Richard Perkins returns from an extended summer holiday with his children and surveys his farm in early September. He describes harvesting abundance from vegetables, orchards and nuts, maintenance tasks (taking down caterpillar tunnels, weeding, wood-chipping beds), recent equipment (a Ryobi electric zero-turn mower), and plans to scale down commercial operations toward homesteading — selling or reducing livestock, stopping commercial poultry, focusing on a smaller number of cows, pigs and charcuterie projects, and spending more time with family and outdoor pursuits like hunting and fishing.
Chapters
Welcome back to another video, folks. It's September already. This year has flown by and I now haven't been making as much content for you as normal. Things have been extraordinary this year and I've had an epic summer holiday with my kids. We've been all over the east coast and spending a lot of time at the west coast. We've been sailing, spending a lot of time fishing, putting away mackerel both for eating and for lobster season. We've been spending a lot of time on the water and it's just been the best summer I can remember. I've had so much fun. Sadly, I've seen Grace off back to the UK with her mum. She's coming back in December to live full time with me here to finish school and possibly do high school here. And lots of things are changing. But I thought I'd give you a little look around the farm as I get back into the closing down routine before we pack down for the winter now. So come along and I'll show you around. So, as you can see, there's lots of veg still going out and we'll have a look in the greenhouse, see how all the tomatoes are doing. But the veg garden has run away with us this year and there's a lot of work to do to pack this down. We're going to actually take the caterpillar tunnels down now while the weather is dry in the next week or so and get those covers folded away. Whilst this is the sort of shoulder season where you would want caterpillar tunnels up, none of the crops are needing the caterpillar tunnel specifically. So we thought we'll get that all packed away while it's still dry and then we're going to do a big overhaul, put down wood chips, clean up the beds, make sure it's totally weed free ready for next year. I'm actually going to leave some sneaky little kale so that I can hunt deer who are attracted to them. So, as you know, if you're a follower of the Channel, we actually purchased the forest here that used to be on the neighbor's land, but I think it used to be part of our farm and the old maps seem to confirm that now. I got a hunting license last year. I never actually got around to hunting last winter. Just too busy getting the Ridgedale farm builds booked together, which I'll be shipping off towards Stockholm for all you Kickstarter supporters. And then once we got the logistics sorted with that, we will have them out for public sale. The PDFs has been selling loads. You can get that for instant download already and you can find that in the links below if you want to get that for winter build projects. But hopefully that book will be for public sale within a few weeks, three or four weeks from now. But now what I want to do is just harvest one or two deer for the freezer for myself. We've been invited to go hunting over on the east coast at a beautiful farm that I visited over the summer to hunt fallow deer and wild boar, both of which we don't get here. But here we have a lot of roe deer and so I'm leaving. I think you can just make out the purple kale in the background. I want to leave some kale because it attracts the deer to come down through this forest. And whilst I'm still in an area with other houses, I've got a backdrop so I can sit at the top of the slope and have ground behind me, so no risk of ricochet, etc. And I've got a nice neighbour Bjorn, who's close by, who's also into hunting. So we're talking about having some early mornings and getting some really nice meat for the freezer. And I'll bring you along with processing the meat when we find it. These old trial beds have been put down to quite corn and pumpkin and just left to go rampant. Look at the size of that beauty. This will be a Halloween pumpkin for Ragnar. But there's quite a few beauties in here. Zero maintenance. They've just been left to go wild and it's going to need a good weed through. But a lot of beautiful produce from a tiny space. So while I've been away, I think they started topping the plants because we need to get these tomatoes ripening up now. But there is a massive abundance of peppers. So many peppers now. It's a bit of a jungle in here. There's only been a few people on the farm, but just look at all this beautiful producer. Oh, yeah. So they're ollie going out for sale. In our climate here, you typically top the plants off end of August to get things ripening up. And they've been going through picking just before things get ripe and putting them in the greenhouse to ripen off. It's a little bit overgrown, but you can see there's an abundance of tomato. Really delicious cherries here. Wow, it is a jungle. And some really nice beefsteak tomatoes you can make out here. Beautiful. Some of the idlis coming on. Just look at that for a fruit truss. Unbelievable. Oh, yeah, so sweet. Less people on the farm there's ever been before. So just keeping up with basic maintenance is a bit more of a task. I've just been playing around with my new toy, cutting the grass here that hadn't been cut for months. And so it was about knee height and really thick sward. So this is my new toy. This is a Ryobi all electric lawnmower. And it's a zero turn lawnmower, so it can turn on a dime. The reason I've invested in that is there's a lot of grass to cut here and I have spent more time fixing this machine than I have actually cutting grass with it. So what I wanted to do is have something that's capable of cutting pretty hardcore grass, but also capable of doing really nice job on the lawn. And so I was looking at the what's available on the market. I bought a version of this, a new one at Cleta, and it just was a joy to use after fixing up this thing all summer for the last few summers, to be fair. And then I just thought, well, why not go all electric? It's got super high torque. It's a bit cheaper than some other models because it's running on lead acid batteries, not on lithium. And so you can replace them yourself easily. If they ever go bad, just plug it in here on the back. And they reckon you can do three acres on a single charge. It depends obviously on the grass you've been going through, but you've got a lot of functionality with the height from 115 all the way down to 35mil. So it's capable of doing a really nice job. You can charge stuff on here too. You got different speeds and blade speed on here. But I have been super impressed. The grass here is out of control. No one had cut the lawn for three months, I would guess, and this thing just blitzed through it. Long wet grass is very impressive. And there's two motors, one for each wheel and that gives it the zero turn. But then there's two motors for each blade. Sorry, one motor for each blade. So there's two blades, two motors and just incredible torque. And I'm super impressed. I've only used it for a day so far, but I've been around the whole farm, including the vineyards and orchards where it was really thick field sward and it just buzzes through it. It's pretty amazing. So I'm very happy with that purchase. And this thing, a dying relic, I guess. Here's an example. Maybe you can make out now I wasn't trying to cut this short, I was just cutting it at 100 millimeters. But this is what I was cutting and this is for reference. That's my. That's my waist. So it just buzzed through this really thick, dense sward in one cut. Pretty amazing. It's been a funny year for tree crops, but some really abundant plum and there's also, if you just have a look here, a lot of beautiful pears coming on. The season of the harvest, my favourite time of year. We're still getting beautiful warm weather, still swimming in the lakes and making the most of it, and so much beautiful tree crops to harvest now. So as autumn rolls in now, I'm really thinking carefully about what to do. We're closing down a couple of weeks earlier than we normally would and I'm scaling down totally towards homesteading next year to honour rest and to honour the other work that has started consuming all of my time. And so I'm actually put out the cows for sale. And I think the older cows, Clove May or Violet, would be nice if someone wanted to take on these heritage pure breed fial cu. I'm thinking I'm gonna keep maybe two or three of the smaller calves and just grow them on for beef and I'll be sending one or two cows to the slaughtery for fine detailed butchering for my family freezer, which is always a pleasure. We've eaten quite a lot of beef this year, but it's always nice to have the freezers full. It's been incredibly dry here. It hasn't rained for quite a long time. It looks like it's not going to rain for a while more. The pond is a little bit low, but the stream flow has stopped, so we're not filling up the big pond or this pond. Seems fine on the veg watering front, but we'll just have to see. It's usually very wet in September, so I expect there to be a deluge not too far in the future. There are insane amounts of erroneous and the ones up near the trellises, the apple trellises up at the house, they are big lemma thumb now and the birds haven't gotten this year, which is a big change because last year the birds just took them all before we got them. This is part of a black walnut row that you can see extending off behind me in Topfield. I've shown this on Instagram. If you aren't following me on Instagram, do that. There's about four times more of you here on YouTube. Than there are on our Instagram channel. And I post daily about things going on in life and at the farm. But I showed this because this is the incredible growth the black walnuts have put on this year. Over a meter of growth. As wide as my arms. Pretty amazing. It's been a great year for the nut trees and black walnuts, the one that will always do best here. It's super hardy, it's propagating itself readily once it starts yielding nuts. And this is all moving towards my dream of mammoth stuff. So both eggmobiles still functioning nicely. I'm actually going to get rid of the hens by mid October, have a winter with very few animals. I'm still deciding whether to bring back the sheep from Cleta, dead or alive, essentially. But I'm going to really put a lot of attention on these four pigs that I have because I want to do a bunch of charcuterie, I want to make hams and really make the most of those animals. And that's already a lot of food. I know I've got one cow for the freezer. I've got to be sensible. So it might be best to keep a few cows and a few of the sheep alive and be able to harvest them over the coming years. I'm not going to run commercial poultry next year at all. I'm partly going to be traveling to do trainings at other people's farms, something I've missed a lot in the last years. To be able to get out and see other people and be in different spaces and not feel totally locked to this place in the way that I have been for many, many years. I'll have a few hens for my own use, but these birds will be sold on to other poultry farmers close by who want to expand their flocks. And so, yeah, that's what's going to happen with them. Considering how dry it's been, we've got pretty good recovery. And we weren't in here very long ago, but a nice bit of rain now as the weather starts cooling down would really do us well. And I'm pretty sure that's going to come. So it's obviously a really big decision to put the farm down, even if it's temporary. But I've really needed rest and this summer away with my kids has been absolutely precious and so necessary because they've, you know, had to put up with a dad that's just busy, busy on a different level. And it's not just been running this farm, it's writing books and running very Intense education, working a lot digitally and traveling, etc. And burning the candle at both ends. And I think you've all heard those of you that follow the channel regularly. Yeah, it's been too much and I need to focus on the things that are easiest to leverage to give me space and time. And what I want to do is connect back to what I love about all this stuff. And it's been too stressful running a commercial farm that's a full on educational hub, serving a new generation of farmers from all over the world. And so I'm focusing my energies on the things that I'm most passionate about that will bring me the most benefit with the least effort for the longest time. And right now that means putting the farm down and homesteading for myself and to take the time with like the pigs to use every bit of that animal nose to tail with no pressure of the economy and just moving products and cutting up thousands of chickens. I don't need to do that and I want to connect back into what feels exciting and really relevant for me whilst allowing myself time to be with my kids and time to explore other things that I'm passionate about. Most of you know me as a farmer, farm planner, educator, but there are many other bits to life that I'm interested in that I just haven't had time for in, well, 15, 20 years now. So. Hey, here's the piggies. Hello. You are getting big. So I think because of the amount of work to really process these animals all the way to full cuts and a lot of bacon to smoke and hams to cure, I think what I'm going to do is maybe take one very soon and then another one fairly soon and we will see. Oh, it's going to be incredible. I've had my freezers been empty of pork for the last year and a half or so and it's fine, we've got lots of beef, lots of chicken, But I've never been a big chicken fan. As some of you know, I never ate chicken before I moved here and set up the poultry enterprises. But I'm a big fan of pork and beef as well as sheep and lamb. So there's a lot of food to be put away at this time of year. As some of you know, I explored carnivore diet when I faced burnout and it really helped with mind fog and just feeling lean and strong and sharp and I really value speed of thought. So I'm going back into that now as autumn rolls in and eating a high fat, high protein diet Getting rid of carbs as much as possible. And I'm super excited. I've been eating loads of really amazing charcuterie goods and just visualizing where I want to go with the nut trees, with raising pigs underneath, etc. I really want to have the time to just use every bit of these beautiful animals and make exquisite produce. I'm going to make videos of that as we go and I'll bring you along with that process. I can't wait for to smoke some bacon again. So, lots of changes, but it feels really exciting for me. I think what I've been able to show over the past years here with commercial small scale regenerative agriculture is the efficiencies and the thought process to land design and business planning and how to do highly effective workflows on the ground. That's what all of the people coming here for education have been exposed to. That's what my book Regenerative Agriculture is about. That's what my online training focuses on. We're running that as a math class over the wintertime. So if you haven't taken that training and you're starting up or you want to really boot up your practice, then that's the best learning opportunity I can ever offer. But I feel like I've said this a load of times over the last couple of years. I kind of reached the end of the road there. There's not so much more I can show. I started to get the feeling of like, okay, we've got broilers out on pasture again, but I've shown you that years and years in a row. There's nothing new, you know, yes, things can be refined, but we've got to the place where those models work. Thousands of farmers are copying them. Tens of thousands of farmers are using our model for no dig market gardening with wood chip pathways or our eggmobiles, etc. And it's beautiful, it's all good. But it's lost that excitement for me because there's nothing new in it. It's a maintenance thing. And so partly what I want to do is shift this channel, as I've spoken about before, to some of the other things in life. Like the beauty of homesteading will mean I have a lot more time, a lot more time to take care of produce and wild harvests and pursue my passion for fishing and hunting. And I'd like to weave elements of parenting in as well because I've watched some amazing YouTube channels focused on really wholesome parenting and I think it's such a needed thing in today's world. And my kids have an incredible life here. And it's something I want to share that aspect of life too. So I'm really pumped for it because it means I get to share more of the things I'm excited about, as well as take the time to do some of the things that I'm excited about that you can't do in a commercial setting where it's just about how do we get this job done in the time we've got so that we can maintain the quality of life. And it's all about rapid processes and that's all great, but I'm also in a position where I'm looking for some other things that that can't serve me with right now. And so I hope you'll be interested to follow along. I think it'll be richer, broader, and we'll be doing a lot of interviews with up and coming farmers. I think I'll start a weekly series, a bit like Farm Like a Hero, and just put it out on YouTube for free because I love doing that. And it's amazing to see how that boosts those people and how they connect together. And we create this widening network where people can ask each other questions, etc. And that's awesome. So, obviously a massive amount of work has gone into building this farm up. And I don't know what I want to do next. I want to pause. I want to really honour my creative process, honour putting time into other things that are equally important in my life. And so what I plan to do is just keep the farm maintained exactly as it is and it's just ready to pop. And maybe I'll have a revelation over the winter and decide to do something, but I think I'm just going to homestead, grow a bit of veg for family, bit of meat, bit of eggs, and just live a good life, simple life. Quieten down a bit. I've been saying I need it for years, some of you have been saying I need it for years, and I'm really gonna listen to that. And I think give it a year or two and I'll be itching to get going again. But I just want to take a break and that's totally okay. And it's good to make sure we keep balance in our lives. As I've always said, I'm not ever just been farming. I've been writing books, making videos, educating tens of thousands of people through our on farm and online programs. And it's just been a lot, it's been too much and so now it's time for really honoring that rest and just landing into this landscape that's always been a year, year and a half in advance planning. Now I just want to wake up and have half an hour for coffee just watching my landscape without anything pressing taking me away. I also want to say thank you so much to all the people that follow me who have supported me by buying our book, participating in our trainings. It's what's allowed me to take this time off this summer, and to have the most precious summer with my kids. I've needed that. I feel like I've neglected them in the process of building up everything I have here, as well as all the things around it. And so I'm extremely grateful and humbled. And yeah, I just wanted to say thank you so much for your support and look forward to seeing you in a video soon. Bye for now.
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