BIG DAY! The Sheep are out and I'm sending books with FedEx finally!

Welcome back to another video, folks. Today marks a very special day for me. Not only are the sheep coming out onto pasture for the first time this year, but I've finally made the switch from Post Nord, the Swedish post service, to FedEx. And I hope to be able to get this to people around the world much more swiftly and effectively. Big day today. We're moving the sheep. Hey, sheepies. But we want your lambs too, please. Hey. Hey. We need all the lambs here. Come on. All together now, please. Where's the other lamb? Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Where's the other lamb? Hey. Hey. Hey. Long night? Handy having animals that are trained through a bucket. Big walk for you today. Come on, net. Come on. Come on, lambs. You can do it. Hey, little guys. Philip's having to carry the little straggler. Come on, then. I'll bring some food up for you. Don't worry. You've got fresh grass here. Dreams have passed with poultry soon now. You've seen this many times before. If you follow our channel, they've actually cut some of the trees to open up the view, I guess. But you see the little birch trees just coming into leaf here. Pannier across, different story over here and lots of grass underneath. Nice to see the sheep out and enjoying themselves. Look at that. Okay, 3200 volts coming through there. That's good enough. Bottom wire is not on. Hey, so we're just giving some silage up here and keeping the bale outside. They've got plenty of grass and they've just got to get orientated. But we'll give them silage for roughage just to transition over to the next days. Hopefully that's the last bale they get. With a bit of luck. Now, grass has only just started growing, but you can see how eager the mummers were to get out and eat fresh grass. I think the cows are causing a ruckus. They can hear probably wondering why this lesser animal gets to eat grass first. Maybe I'm just projecting my thoughts. Anyway, we don't mind impacting this because we're going to put pigs in here too, probably. Although I haven't fully decided. Maybe we'll put pigs straight up in the back forest because that's not really had much pig impact since the trees were cut. But I don't mind them impacting this and much rather they impact this than our fields. We want to graze the cows in a single wire, so save a lot of time in the moving. And with lambs, obviously you need nets, so we want to Try and avoid that if we can. But we also don't want two flocks and herds moving around. Either they go together or sheep will go out of here, I guess. You in your element finding ants nests. Yeah, this is the ant nest. It's blackout. You see the little tunnels? No, but look, I see ant in here. There. Ant. Look. That's where I lay the eggs, I think. Hello. Be careful, be careful. There's an ant's nest. Too dry. You are so good at finding things. You see the ants are picking up their eggs and running off. Ah, they're like, quick, our roof has been taken off. Run. Take the eggs. You're so good at finding. Look. Now, I've shared a bunch about my journey here on YouTube with you. All about farming, about life, about self publishing, etc. I've always tried to encourage people to self publish. I've had contact with most of the major publishers in the field and to be honest, I think that choosing to self publish this book has been the best decision I made in my life. And that's because when you make a book, you're doing a huge amount of work to produce the material that fills the book, but also putting together the text, the images, and in my case, building out the book as well. And a publisher typically wants to take 75, 80% of all the sales of that and you have to promote your own book. So I just think that's a raw deal. I've really enjoyed the fact that I've seen the name of every single person that's bought a copy of this and we've shipped this out to over 90 countries around the world now. And starting with my previous book, Making Small Farms Work, which this transcends and includes, I'm really happy that I've done that. The one thing I've not been happy with is the postal service here in Sweden, which, to be frank, sucks. It's very expensive. If you want to offer a tracking service, you have to add that on as an additional expense. And I've been heavily subsidizing the cost of shipping as it is now. I used to pack and ship every single book by hand at the farm. In more recent times, I have a company near Stockholm that are doing that for me, but it's incredibly hard to switch over to a different shipping company. You'd think in today's day and age it was quite easy, but it's not because these things are very complicated. I sell a PDF copy and the hard copy book around the world. And for digital products you have different vat rules in every European country. And so you need to have software that can deal with that automatically into the accounting software. So first you need somewhere to sell the book, and we've been using Shopify, but then you need the information from that sales platform to go through to someone that's going to package the book and send it out. So you need a labeling service and you need it to coordinate with your accounting as well. And that's particularly troublesome. And that's because here in Sweden we have a great piece of accounting software. We use a program called Fort Knox. It's very hard to find all the little pieces in between that integrate between those things. If you're in America or England, there's a lot more plug and play solutions out there. But it's been a big challenge and it's taken us forward five months to get to the point where today the first shipments have been picked up by FedEx. Now, the reason I wanted to make that shift is this book has been taking a huge amount of time to get to people around the world for the whole of the COVID pandemic. It's been taking six to eight to 10 weeks to get to America, Australia. Typically we're sending out a lot of copies. And so it generates a huge amount of emails with people asking where the book is, if there's a tracking link. And I haven't been able to offer tracking in the past because it just adds another $15 to the cost of already expensive shipping, which is not acceptable in my mind. We had our records in this last year. We had a book arrive in Chile six months after I sent it, Many, many books taking three months to arrive. And I just got a book back from South Africa nine months after I sent it. Where they go in the meantime, I have no idea. But with FedEx, they claim to be able to get the book pretty much anywhere in the world in five to seven days, which is amazing. And it's automatically got tracking in there. So I hope to get up to speed with the 21st century and be able to offer you that if you want to purchase a copy of Regenerative Agriculture. It's been amazing to see the influence of this book from our approach to the past with poultry, our no dig market, gardening with wood chip pathways that we've spread all over the world now. And it's amazing to see how many people have used this as a way to start their business and create the skeleton for their enterprises. And that's why I wrote the book. It's information dense, it's a manual, a university textbook of how to do this stuff and I'm so glad of all the feedback I get from around the world and all the benefit that this brings. Thank you so much for all the feedback that you folks give me and I'm looking forward to be able to get this to you a lot quicker than that brings me to the Ridgedale Builds book. Thanks so much everyone that got behind the Kickstarter. Amazing to have another successful Kickstarter. So this book won't get back from the printers till probably July time and I'll let folks know when that happens and we'll be shipping them out as soon as we can, but I hope to get the PDF copies out this week in fact, and those that signed up for pledges that were combinations of both books or PDF versions. I will get the hard copy and PDF copies of Regenerative Agriculture out just as soon as we've done the PDF copies of this. So within the next couple of weeks I'll let you know when that happens through the Kickstarter page. Please don't email me individually about that. There's no way I can respond to all the emails. I'll be doing updates in the Kickstarter page. Those of you that have pledged but have not filled in the surveys, do that asap. I cannot send you I stress I cannot send send you a copy of the book if you don't respond to the survey because I don't have your address or contact information. So make sure you do that if you signed up. Thanks everyone that did sign up and I'm looking forward to get this book on sale in the summer months to the general public. That will be in the links below, as always in the show notes underneath. And I really hope this new partnership with FedEx will work well. We tried in the past with DHL that didn't work out, but hopefully with the first shipments going out today, we're going to see a radical change in the speed and efficiency of the postage. So thanks for everyone that supported us in that way. That's the single best way that you can support us in the work we do. If you've gained benefit from this channel and you want to get a lot of condensed information in one place, this is the single best reciprocal way to support us in our work and we appreciate that very much. And so that's it for today. I just wanted to update folks on that because it's an important part of my journey and I know it's been an important part for thousands of farmers journeys too. Thanks so much as always for watching, folks. You can find out everything we offer in the links below and we'll see you in the video soon. Bye for now.