the behind-the-scenes things of ordering everything, dealing with sales, dealing with paying the bills, and just all the little details in the background that fall just on me alone. And part of the problem with having such a short season is that the team Being amazing as they were, aren't here long enough to take on some of those responsibilities and offload them from me. And normally when we run the normal 6-month season here, people can start to get familiar with some of those administrative things and take some of the load off that, or deal with ordering chicken food or whatever it is. So that was pretty intensive, and I knew pretty early on it was a bad plan on my part to have a short season. We've still got 3 months of the farming season left with just ourselves here.

But our production is quite low. We've done all the broilers already.

The eggs is just a constant rhythm. We are selling cows for meat and maybe some live animals, so animal numbers are going down. And then most of the veg crops this year were aimed for the restaurant, so it's just to store crops now for the winter for us— potatoes, carrots, and pumpkins, and ferments, and things like that. As well as processing all the tomatoes and things. We decided not to sell any veg commercially this year because we're trying to work out what we need for the restaurant, and that's an ongoing process. But it went good, and super happy with the crew we had here, a really amazing team, and a really nice group of interns too, from as far away as New Zealand, South Africa, and Mexico, and different parts of Europe, Canada, America. We've had people from all over. We've also run a 9-day regenerative ag training and a market garden training, and it's been amazing to meet such wonderful people here this summer. And we've had a really nice festival season, great concerts and really amazing food from Chef Anjumal. And it was very—

couldn't have asked for more.

It went really smooth, really nicely, but just intensive, and I really needed that little break in America just now, and a lot's been happening. So one part of what came out of that for me is that I think I will put the restaurant up for sale again. I managed to sell the West Coast property that I've been trying to sell for some time now, and that's released a kind of stranglehold around me economically. But I still feel like I have a chokehold around my neck. Realistically, the restaurant needs to be run by someone that wants to run it full-time. And make that their endeavor. And at times we've been considering whether we move farming operations up there and focus on that place entirely. I love it, it's such a beautiful and special place, and it's really in the heart of the community here. But I'm too busy with the farm realistically, and I never bought the place thinking that I would run it. I wanted to set up a collaborative enterprise where I just produce the food for it, doing what I do anyway. And that didn't pan out in the way I wanted, so I think it's a good call to Pass it on, see if someone else wants to take it on that can give it the time and energy it deserves. I love the place, I always will, but it's time to scale down and just focus back in on the farm, which is the, you know, the rhythm and heartbeat of life here for me, and just simplify. And so I'm looking forward to, you know, just offloading some of the additional responsibilities I've taken on that are just not necessary for my quality of life. In fact, they detract from my quality of life in an overall sense. So that's some big news that's happening, and we're taking photos of that next week, and the property will be on the market again this autumn. I feel very at ease with the idea and decision I've made within myself because, as I said, the intention behind this place was to have a full-time team who didn't need to work year-round to make their livelihood. as it's a summer-only restaurant. But to do that, you need to pull in money from the bigger cities— Stockholm, Oslo, Gothenburg. And I had a business plan that I think would happily do that, but it relies on a team, and the team is the hardest thing to find. We're blessed by having amazing people coming here from all over the world in the farm, uh, but to have a team that want to actually physically move here and, you know, build their life here around what could be— you know, the sky's the limit with that place. You could build a Michelin-star restaurant, you could do whatever. It's an incredible place and opportunity, but I just can't take that on. And as I get older, I just want to, you know, size back down to what's manageable, relying on less people, because people will always be the hardest thing if you're setting up something like this. Finding enough money and resources and skills is not a problem usually, but finding people that can gel together that are invested in the same way is challenging, especially out here in the remote countryside. And it's been our week link of the whole time that we've been running this farm. I'm essentially training people to go and start their own operations, and most of the people coming through here, you know, are very keen to go off and start their own thing. And I really would love a collaborative business where I didn't have to hold all the responsibility or be that leader position, which I've grown tired of because it puts you in a different psychological Constellation with the rest of the team, and I'm a bit tired of that. I'm quite introverted naturally, and you might be surprised by that because of my presence on social media and with talking and teaching, but I spend a lot of my time just quietly pottering away. And as I get older, that's something that I'm, you know, putting a guard around and want to withdraw a bit of my outward-facing side. So that's where it is, and I feel, I feel I don't feel like I want to hold on to something that doesn't hold the vision that I went into it with, and so I feel very easeful about letting that go, and hopefully someone else gets inspired and can really take it on for their own.

All right, egg collection time. I'll just show you the grass that the animals are coming onto now. So we're in front field, and it's looking good. Take a little grass plant down here, and we've got 4 true leaves yellowing off at the bottom. So this is good to come into soon, so maybe tomorrow. But if I open the bale, I think I can give them 3 days where they are and just really let this take up the rain that came last night. Had thunderstorms. Been having tropical thunderstorms this summer and also over on the Cape, and very nice Going to sleep last night with heavy storm, but now it's time to collect some eggs. So same as we've always done, we're feeding half the feed in the morning, quarter of the feed at egg collection 1 and quarter of the feed at egg collection 2. We separate the different Eggmobiles in their field collection crates. So most of the work with managing good eggs happens now, sorting, pre-sorting the eggs in the Eggmobile. So I'm looking to put all the eggs pointy side up and clean off any feathers, make sure all the eggs are crack-free and sorted already in these trays. Then when I flip them in cardboard in the egg packery, everything's good. Having documented all these processes in such detail on the channel in many previous years, as well as our book, I don't go over a lot of the details in our videos. Maybe I should go back to some of those simple day-to-day things for people's benefit. Especially people new to the channel, but there are 600-700 videos that you can see every aspect of this farm in the past where we go through all the details of how to run these operations that have led on to farmers all over the world emulating our models in nearly 100 countries. So we keep the flock data separate because we want to know precisely how many hens we have, how many eggs are being laid, and how many of those eggs are being sold. And we want to know that for each egg mobile so that we've got data behind decisions we make. Everything in farming is a tight numbers game, and if you don't keep records, you're winging it. And if you wing it, you can't make a living doing this. As I've said for years on the channel and in my books and education, it's all about the back-end planning and monitoring, and you've got to keep tight records. I've been to a bunch of farms where they're winging it and they don't keep records, and they're losing money through operations like this, whereas we're making good money through the eggs. We're selling direct to Livs in Stockholm and wholesaling chickens and eggs this year, as well as our beef, and that's been going really well. And really happy and proud with the price that consumers in Stockholm get, and we're very happy with our wholesale price. So big change in the way we do things. We don't sell on Rico at all. I've talked in videos on Instagram as well as YouTube about how I feel a bit disenfranchised with Rico Rings nowadays. A lot of people copying our models and kind of half-assing it, like not moving their eggmobiles very often or feeding conventional feed and basically getting the same price that we get for doing this exceptionally. And I don't like it. I feel like people are sort of taking advantage of customers who don't really know the difference and can only care so much. They've only got so much bandwidth. And I've been here for 25 years in this space teaching people how to do this stuff exceptionally and aiming for optimization and excellence, not cutting corners, etc. So, you know, it's a natural evolution for me. I really support the LEAPS model, and I think it's worth the wider community having these bigger discussions of how we scale up and how we collaborate together to get economies of scale with transportation and logistics, It's just the journey I'm on currently with these questions around the bigger food system. But I do have to say I've been a little bit disenfranchised with what I see on the RECO rings nowadays. Not to say that there's lots of bad actors, but I think I've seen things that cause me concern and distress. So anyway, let's get some eggs. So beautiful clean eggs, which is the result of managing the nest boxes well. And I've got to be quick in here to open the nests up again. But lovely. So as always, we time it to get half the day's eggs in the morning, and then by about 2:30, the automations will shut the nests and we'll get the rest of the eggs. Don't forget, you can find out how to run all of these enterprises in my book Regenerative Agriculture, which goes further and deeper into farm design and economics than any book in the farming literature, as well as our Builds book, which shows you how to build eggmobiles, boiler pans, saunas, slaughter facilities, egg packing facilities, everything that we've built on the farm in 3D CAD plans and print Uh, build. It's only available as PDF. You can find them in links in the bio. I still really love this enterprise. It's one of my favorite farm enterprises. Still love the design of the Eggmobile, and it's such a great product to bolt on other products to. And this is about an hour and a half's work a day to run these 2 Eggmobiles in a really good fashion, and that's with the egg packing and record keeping, etc., as well. And that produces around Nearly €90,000 of sales, of which €58,000 a year is the enterprise profit, let's call it, that you can use to pay salary and farm overheads, etc. So very profitable. It is 7 days a week though, so like all things, you've got to look at the different enterprises you might consider on your farm and what they look like week to week, day to day, but also month to month across the whole season. And this is one of my favorite enterprises and always has been. So sand garden is looking beautiful, and if you see down the back, we have a lot of flowers as well as potato to harvest. It's looking gorgeous, but a bit of maintenance to do in here, just trimming some of the bushes. But it's been a joy to just watch this transforming through the season. It's been one of my favorite things beyond the natural swimming pool. I get a lot of pleasure from That's incredible space. Gotta shut the teepees down and gotta do some cleaning up of food and kitchen gear, etc. But for now, it's time to cut some grass. This little beast has saved me so much time. It's electric and cheaper than the lithium-ion battery models. This is just using lead-acid batteries, which means you can change them out yourself when their life has ended. But this is quite a fast mower. It's saved me hours with the amount of Grass that I have to cut here and over at Siligun. Pumpkin patch is growing strong. There's sweet corn there too. We just plant this and leave it. Don't water it. Don't think about it. We only just finished the last pumpkins from last year, just before we left for America. So it's very nice to have. So turns out the turkey has had chicks finally while we're away. They seem to be doing really good. Now, people that were here at the farm this year, if you're watching, will be happy to see this because they've been sat on eggs all year. In fact, this mama still is. We haven't let them out this summer because of the fact they're sitting on eggs, and Tom worked out while we're away that the hedgehog has been coming in and stealing the eggs. So this year we saw the first hedgehog I've ever seen in Sweden on the deck by the swimming pond. And a lady in the village has been breeding them and releasing them because they're very rare here in Sweden. And she said if they like it here— she took it away and she said if it likes it here, it'll be back. And it was back within a couple of days from 7, 8 kilometers away. And it's been sneaking under the barn and stealing eggs. So I think it's been— the turkeys have just been laying eggs over and over again because the hedgehog comes along and steals them. But I'm very happy to have the hedgehog. It's a big healthy male. And that's something that one of my first childhood experiences was actually digging a hedgehog trap in my back garden, in my parents' garden. And the next day there was an actual hedgehog in the bottom of that. And it led me to understand that I could influence nature and affect things. And I was very young at the time, but it was quite an impactful moment. So I've got a little special connection with hedgehogs. I'm very happy to have one back here. Well, it's all pumping in here. First ripe tomatoes coming through. We've got a few crates picked. Lots of basil that we'll be making into pesto that we freeze for the winter, as well as lots of parsley. A few different varieties here. This is Tigerella, doing very nice. And it's about time to top these plants so these fruit will ripen up. Got some very nice different varieties. Coming in, a lot of tomatoes, but we will end up canning these and freezing them. We've been having an embarrassment of cucumber this year. It's been an unbelievable cucumber year, and we've harvested crates and crates. We're making fantastic cocktails at the restaurant— cucumber and gin and lime and mint, all from the farm. Very nice. So a lot of work to do in here, harvesting and preserving in the coming weeks. And it's a shame the team are all gone before this is coming in. A lot of spicy chilies that we will preserve and make chili crisp and just dried chili with. And a whole load of pickles to make as well. Pickled cucumbers, fantastic. And we like them a bit more salty than sweet, and often in Sweden they add a lot of sugar to the pickles, which is not my favorite. I prefer Salty pickles. So in our small tunnel, there's a lot of harvesting to do. Padrón and shishito, and they're doing very well. But that's going to be my focus this week, is picking a lot of leaves and freezing them down. We've been cooking these from frozen a year later, and they're fantastic. So that's gonna be what I do with those, and same with the shishito. One of my favorite things about greenhouse production here. A lot of flowers we put in by bulb this year, primarily to put on tables at the restaurant, and they got hit by drought conditions early on in April. Back in April we had a hot dry spell, but they've done very nicely now, so we're going to have beautiful bouquets on our table for the rest of the summer. But they were a little bit late for the restaurant season. We were expecting them a little bit earlier, but anyway, it's beautiful to have more flowers in the garden.

What a sight!

Something I've got excited about this year is Setting up tree nursery stock again. This is apple on its own seeds. This is Bittenfelder, and it's one of Ragnar's favorite apples. And we've got a bunch of apples we've grown that we stratified seed for over the winter. That's enough to fill in the gaps on the tree lanes. I'm thinking of planting a lot more aronia and apples on their own seed and more grafted nuts and just filling in the tree lanes again. I kind of gave up a few years ago because of the vole pressure, and it just felt like a bashing my head against the wall situation. A lot of the hazels— we had like a few years of very seasonal weather for voles and their population exploded and they were taking out trees that they don't normally attack. And there's a lot of work to coppice the windbreak in the spring and I just want to put some attention back onto tree systems I think in the next years. So the sand garden is really coming into its own and self-seeding everywhere. This is thyme spreading across the entire pathway now. It looks a little bit out of control, but it's just hum with activity of insects. And nearly everything coming up as this looks a bit weedy is actually just plants self-seeding themselves. And it's creating a different texture, the way that the plants are spreading and carpeting the ground. And it's just been really interesting to watch it all fill in. A lot of the grass is getting bigger now. And way above my head height, and it's creating different forms and textures that we haven't seen in the previous years as it's been settling in. But it's unbelievable. I saw my first swallowtail butterfly that I've seen in Sweden here this year, and it's just always throbbing with life. So beautiful and so nice to see more flowers in the gardens here. We've got 10 beds of potato at the back that I need to lift for winter storage. But it's really something else. I've been enjoying this a lot. A sea of colors and textures, and it changes week to week throughout the year. And Flynn, who is here on a scholarship from Australia, has got— well, she fell in love with sand gardening. She's actually going to work with Peter Korn next year, I think, and dive deeper into this topic, which I think is a fantastic idea. So I'm missing the team. It's such a nice group we had this year. But it's nice to also have a little bit of quiet time now to get packed down and just think about what's next for us. So a big part of this year and an amazing accomplishment was the Regenerative Agriculture Festival we put on. And I always wanted it to be a participatory event where other than just consuming, which is what typical festivals are like, people would come willing to help pitch in with preparing food and washing up and just keeping all the spaces clean and working efficiently. And it just flowed so beautifully. I was running around most of the time with Nora, and our team was super busy, but we pulled off an incredible event. And people keep writing to me that it was unbelievable for them and they had such a good time. We had speakers in different spaces around the restaurant throughout both days, and we had a big tour of the farm to start with, followed by smoked chicken dinner at the restaurant. And then we had built all this Amazing stuff for roasting whole pigs and half cows and 50 chickens at a time and frying a couple of hundred eggs at a time. And that worked spectacularly. And people— we had very nice weather— people camping out in the field, coming together to learn about all different topics of regenerative farming. And it was just so fun to see how everyone contributed and spaces were kept going. I checked the toilets after the first evening. It's like, ah, They're cleaner than when we just have a normal restaurant evening, and there were 270 people there. We had music in the evenings, and it was beautiful. It was so nice to witness people just coming together and collaborating in that way. And I guess that's a big part of the regenerative space too. And I really felt proud of what we managed to achieve. The team did an exceptional job, worked really hard to pull off— cooking on fire for that many people is a challenge in itself, but meals were on time and well cooked. and beautifully prepared. Chandler did a fantastic job. She's a chef from America who came and organized the logistics of that and did an incredible job. And everyone just did fantastic. It was great to see old and new friends. And whilst I was really busy, I could just absorb so much of the joy and inspiration going on, and it was a pleasure to host people there. So really happy that that happened. Okay, so time to pack eggs for the day, and egg packing is about a 20-minute job, 15 to 20 minutes for this many eggs. And that's because we've done the pre-sorting in the Egg Mobile, and that's a 15-minute job on the egg collections. And we're just getting the eggs the right way up and making sure we have clean eggs in the first place. That makes everything easier because I don't want to handle every single egg, just want to handle 3 or 4 a tray maximum. And so if you notice eggs getting dirty in our sort of roll-away nest box system Then it's a sign that you need to clean the nest mats, and as long as you keep on top of that, everything works very smooth. So I meet a lot of students that take a very long time to do this job in the beginning, and the challenge is to see what you're capable of to be able to do this enterprise in a timely manner. And I meet a lot of people who have worked on other farms that spend 5, 10 times the amount of time doing the same job that we're doing. And so that's a big part of what we're trying to teach people is effective time and motion studies so that you can get the job done well and get on with all the other jobs that need doing. And that's pretty much how everything on around the farm works. It's got to be dialed in, it's got to be efficient, otherwise you just can't fit in The same amount. And I think that's something that really dawns on people when they come here to study, is just the level of care in time and motion studies and the speed at which we can work at an excellent level of quality control. And that's really what makes it work. Ultimately, none of these things that we do are rocket science. It's the ability to get them done consistently to a very high standard very rapidly. That makes it efficient and pay for itself. So I'm going to stop talking now and just get on with this. Should be done in 15, 20 minutes, I hope, with the records done. So what I'm doing when I see a pale-shelled egg is I'm listening sonically. Now, I often get the micro-cracked eggs in the Egg Mobile, but sometimes they slip through. What I'm doing is observing every single egg and making sure there's no micro-cracks, there's no shit, or there's no Feathers or anything. You're technically meant to use a lamp to actually look at each egg, but I've handled millions of eggs and I can feel and understand eggs in a way that somebody without that level of experience could never do. I always encourage my students to learn by feel and by hearing, and if you just candle every egg, you never actually learn the delicate skills that mean I'm very confident, 100% confident, that every egg I check— has no microcracks, and you can't learn that sort of tactile skill by working in a sort of automated fashion using a light. So you're meant to do that, but I've never used a light and I have never failed an egg inspection. So that took 15 minutes, and I have sorted out a tray and a few extra eggs for the kitchen at the house because I've just got back from holiday.

to refresh the eggs there.

And pretty neat, pretty good. That's how we produce the best eggs here in Sweden. Just a little update to give you a sense of what's been going on. I hope you found that interesting in some way, and I look forward to having a bit more time to be more engaged on social media and sharing more of our journey with you. Thanks for watching, folks. As always, don't forget to check the links in the bio, and I'll see you in a video soon.