Breaking a candle in half and burning all four ends...

Okay, up early today. We got slaughter today on our postopultry maths class. And then we're going up to Siligon for a full day in the concert up there with Eunice Mayband. So we're surrounding pen with crates, lifting a whole pen at a time. And then we'll head down for quick breakfast before we get started today. Well, wow. Beautiful summer weather has returned and that's been something we've been longing for for a long time now. It's been a hot early start to the year and then got cold. We're about three weeks behind with vegetable growth. We're producing chicken as well as our pastured eggs and vegetables for the Rico as well as for our restaurant. And it's kind of like starting all over again this year because we are coming back into the Rico rings after a couple of years out. Also starting up the venture at Silly Gordon, which changed dramatically because the chef we'd been planning with quit on us last minute, which was just a ridiculous thing in the heat of the season. But we found an amazing replacement that's turned out way better, actually. So life has a mysterious way of doing these kind of things, but it's an unknown thing. We've had to cancel the big feast ideas that were really going to generate the cash in the restaurant. And we're just opening to have concerts and to have local people showing up and get some good photos, get systems in place so that we can scale up. And we want to take that a little bit slow because it's enough running the farm full time and an education center. Running a restaurant is a whole nother thing. And as you can probably imagine, we don't do things in the conventional way. So we had our soft opening last week, and it's been a bit of a marathon to get ready for that. But with new waiters and staff just meeting on the actual day of launch, it wasn't really a soft opening at all. It was pretty stressful. One of the point of sale systems broke down, but lots of people were there. The concert with Days of August was amazing and we had a good time despite being rushed off our feet. It's pretty hectic starting to farm off in the season. In Sweden, winter is very long. Spring and autumn are characteristically very short. And so the season just really suddenly gets going. Everything comes at once. And with new staff on the farm, it's always a lot to just get people trained up and get things running. So having a restaurant start up and building a stage and all the paperwork that comes with it is not exactly useful, but it's gone really well, all things considered. Couldn't have gone better. And I haven't had time to make updates even on Instagram. We've just been busy with our internship program. So so far we've orientated a new team. We've run a nine day regenerative agriculture design course, we've run a market garden masterclass and now we're right in the middle of a passive poultry masterclass. Today we're slaughtering three pens of boilers and they are going off to Rico rings and to our restaurant. And so it's a whole new venture this year and we've got to work out what the supply needs are for the restaurant and sort of build up some data so we can tailor our productions just for that. But the intention of the video today is just to take you along for snippets of the day. It's going to be a long busy day and I'm going to be at work till 11 o' clock tonight. So I'll show you little sneaks along the way and tell you about other things that come to mind as we go. Now here we are and the grass is really growing. It's gone seed by mid summer as you'd expect. But it's been really interesting. This is where layers have just been. We've had to go to the neighbours. We have about three and a half, four hectares of pasture here and we've got 12, 13 cows and we've got a bunch of sheep and we've got the eggmobiles and broilers too. So we've been off grazing the last couple of weeks on the neighbour's farm after zooming around the farm fast and spring. And now we're back and probably will be staying mostly on the farm with a couple of little trips to the neighbours too. Okay, so these birds have withheld from feed for overnight and we'll just make sure they have water collecting these up in their crates just by moving the pans over the top. That's pretty useful where to do it and then we'll have a quick breakfast. So Julius Maybank from Iceland. The artist is sleeping on farm. There's August stayed up there, the band from Norway. But Eunice flew in from Iceland and bought a second hand guitar in Stockholm and we thought we'd offer him to stay on the farm with us because it's just more fun and social. No one living up at the restaurant. Okay, so those of you who followed the channel over the years will remember our slaughter Facility. This is one of the cheapest, if not the cheapest approved facility in Europe. And we had it deregistered, but now we have registered it again and means we are fully certified to sell through the restaurant or to people in RICO or other shops and establishments here. That time of the year. Again, this is always very hectic having multiple people who cycle through the entire process here to learn every station. There's a lot to manage, a lot of details that could go wrong. But there are basically no slaughter facilities in Europe where you can train and get experience in this. So it's a really valuable part of what we do here. Okay, lunchtime and we've still got 30 beds to go. It's pretty, pretty hectic. Switching around every station obviously slows down the process, but really nice job so far and hopefully we'll get some lunch before I have to go back to work. So in Europe, birds are electrically stunned and then bled out. And they bled out for about a minute and a half. We are scalding at 63 and a half degrees for one minute, 15 seconds before fluffing 45 seconds in our bucket. Birds can be cleaned and estimated and quality control teams and grade the birds. And then all the record keeping is happening here before birds are put into their chiller in different weight categories so that we are able to store them in the weight categories we sell the birds in. And this team is responsible for recording the time that the birds take to chill down in micro feeding machines. And we have grades and weights here. I'm not going to show the process. If you look back on old YouTube videos, you can see the entire slaughter and packing process slowed down and in detail with all the information you need. It's taking longer with a group rotating through the rolls as we would expect. Typically we would do 80 to 100 birds an hour. Ideally with a team of five. We can do it with a team of four or so. And we're working much slower today. More like 30, 40% of that because we're rotating everyone through every roll so they learn the process and the little detail, make it work, which is super fun. A little bit hectic, but hopefully we're done in time to get up for lunch and silagon for the opening of the concert with Unius Mabel. Okay, job done. So we're just going through clean down. We've run out of water pressure, so it's a bit problematic when we're chilling. But it's full of beautiful big fridge full of beautiful big birds. Quite high average weights. We've been slaughtering this batch in one go. So we get a much bigger weight. Differentiation between the males and females has a lot of birds up at near 3 kilos, which is a lot bigger than our standard. We typically want to sell birds around 2.2 kilos breast per average. But very nice job. Well done. Now it's time. Clean down, finish the laundry, etc and I'm heading up to Siligon to set up for work until 11 o' clock tonight at Siligon. Just had a quick shower and going to check in on the chef and see what's ready. And what we're going to have to run for protocols with the serving girls and the bar girls. You said top five locations. You've been at top one. Top one. Top one. Okay. We got a little farm stall next to the bar. I'm just setting up. We've got the sound guys, senior maintenance, we've got some of the girls here, Victor's here. But we don't sell products right here. And just see if that works as a way to sell products. So you can come here, have a drink, eat some of the restaurant from the farm and buy products to take home with you too. So it's looking beautiful in the restaurant, don't you think? Ragnar and we have had a little teething problems last week with the point of sale system. See the artwork we made last winter. But we've changed things. Here's a little tap I made so you can just fill up your own drinking waters, etc. But we've made a few changes in here with how we run things. Just simple logistical things with table numbers and how the till systems plug in, who's got concert tickets, who hasn't, etc. And Jonty, our chef has been incredible. He's been an angel just rewriting the menu, connecting that to the farm, as well as making all the paperwork for the authorities. And we've got full, clear license to do everything now, which is fantastic. Can't use the old dance hall in the fire plan or the alcohol serving permit. We've had to put a fence around the serving area. But that's things we might do in the future if there is bad weather, etc. So here's where the kitchen is at and we maybe made some changes since we're not running pizza. This is Chef Jonty. He has been a legend and organized a whole new menu. And we have been approved, obviously to be open. So you can see we have our little large dishes and desserts with a focus on products from the farm with different meats and salads, etc. And we got a really cool wine list from Nature Wines. I'll show you out on the bar. So what's really cool about this bar is we have nature wines and organic biodynamics and supplies from a company called VIN Stereo. And we wanted to work with them because of their focus on intimacy with the producer as well as organic and biodynamic production. So you've got QR codes, you can see the individual farmer, how they've grown and how they've chosen to process the fruit, as well as bottle it, etc. And we've got different fruit ciders, and they're made out of the waste stream from supermarkets here, as well as fully Swedish beers and doing a few things like apple spritz, gin and tonics that people expect. But I really like this closeness to the producer, which is how we have worked selling direct to consumer from the farm as well. We haven't done it. We got forest race pork. We've got salad from the garden. Thank you. Everything's good. Stage looks beautiful. Union says top one in the world. I'm just gonna do a very short and sweet welcome for our artist that came all the way from Iceland and that I've had the pleasure to spend the day with a very fun, very charming, beautiful human who's gonna play for us today. So a warm welcome for Jumius Maven. I'm wearing sunglasses now because I'm cold Eyes wide open Floor is right Lights are on Time to shine then it's over when you touch the sky. Fade away right on there line Beginning of decay Brought under line Beginning of decay Bitter like the flowers of debate Stood by me Interest of moving place from blue to crazy and it has a floating p. Well, day is ending Bar is closed People have gone home very nice concert. 11 o' clock at night. Don't know how well that portrays all the things that go on in a day. It's obviously very busy with running the farm with the internship program on, as well as running Slaughter today and running the restaurant, but had a really fun time. Unis Mayvant was incredible. We've got an incredible lineup this summer. Hope you can make it. The food's been fantastic and just a pleasure to see people hanging out in this incredible place. This is the cosiest venue in the whole of Vermland. I think the team have done an amazing job to get to where we've got to with no money. This bus probably the cheapest and most rapid restaurant launch ever. It's certainly been challenging and stressful, but it's been a full on day. Tomorrow is packing chickens and then we are carrying straight on into the internship program. We've got a couple more weeks with this team. We're going to process some young bulls as well as get deeper into the design of different people's farms. Okay, packing past your boys today. We've got birds that are going down fresh. We've got birds that are in brine, we've got birds that are going for freezers and then back in the tulip and they'll go out tomorrow to the freezer space. Got pretty big birds this year. They're averaging 2.8 to 3. Because we're not slaughtering over three weeks, we're doing it all in one go. We got birds in for smoking in 10% brine, technically 9% brine, 30 liters of water to 3 kilos of sea salt. They'll be in there for 24 hours before smoking to tomorrow. But some pretty good looking birds. Okay, so it's the morning after the night four and we had a wonderful concert. We had really good feedback. People think the food is great, decorations great, service was great, performance was great and we're really happy to hear that. We put a lot of time and effort and overkill into getting it all ready and it was a real pleasure. Yesterday Jumius was awesome. We had a lot of fun hanging out with him, hosting him at the farm and that's what we like to just bring a little bit more humanity, a little bit more realness to everything. And we're able to sell organic and biodynamic products at the price of pretty bad quality food in Sweden. So that is incredible. I'm super proud of the whole team today. Early start, we are packing pasture boilers and so we've got different weight categories in 200 gram increments that we put them in. And we are doing freezer birds with freezer labels as well as refrigerated birds. And some birds are going into smoking and so I am hoping that for tomorrow we'll take birds to the freezing. Carlstead, keep some for Rico customers happening on Wednesday and we'll get the smoker on tomorrow for 24 hours. After 24 hours of binding, job done. Lovely. We've got all the birds packed in white cat grease, organs packed, some for a barbecue tonight, some brining underneath. We've got 48 birds for smoking. Chiller back on now. We've loaded it and time for lunch. So busy morning. Packing Pastured poultry into different weight categories. And it's been a lot. Definitely crazy planning to have trainings that lead up to the opening time here on Saturday nights. Things haven't gone to plan this year. So we were planning big feasts for 200 people on a long table in the pasture that would generate the main income for this place. These local nights is fun and we're offering incredible value, I think, and we're offering something cultural that just doesn't really exist around here. Like, I'm building a place mainly to create a gathering space because Swedish people don't typically hang out in the way that many of us Europeans are used to. And that's something missing from life here. I'm obviously socially stimulated in the summer with people at the farm and often it's too much really, but wanting to build more local networks. And yeah, I didn't plan the year perfectly well with the amount of work landing on me, but it was also a little bit hiccups with how much should land on me. And I think I always have had pretty high expectations of people. You know, I want people to exalt themselves and that's really how we've run the farm in the past. And I've led from the front and, you know, want to sort of pull people along, for example, and see if they can sort of find that place in them where they excel and connect to that a bit. And I've forgotten. I guess starting this up on top of the farm this year has just made me really see again as I've known over the years, like there's a lot of great people, but there's less people who are able to carry along at the sort of pace that we've set. And it's left a lot on me and coming up with protocols and all the back end stuff for all the people in all the worlds. It's a lot and I'm really tired and this has got to get fun for me, otherwise there's no point doing it. I've had quite a nice life balance up to now. But yeah, I've been burning the candle. Well, I was talking with Ineos yesterday and it's like I've snapped the candle in half and I'm burning both of them at both ends. That's a good metaphor for how it feels these last few months. And I'm resilient, I can handle that. I mean, I've always had a high capacity, but yeah, there's a limit to that too. And I need to have a lot more balance and fun. So pretty full on doing these trainings at weekends and I need to find a better way of formulating this place and the farm that they're more synergistic and not competitive. This though has to be the coziest venue in Vanland. We got flowers coming from my friend Tenille that I met on the first course I did. Beautiful paper flowers that will stand at the edge of the stage and we can move them down to the restaurant. But this is a gorgeous place and I'm really happy to see it coming back to life and people gathered here enjoying amazing food and very reasonable price organic biodynamic drinks and yeah, it's just really beautiful. Then the guns coming back as. Yeah. Got a glimpse last night of what I'm trying to create and I think it's incredible the artists we've got coming here and hopefully we build up enough of a reputation this year that we will have a lot more scope for bigger artists and make it fun to be in the countryside again. Look at the gorgeous flowers. Yeah, and a gorgeous view. Check this out. These still nights looking over freakin very long lake that goes all the way up to Torshby and down to Carlstead and we can't wait to bring the farm up here. Gotta finish up the pasture poultry course. Just gonna address any last issues and questions and thoughts and feedback and then I'm gonna have rest, go out on the boat, maybe take some time in the lake today and just chill down before the last two weeks of the internship. So much for following folks. And as always you can follow us on social media where you find links all in the links below to our books, to the concerts. If you want to come eat the farm, see some of the incredible artists that are playing here this year, you know where to find it. See you in a video soon folks.