Epic Egg Mobile and Poultry Processing construction

Oh, beef and venison stew. That's from the deer that I shot this winter and from beef from the farm. Really amazing to have freezers and preserved foods to last all through the year. This video is a Farmer talk episode with Catal Mooney from Heatherhill Farm. Those of you that follow my channel will be well aware who he is. It's one of my star pupils from a course I ran over in Moy Hill in Ireland a few years ago. He's been doing incredible work and has a brilliant mind for these kind of creative solutions to regenerative agriculture. It's a real pleasure to have cattle back with us and I'm excited to be running a course with him over in Ireland this summer and I'm excited to meet many of you. Yeah, it's a real pleasure to have you back with us for farmer talks. Welcome, Karel, to the channel.

Thanks for having me. It's great to be back.

I see you standing in front of your new eggmobile. But before we get into any of that, it's worth saying to viewers and listeners that we're running a course over at your farm at Heatherhill in Ireland from June 18 to June 26. Is there still spots on that for people?

There is, yes. It's filling up fast, but we still got some spots. It's going to be, I think it's going to be an epic training right in the middle of summer when the farm is going to be in full flow. So it's going to be a great hands on and classroom based learning for anybody that's either in regenerative agriculture or thinking about getting into it. I've had a lot of queries with people that have no experience in farm and wondering if the course is suitable for them. And I'm like, this is the course you need to get on to get a good comparative study of enterprises to figure out what will be the best route for you to take.

And you've got Knotts, the sort of farming association over there subsidizing some spots for Irish.

Yeah, yeah, we're very lucky. There's a very forward thinking organization here, Knott's National Organic Skill Net Training center. And they get funding and then they try to allocate that and they're very passionate about working with in the regenerative agriculture sector as well. So they're going to be. If anybody in Ireland, you have to meet certain criteria. You have to be from Ireland and there's a few other things. But if you keep an eye out on their web page or they Also have a Facebook page if you're here in Ireland. Keep an eye out on that. They're going to be announcing that soon and that's going to be subsidized, so they'll get it a little bit cheaper through them.

Nice. Perfect. And what sort of things are people going to see on the farm? Like, what's your plans for this season?

So, yeah, we're going to be busy. We're going to be running this. The tank behind us here is going to be in operation. So pastured layers. And I'm really trying to dial in that. That whole. I'm just sitting out of the wind here. I'm really trying to dial in that whole pasture layers context here in Ireland, and particularly in the wet climate, we're going to be doing pastured broilers. So the next project after this is to build a slaughtery. So we're going to have our on farm slaughtery, hopefully up and running. And our pasture broilers, we'll be doing pasture turkeys. We run our turkeys in the summer. It's for the Christmas market, but run them on the summer so we'll see them in action then. We will be. We. I'm starting a micro dairy. Well, it's just for homestead purposes really, but we'll be milking goats. But I'm but serious about turning that into a proper enterprise in the future. And we also. I'll be grazing some sheep and cows in the farm. Not. Not in a beef and lamb real enterprise setup, more in a holistic management approach. But it's still following the exact same principles of daily moving, etc. Agritourism is another big aspect in the farm here. So we'll be able to show people all the ins and outs of how that all works. And that's kind of us in a nutshell.

And we met over Moy Hill, didn't we, in Ireland a few years ago. And that was the training that you joined for. And then you've been just on a mission since then. You've been.

Yeah. I don't know is it fate or what it was, but I had been. I'd been interested in. And I suppose I'd be interested in agriculture all my life, but conventional agriculture, I didn't see any other way. And I just happened to start to follow people like Joe Saladin and yourself. That was maybe like a year and a half or so before the training in Moyhole. And then you came to Ireland. So I was like, right, I got to go there. And yeah, I was I was on the fence and that training just, you know, give me the clarity and the vision and the, you know, the, the decisiveness to go out and do it and make it happen.

And you've been really working super hard since then, haven't you? But you grew up on a sheep farm, right? So you sort of grew up in conventional ag and had a whole journey out of that, I guess.

Yeah, yeah, I grew up and I love farming. But we come from kind of, it's coastal hill country, so it's all hill sheep farming. And just the way conventional agriculture moved it left that so far behind. So there was, there was no, there's no real future in farming for young people and where I come from here. So I got out of farming, I went to university, became a teacher, done some traveling and got into the food industry and then got really. I always loved farming but when I started to see and connect food and farming, I kind of started to see that there was, I suppose I was in my mid-20s so I was kind of having, trying to find my purpose in life as well. And all these things were happening in the background. They all kind of came together to point me towards regenerative farming.

So paint a picture for the viewers like you in Ireland and it's pretty challenging conditions. Like what are the sort of main problems that you face farming there?

Realistic. Like it's difficult to describe to a lot of people around the world because they wouldn't understand. Most places in the world when you get rain, it's like thunderstorm rain. So you can get like a lot of rain in short space of time and then you'll spend months of the year that you won't get rain. It rains here all the time, but not heavy rain, just consistently rain and rain and raining. And like our, historically I think our rainfall here is about 2 meters per annum. That's consistently all across the year. You know, obviously the summer is a little less precipitous in the winter times. So our spring, winter and autumn, those three, like they're the real crunch where we got. I really should be farming a part time farmer six months of the year. The only operation I'm running currently over winter is layers. And my longer term and my holistic context is to move away from that that I would have no animals on the farm here. The only animals I'm thinking that I should overwinter or maybe cattle and goats that are hardy enough to overwinter outside get. I don't have any woodland on the farm like proper. I'm thinking about buying a monoculture spruce forest maybe and starting to convert that over into a habitat that I could overwinter animals in long term. It's very difficult. The ground just gets so saturated here. And like conventional farmers all house their livestock. Their cows, their sheep are all put into massive slatted houses. And that's the only way farming exists. And for me it's about finding the animals or enterprises that are either seasonal or have the ability to adapt, to be outside in that. And that's the big one. It's just that the ground gets saturated. Typically depends where you are in Ireland, in my context here, it's by mid October, you can't even walk through the pasture without cutting through the sod with your foot. And typically be mid March, almost April before it starts to dry out again and you can get moving on there again.

So what's the, what's the implication of that for eggmobiles? You've been through a couple of iterations now. Is this new one like a hovercraft or was it.

If I crouch down here, maybe we can see. I need to go lower, but I'm basically sitting. It's on eight wheels, two, four axles. So. And they're big. If I back up a little bit, they're big like ATV flotation tires. Yeah, you can see. So they spread the weight out. I've had great success with these. I'm actually. This is my Mark 2 egg mobile. And you can see I. I done it to that and that was where the can inspiration came. So that buys me a couple of weeks in spring and a couple of weeks in, in autumn to stay on pasture. And again, the real. What really works well in my system is how I move them with the 12 volt winch. That means I'm not taking a tractor. I'm not typically what really messes up your pasture. I see a lot of farmers around here is especially when they're feeding silage, that they're going in and out on the same spots all the time with their tractor. They just destroy it. So I came up with that system of a winch so that I can get the main areas that I was going to destroy in my pasture were actually coming and going from the farmyard to the pasture. That there really alleviates the pressure in the pasture there. And again, I'm just buying myself time. A couple of weeks in the spring, couple of weeks in the autumn. At some point it just gets so wet. I got to get out of there.

Yeah, yeah, sure. So what. How does that work. You've got a 12 volt winch that you can hook to either end of the eggmobile and then you're running a line to big trees essentially at the ends of the fields.

Yeah, I use trees as my anchor points. You could, you could construct anchor points if you needed to. But yeah, it's, it's, I love it. It's solar powered. It's. Everything's moving really slow. It's very safe. You know, even though you're moving like my egg mobiles are probably pushing 3 tons when they're fully loaded. So you're, you're dealing with weight but you're moving so slow with so safe compared to. I was originally using an old Jeep and stuff and you know you're using much more force and speed so it's really safe and it's. Yeah, the only thing you need is the winch and some long ropes. Depends on your context. Maybe you've got, you know, some people probably won't work for it because their fields are just in a pattern where it doesn't work and you'll have to come up with something else. But I just use like 100 meter rope and my wench and away I go. And I suppose I do a big loop around the farm. So like if I start here, I move slowly every day and I go and I go and I go and I try and get it that I have like a pad coming back down here. So I'm back at the start when I'm. When I'm done.

Nice. So what's that journey been like for you? Like what's led you to build this new eggmobile and is it about the EU organic certifications and those things?

Not at all. I mean I suppose I just noticed in the masterclass there was a lot of debate about organic certification in that and I'm of the same thinking I like, I don't need it. My customer. It's the relationship between me and the customer that counts. But one thing I do is I do a kind of similar system to rico. I do drop offs with my eggs but it's very difficult here in Ireland. Irish people are extremely laid back and they never make the times. And you know, I sell maybe half my eggs through that and I'm thinking it's just leads to more admin time for me and I'm trying to tidy this up a bit and I'm trying to really save any time I can anywhere. So I'm thinking of moving away from that drop off model and because I know the thing is Irish. I was trying to, I set up the RICO model. I like it because it means I can deliver the eggs as cheap as possible to my customer. I'm cutting out any middlemen. But Irish people don't mind so much paying for convenience. They would, they would happily pay €3 for a half dozen eggs in the shop, then pay me 250 for them and go out of their way to meet me. So in order for me. So what I'm thinking is I can go into a couple of local retailers so people can get access to my eggs and the retailer can make their margin on it. And people shouldn't mind paying that little bit extra. They can always come to me at the farm here if they, you know, if they're afraid the price is a bit too much. I'm very local. My customer base is within probably, you know, 15 miles of me.

Right.

So that's kind of the shift why I wanted to get registered, because in order for me to sell in local retail shops, I need to be certified. So that kind of led me down the line. The other issue we do have here in Ireland, because we're very moist poultry mites, red mites, and that can be an issue to keep on top of. And I was just spending a lot of time managing that, like not ridiculous amount of time, but you know, it's maybe 10 minutes a week here or there. So I wanted to change the steel components just to make that much more easeful. Because wood is cheaper. Yes, but mites is a problem. If I change my birds every year, you're going to bring in mites at some point.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess just touching back on that point about Ricoh, I think what I noticed in my experience of it here is that it really needs a critical mass because we started also with that drop off model, but then when Ricoh became like an official thing, I think people respond partly to that official thing, but also a critical mass of products that it's, you know, you're getting bread and dairy and eggs and meat and veg, so it becomes people's weekly shop. And I think that there's something to be said for that. Like a critical mass or something.

Yeah, I think so. And I thought about it and I just, I thought about the effort it was going to take for me to pull all that together because it doesn't really exist in Ireland, so needed someone to go and instigate it and I'm already trying to develop the farm and build the farm up and I just kind of decided that I'LL I need to focus on the farm and that might be something down the line when I get the farm bedded down that maybe I'd work on. But yeah, it's a big time commitment to get it up and running. I think you're right though. Completely. That whole kind of pop up supermarket idea, it definitely has, has that that kind of attraction to it as, as a whole.

Yeah, sure.

What about.

I want to hear what your thoughts are. I know that you have the same sort of critical analytical thinking that I put to all this stuff and I know you love running numbers and these kind of things you said before about possibly not having flocks over the winter. What does the economics of that look like to have? I'm assuming you would be buying in point of lay birds and then culling them as winter turns up. Is that still economic?

Yeah, I mean the people. That's a common question. Like point of lay bird isn't expensive. It's €6 here in Ireland. So €3 is the deficit you got to make up. The bigger problem here is the economics of it. I would need to be doing double the birds in the summer that I would do. Say if I was going to do 500 layers all year then I would need to do a thousand and six months in the summer. So where am I going to sell those eggs? Would be my and my thinking that's where that's my biggest challenge. That if I'm do you know it's only cost me 5,000, it's €3,000 in bird cost that I got to make up. But I mean if I'm selling a thousand birds for a thousand birds worth of eggs for six months, it's not a lot of that's you know, I'm turned over a hundred thousand euros there so I can squeeze 3,000 out of the margin somewhere pretty easy.

Do you feel like there'll be a stability in the customer base?

That's the biggest problem.

Yeah.

Where the, you know that particularly here in Ireland people are very, you know they're very pattern based in their, in their eating habits. If you eat two boiled eggs for breakfast every morning, eat them every morning and what that's my biggest fear for cutting it out is bringing the customers along with me and understanding that this is, you know, probably, you know, in this part of Ireland a laying hen probably wouldn't like to be out in the middle of winter and that they would rather eat kale than eggs for six months. And I haven't figured out how I'm going to sell that to them yet. That's one of the biggest stumbling blocks.

Yeah, we saw, because we had a couple of instances where we had a winter off hands and our customers came back. But something I've observed in the last couple of years is in the RICO rings here is that as we've been training more and more people, someone else will do it, more egg producers. And so it's very easy for people to sort of capture that market if you, maybe you don't have that same saturation there yet, but it's certainly becoming an issue here.

It will, yeah. At some point it will happen and someone will over do over 100 layers and you'd lose those customers. And again, it comes back to your holistic context and what is it that you want to get out of life? You have to ask yourself that question. Are you happy to keep the layers on the farm all year or is it really against your context and then you're just gonna have to overcome it? Maybe layers is an enterprise you shouldn't do. And that's kind of the question I'd be battling with myself. I need the money right now to get the farm up and running and get like my goal here in the farm. I need to get the cash together to buy a house or build a house, one or the other. I need somewhere to live. I'm renting all my life to date. And it's something that myself, my partner Nevaeh are passionate about is having the security of owning our own home. So that's what we're working towards right now. When I get there, then that'll, you know, maybe I can say, you know, eggs, maybe I can let them go now. They're, they're starting to fall out of my context more and more.

And you've got that experience with the meat beds production that, that's obvious one for some are only production then.

Yeah, again, it's a funny one. Meatbirds isn't that good an enterprise in Ireland due to the fact that people don't value chicken. Nowhere near. Like it's a strong push to get €20 for a 2.1 kilo chicken here and the price of grain is so expensive here. Eggs are definitely a way better enterprise number wise in Ireland than broilers are. I'm actually thinking my long term goal is to go tours. That's why I'm getting into the Darien, I think micro dairy and goats, because goats are perfect for my context here. This is rough, rugged hill country and make cheese with that. I think I can do that just like milk 20 goats make like I only once I buy my house, I need like €20,000 a year, probably maximum. I live in the middle of nowhere. My cost of living is nothing and kind of my longer term thinking is a definitely towards a herbivore. The price of grain is like layer feed is going up.

What are you paying for grain now? I think it's over double what it costs here.

We're paying almost like for a balanced layer feed. I'm talking maybe 20% crude protein. You're talking at least 75 cent a kilo bulk.

Yeah, but you're just. Raw grain price is quite high.

Raw grain prices like minimum would be like 50 cent a kilo for like a whole, you know, for an oat or a barley. And typically it's hard to get. It's hard to get like you can't get any beans or anything in Ireland. They're very difficult to grow and organic anyway. And then you've got to transport it and we're just not a big grain down. The south of Ireland would be more of a grain growing area, but we've got a lot of breweries and distilleries not in Ireland and they buy up a lot of barley and that there kind of drives a lot of the market.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I appreciated your comments. So cattle is a mentor on online training and you were pointing out to someone that because your grain price is so high, when you sort of calculate the feed cost in terms of the protein requirements of the birds, it's cheaper just to get rid of that grain altogether, which is something that, I mean, it's obvious really. But for someone coming into this, like it's. It's not how they're necessarily thinking and it's something I've always been trying to analyze is, you know, how to save feed costs while keeping animals healthy. But it often comes at the cost of something else. And in my case it was lower egg production, which is more valuable than the grain cost itself. But that level of like constant analytics is so crucial to making it work.

Right.

Are you still plugged into spreadsheets in the same way that you've been.

Sorry, I just lost you there a little bit. The audio cut out on me. No, I just go over that last bit again.

Yeah, I was talking a bit about the analytics and how important it is to use data to drive your decision making and wondering about your thoughts on that.

Yeah, 100%. I suppose I was kind of lucky and I was mentored by a few entrepreneurs when I was coming up, just working Various jobs as you do when you're young. I happened to come upon a few really good entrepreneurial people that kind of took me on, and I just learned from them. I just watched how they operated. And that's one thing I seen. Very simple. Get all the facts you can and make the best decision you can based on fact. Don't make decisions based on maybes, hearsays, what someone else thinks, you know, on a guess. Get factual information and then make your decision based on that. And even if it's a wrong decision, then, well, at least you've done the best you could. And that's what I find. So numbers are great because numbers never lie. So if you boil it down to your numbers, because you can, one thing I find is you can. If you. I suppose it's like you've done in Regenerative Agriculture, the book, you know, you have to do a comparative, so you have to break things into their own piece and figure out, you know, how much do I get paid per hour if I do this job and how much do I get paid per hour if I do that job and that comparative. Because you can. You can be a very busy fool. I find that. And. And the one thing I find is you have to constantly monitor it. Like, you can't just set up a layer operation, figure out all the numbers on it, and then. Yeah, that's it. You know, if you go back three years later and look at the numbers, you know, if you don't look at them in three years, you could become very unprofitable without even knowing it.

Yeah, yeah.

Like, I'm constantly updating my cost of production sheets. So I know at any point how much, like to the point of a cent it cost me to produce an egg, how much my profit is on that. And I analyze those monthly. I kind of every month, I kind of sit down and look at the sales, the cost of productions, and Because I'm looking at grain prices and I'm thinking, should I. Should I buy more grain now? And it's all these little margins, it's all these little decisions that can add up to a couple of thousand euros at the end of the year. And that can be a holiday or it can be, you know, it's every the way I see it. Every thousand euros I save, that's as good as €2,000 in sales, because you'd have produced something to sell it. And that means I don't have to make that money anymore, so I can get smaller. That's more time for me available to do Whatever I want to do as well.

Yeah, yeah, that's a great way to think about it. Tell us a bit then. I'm not sure how well the camera is going to pick this up with metal interfering with the signal. But tell us a bit about the old Eggmobile. And like any pros and cons you had with that and what's gone on, the design process for the new one.

Right. The frontier. So I actually sold the very first eggmobile I made. I sold that. It's gone to a new home. I just loaded it out last week. So this was the second egg mobile I made. Another ridge steel design, really good. The only real adaption I had to make for this context was put loads of wheels in underneath it. That worked well. And the other issue is the wood I recommend and people. Now again, if I was going back, knowing what I know now, I would still build it out of the first one or two because steel is twice the price. You got to get this thing made and get it making some money, you know. So the first two egg mobiles paid for this one here. So even if I went back, I would still build it out of wood, the first one, and get it operational, get it making cash and then when I had cash and enough money to make, make it out of steel. That's what I do and that's what I recommend people do. Now, if you have money available, I'd say, yeah, go build it out of steel from start. But it's a big investment and typically when you're starting a farm and that you don't have so much money available. I mean, the design is great. The only thing I'd say maybe is I wouldn't. I'd make more of a. I would change the nest box system a little, maybe something more similar to this. And it's not really for me, I don't mind going into the egg mobile, but I'm quite small. I'm only like 5 foot 7. I've had other people at the farm that are bigger people. Like, if you're a bigger person, it's probably not going to be that comfortable going in there collecting eggs every day. That's the only two things that I would maybe like consider for my context that would need to be kind of.

Different just to interrupt you. But I think that's a good point. For people working with wood is like an obvious easy solution is to. Is to paint timber and also to use something like silicon to fill any edges. Because it's particularly where you get joins in timber that mites Will sort of hide in there.

Yeah, yeah.

So that's worth. For people.

It is, yeah. Like, you could. You could retrofit it. I mean, I suppose I'm at a point now where my time is way more valuable than money. When I started out, it was the complete opposite. I had loads of time and no money. So it depends where you are completely. You could retrofit the wooden one, as you say, you could paint it, you can seal up all the little crevices and all. I was trying to do a comparison. I think, again, it could be your context. If weight was an issue, I think you could, like, you could go aluminium.

Yeah.

And if, you know, if you were worried that you need to build a really light egg mobile. And I did consider aluminium at the very start, but the price was just ridiculous. So I said, right, I have to go with wood. And I moved kind of to the middle now to steel again, like, you don't. Everybody thinks you got a copy, you know, screw for. Screw what Richard done at Ridgedale, you got to sit down and look at your context and what it is, is really important for your design and prioritize them. And then, you know, you got to make compromises. It's like everything in life, you're going to make compromises here and there. So make your compromises and go with it. The main thing is get it. Making money and then you can always come back and improve it when you've got more money.

Yeah, for sure. And working with wood is fun, but working with metal is even more fun.

Now you.

I bet you've had fun making that.

Yeah, I'm really lucky. I'm not. So. I'm a cabinet maker by trade, so I was always good at wood. Wood was always my go to. I could do anything with wood. And I always kind of. I was never as fond of metal. It was just too stubborn and cold growing up. But I've actually gone a full 360 now. I'm kind of like, woods, like, nah, it's. And metal's the way to go. I'm really lucky. My uncle is a retired mechanic and he used to do a lot of fabricating and stuff. And so it was actually a good project because it got to give him something to do as well. So the two of us worked on that and. But yeah, metal is like. Metal is so strong. Like, it's hard to believe, but when you weld metal, the weld is actually like 20% stronger than the metal that it's just stuck on, too.

Not with my welding, but.

But like you can do so much and it just. Yeah, it's like super glue. You know, a welder is like a super glue for steel. You just stick it on there and on you go.

It's quite a big old structure. What's the dimension of that and how many hens is that for?

Yeah, so it's eight meters from here to the front. And this was another point. Like when I built my first egg mobile, I didn't have a farm, you know, I didn't know what size of gates I was going through. I didn't know. So the ridge deal was a good set for me. I thought, you know, it's a good size, it should work anywhere until I figure it out. So now that I know where I'm farming this is, I said, what's the biggest I can go here? So this is the biggest I can go 8 meters long, which is quite long. That's 26.6ft for people who work in feet. And I stayed 10, 3 meters wide. I've got some narrow gates that I go through, so I couldn't go any wider than 3 meters. And the 8 meters comes from turning at the end of my tree lanes. Eight meters is the longest before I would start to get awkward at turning.

How does turning work with the winch system? Do you have like the sort of wheels, you can shift it like a.

Yes. So the front axle is like a circus wagon or like a fifth wheel of a truck. So this whole thing pivots. It's on a big plate and that there. So it can turn on its own axis. Basically.

That's great.

Which makes it. Actually makes it very maneuverable. But when you're pulling it with the. I was taking it up here because you've got two pivot points, so it's got a. It's like a circus wagon. And then you've got it on the tow bar of the. Of the. Of the pulling vehicle. It's a double pivot. So you've got to do the opposite to what you would instinctively do. So it takes a while to figure that one out. But I'm generally only really going to be moving forward with it with my winch. What about. Go on ahead. I'll just finish up on the capacity. So we're 8 by 3 meters. What I've done then is it's got two floors, so I've doubled my footprint because the registers, when the print date get a fixed house to them, that's all they ever measure. So as far as they're concerned, it's A fixed house. So they will measure the footprint and then multiply it by how many birds per square meter you're allowed. So by putting in the second floor, I've doubled the footprint. So I'm now at like 48 square meters. And then they will multiply that by. I think here in Ireland it's. If you were going for free range is 9 birds per square meter. I think organic is 6 birds per square meter. And they will multiply that. Okay. That's the maximum amount of birds you're allowed to keep in that structure.

And what does that mean for you? What are you going for?

I'm actually going for free range status because again, I'm not certified organic. I mean, I'd contemplate going for barn raised just for the crack, but because customers would have kind of got the joke. But I think I can go up to 400 in this house on free range.

Nice, nice.

And now obviously the roof space and the nest mats and the nest boxes and everything has to have the adequate space as well.

I wanted to ask you about wind because it's quite windy there and you've got a big old surface area. Are you concerned because the wheels. How far apart the wheels on the.

So the. Not really because the wheels are actually eight foot wide. So. So there's a big footprint here. It's actually, it's quite a bit off the ground. There's only actually six foot of sheeting. So it's like a rigid lorry, you know, like it's not even like. Like our. Our big trucks are like 45 foot long. I know they've got a bit more weight, but we've had the biggest storm here like last Friday. Biggest storm we've had in a long, long time. And it didn't move. So I'm not worried. It doesn't catch. So it catches one to best. But the other thing is. And again it comes down to your context and good planning and. Well, it was but of luck as well. My tree lanes run northeast to southwest and our prevailing one comes from the Southwest. So 95% of the time the wind is actually going to be blowing at the front or the back. And we get all our big storms in the wintertime when I'm not using it anyway, so I'll park it up in a safe place. So it's very rare that we should get caught out in a kind of summer storm that'll take it away.

Is that the possibility to keep birds, if you do keep them over the winter to have them in the egg Mobile and dock it to a tunnel.

Yeah, definitely. Like the regulators are coming out here and they're registering me to leave the birds in this full time on a housing order. Like that's what they're doing. They're saying it's okay to leave the birds in that structure under a housing order for 16 weeks. That's their job. I would probably, yes. My plan will be to pull it up alongside the tunnel. The only thing I gotta do. The issue with that is the birds will sleep in the tunnel or sleep in the egg mobile and lay in there. I need to put some sort of catchment area underneath it for collecting the. I would put some sort of skids that I could push in underneath it because I don't want to be composting in underneath it. I was thinking about this. I think I would just put some trays underneath it that I would clean out every couple of days and take that off and compost that manure I think would be the easiest thing. And then it'll be totally fine. It makes it dead easy. No winter set up. That's one thing. I spend maybe like a day, a day and a half setting up the polytunnel. Every coming up to the winter it will cut all that work out as well.

Nice. Yeah, I think it's the phone reception's maybe not good enough to take us right in, but maybe you can give us a few in the door and tell us about the features there.

So I suppose the first thing I've done here is I've got. Well, you can see up there, I've got my solar panel and I've actually got. I've got cameras in here as well. So I've got a camera on the outside looking all around and then I've got a camera just right there. You can see a camera close the doors. I can set the time. I. What else did I do? My nest box is cut off a bit there.

So you've got cameras. What's the function of the cameras there? You can monitor that phone so you can see if there's any predators or you can see if anything's happened with the fencing or.

Main reason is if, when I'm not on the farm to make sure that everything's working okay, that I can check the. You know, the birds are all in the fence, that they haven't charged the fence, that the doors are open when they're meant to be open, that they're closed when they're meant to be open. Basically I still control the egg mobile in the past. Having interns and that just the responsibility stops with me. And it was admit I actually couldn't leave the farm. You really have to trust people and still within Terence nature you don't, you don't know who you're getting from year to year. So I felt I had to build something in there that meant that I still had control even if I wanted to get away from the farm. That was the main driver from that. And again I suppose I needed to be able to see to have control and so I wanted to put the cameras in there and then I wanted to be. At first I was just going to put cameras in there and said well I could see there's a problem but then I'd have to get in contact with someone. So I said how can I figure out that I can actually control it from remotely as well. That was the main driver for that, just the responsibility because I have to have a life outside of the farm. So I have to get away from the farm at times. Even if it's like just one night, I have to get away. But if something goes wrong and I've got 400 birds in here, you know that could be €5,000 in sales gone for one stupid mistake.

Yeah.

So that then it wasn't expensive like those, those automations cost probably like €150.

Nice. Yeah, it's nice for that peace of mind. I mean it's is really. I can relate to that in the sense of feeling like I had to always go around and double check things that water systems are functioning or nests are closed or you know, just. It's very hard to get unless you've got the stable long term employee like that. That was the biggest problem for me here is constantly changing people which was part of the context of educating people to go out and start their own thing. But it's certainly nerve wracking.

Yeah, it's problematic. I mean I suppose it's not long term. I envisage moving away, not running the farm so hard as I am at the minute that I would get more time away in the future. But it was a solution I came up with for now. Nice.

No, it's a neat thing but you've got then your whole range of automations. What's, what's automated?

Yeah, so the lights are automated, the doors automated and then the nest box is open and closed. Automated. The nest box tilting is automated. And I've actually, I'm waiting. I don't have. The nest belt will be automated as well. I'm just waiting on a chain to come so that it'll be on a flick of a switch and it'll. I'm trying to gear it so that it'll come at the right pace. So it's coming just at the right pace that you can collect the eggs fast enough to keep it clear.

That's awesome. And you've chosen to put transparent panels in the roof. That's going to be nice for the birds. But do you think that will affect the. I guess the nests are dark anyway because they've got a cover over them, right?

Yeah, exactly. I thought about that. Yeah. I'll just cover over the nest. What I'll do first is I guess it'll take a bit of training but once I train them I think I'm going to spend a bit of time getting the training right. I might even black out the roof for the first week or so whether get used to. Because once they have that real instinct I'm going to lay my egg in this box. I'm hoping then to kind of slowly let the light back in. I don't know, I haven't tried it yet to see how problematic it is. But I think in general the light will be a better thing from sanitation point of view in the long run. So I think I'm better to try and figure out how to get them happily nesting in there first.

And then the issue like that they could lay from up on that second floor on the roof of the nest box.

No, they can't get access the roof of the nest box. I'll try and go in. The other thing is the second floor is only really there for the regulators tick box. Like they're never actually really going to use up there in reality you know they're going to be out in pasture. So what I've done is I put some windbreak. Here. So basically this whole section you access in here. So they're only. The birds can't really get any access to the nest box area. They can only. That's all blocked off. I mean I'll. It's. I'll have to figure it out as I go along and so that's a.

One sided nest box the eggs are rolling in.

Yes. And yeah, so that's the nest box there and they all roll down into there then. And the nest box. The nest box. I had to make the nest boxes a little deeper than standard nest boxes so I made them 500mil deep because again it's all to the required square meter age. Like there's more than enough. That nest box is 7 meters long, which is more like. All the chickens don't come in to lay eggs at once.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. What do you reckon it's cost you.

To build so far in materials? Some about. I've just gone over about €5,000 altogether.

That's pretty neat. I mean, just a net box like that typically costs that, I guess.

Yeah, yeah. And I bought a good bit of the steel before the price of steel went crazy crazy.

Like you said. Crazy crazy.

Yeah. Like it went up. It went up like 15% and then it went up another 15% again. It was supposed to come down. I was talking to people in the industry that thought maybe the prices would come down a bit the start of this year, but they're not coming down yet. But, I mean, there's a lot of labor I spent, I reckon, two craftsmen kind of have. With a fair idea what they're at, would take them two full weeks to build this. Yeah. You know, I spent at least a month building this. Now, I was only. I was only kind of. I've probably spent more, spent about six weeks, but some days I was only getting maybe four hours work done on it. So if you were to pay someone like this is a big problem. A lot of people might not have the skills to do this. You got to think if you're going to, it's still going to be cheaper to Pay. Like there's €5,000 in materials, you could pay someone else €5,000 to build it for you and you're still going to have a good egg mobile for €10,000.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's certainly much, much cheaper than buying something of that standard, isn't it?

Yeah, for sure, I think, anyway. I mean, I suppose it all depends on your context. Again, if you've got some spare money and you don't want to have the whole stress of figuring out how to design it and get someone and explain to them how to do it and, you know, you want to go and buy the off the shelf one. I can understand how that is more appealing to people as well.

Yeah, yeah, yes. And what you've got inspectors coming now to certify. When. When will you have Bert in there?

Hopefully we're still under a housing order anyway. Now, that house for bird flu. Yeah. Been on one since November 23rd. So I would expect that to lift because you can only keep birds inside for 16 weeks in Ireland. I think it's in the EU. And then you have to change the label and you can no longer call them free range. Now they Might change that law, but I'd say it'll be lifted because there hasn't been many cases. I mean, there was only a handful of cases the other side of Christmas here in Ireland, but we've been on the lockdown anyway. So, yeah, my plan is to get the pasture still a bit wet. I'm thinking in another maybe two weeks or so or three weeks to start to move. So, yeah, the regulators are coming out tomorrow, I think to check it out. I mean, I'm sure they'll have some stumbling box that they'll want something change, you know, they'll always want to have their input as well. So we'll see what they say. And if I have to make any little changes for them and then hoping then to get our load it up. And as I say, I need to, I need to take some time, you know, I'll probably only put in maybe 100 birds to start with and get any little things like maybe the light or that they're sorted out to make it properly comfortable for them and then I'll get her in operation.

Perfect. And what's your. Are you having. You have an intern with you or is that in the summer months only?

Yeah, so I've got two interns coming, a couple from. And they're going to be. I generally only keep my interns on the farm from May through to the end of August. And that's more so because realistically that's most of the productions happening in the farm in those months. Like, I'm just working on projects now and I like to be flexible with projects. Like I, you know, I'm going off doing other work and I've just picked them up and dropped them off so I don't have to be as structured with my day per se. That's one thing I find when you've got people, either employees or interns, that you have to be extremely. To be productive, you have to be extremely structured. And that all requires thinking and planning. And I rather, you know, try and give me my mind a little bit of rest this time of year. Yeah. So, yeah, generally beginning of May, I start with the interns.

And what is the process now for building a slaughter? You got a. Like a freezer container with it?

Yeah, if we walk this way. Looking at a few different options, I got my context. I started with Knothali, which was going to be the easiest, was going to be a refrigerated trailer body. My neighbor up the road actually buys these in from the UK and then as trailers and he takes the wheels off them and sells them as storage containers. So they're insulated. But the good thing about them is they've got checker plate floors. They're completely sealed inside. They put all wipeable surfaces. So we've actually just sat it here. It's actually all tilted towards the back so we can wash it out. So, yeah, I've got a. I mean the problem is this is expensive, like setting up, like I know you set up your slot. How long ago did you set up your slaughter?

Seven years ago now.

Yeah, man, I wish I was doing it then. The price of stuff is ridiculous now. Inflation like has been crazy this last couple of years. Like kill cones. Thousand pound, you know, you've got the.

Skills to fabricate them, I think. Yeah.

But I suppose this is the thing. I've only got so much time. I need to use this this season. I've been working on the egg mobile. So there's. This is the time where I'm like, okay, I need to spend the money rather than fabricate stuff as well.

Because it's quite long.

Right.

It looks a lot bigger than my slaughtery setup. You could get away with just the cones you buy that you mount on the wall and they're like €40 a pop.

Yeah. But even still, I think I'm going to put about 15 grand into this thing. Like the container itself is, you know, it was €3,000 and it cost me another thousand euros to put in the pad and put in the drainage and all that. And then I got to put in a good chiller unit. And you know, I've just, I've done the numbers on. I've got a lot of the stuff already bought. It's about €15,000, which is, I mean, long and retrospect, it's a, it's not a bad investment. My plan is to actually make this a multi species slaughtery so that I could do lamb and pigs in here as well. Eventually I'm actually, I got to build on a little bit out the frontier now. Where's my hand? I got to build like the little. The live animal holding area has to go on out here. So put a bit of lean to a roof and put on fencing and all around that. But I suppose again, because there's not so much money in broilers here compared to say your context. Um, they're not as attractive in hindsight. I don't know if I, I'm still on the fence, if I should have went ahead with the whole thing. When I think like 15,000 Euro could build me. I could build three egg mobiles for that. But in the longer term, like it'll pay for itself in the next three years. I suppose I'm just being really progressive and that I wanted like stuff to pay off in year one.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm pretty lucky. I do turkeys and we turkeys are. There's good. Is a good enterprise here. So me being able to process my own turkeys will nearly be pay back more on it than doing like you know, 1500 broilers.

Okay. Yeah, that's a really nice market if you got it. What is, what's the sort of design for the space? Like how to set it up and how many people do you imagine operating it?

I'm going to set it up, I'm going to design it to do have two options basically. So I can run it at my own or I can run it with two other people just because I think longer term, you know, I don't envisage having interns on the farm and you know, five, 10 years time maybe if I want to run a slower farm, but maybe I still want to be able to use it as a good process and setup. So. And the other thing I want to prioritize is the clean side. I want to make that as big as possible so that. Because in Ireland you get certified as a slaughter facility first of all, which is basically your dirty side. And then you can also get, you could get certified independently as a clean room for breaking down meat. So I want to make the clean room as big as possible so that if I wanted to break down meat like I could maybe get my lambs and pigs butchered or killed at this at my butcher and then take the carcasses back and break them down myself. So my plan is to put the chiller actually way up the very front. That's eight foot cube basically up at the very front. Then I'll have like a 20 foot clean room and then we'll actually have an entrance along the middle here which will be a little entrance room which you go left into the clean room, you'll go right into the dirty room. And then the animals, the freshman. It does exactly what it says in the tenants, the Fresh Chicken company. I seen it. I was driving down the road and I seen it. I was like, yeah, that's the one for me.

That's brilliant.

Yeah, there's probably been thousands of chickens through this thing already.

Yeah, that's great. So you. I mean it's a lot of space. That's one thing. I mean my Slaughtery setup worked well for what it is, but having more space is definitely, you know, I often in the off season I will process homestead meat in there, but it's just too compact to like be ideal, you know, like it's really nice to have a bit of space with some tables and.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. It's, it's 45 foot long. It's a standard commercial fridge unit. And again, and I'll actually be extending it because the. You got to have, in Ireland you got to have a separate room for the livestock storage area for inspection by the vet. So I need to build it.

Right. Not for poultry.

For poultry as well. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah.

Now there's, there's a bit of leeway on that, I believe. I believe if you're killing your own poultry, they're a bit more lenient on it. But if you're contract killing poultry for people, then you need to have them inspected.

Right, right, right. So for context, for people listening and that's about. It's literally double the size of my little slotting. So it's a really nice space.

Yeah, it should be nice to have.

That metal flooring as well.

Cuts down on the, the cost. You know, if you're trying to. I've often thought like if you had a shed or a barn that you're going to retrofit, I mean you'd have to put in some sort of concrete floor or something because you know, you know yourself, you're trying to clean down like. And slaughter is a messy place and you got to get that place spotless. So the more design, the more thought you put into the design, it will save you hours in the lifetime of it. So that's why I want to be really, I want to design it really clever. I've got. Go on ahead.

I'm sorry to interrupt. I'm curious, like how has it been with regulations? Like, is it easy to understand the regulations?

I mean there are EU regulations, you know, the written text is all eugenics. It's really down to the regulator that comes out to you and their interpretation of them and your relationship with them. Now I started the dialogue in this, like I still have to put it. Basically I have to go and put it all in place and then get them out to go really go through it with the fine tooth comb. But I suppose there. And it's down to. I talked to people on it and again it seems to be like dependent on the regulator that they're dealing with. Some regulators are extremely open minded and really want to help Them get it sorted and then other regulators can be just so by the book. And if it doesn't, you know, if it isn't 308 shiny steel and it's. Then it's no good. And it's a case kind of who you get and how much. I mean, you can fight all these things because. But then you're going down the route of time and money. You know, if you want. If you want to put in objections or, you know, if you want to, it's how bad do you want it? The good thing I like about this setup is I can put like €15,000 into this, but I can pick that up and put it in the back of a truck and sell it in the morning. And that's why I'm not too worried about making the investment into this. If it was a fixed building, I probably wouldn't be. I'd be thinking longer and harder about it for. In my context.

Right, right. Have you met anyone over there that's doing poultry slaughter? I think there was. I can't remember his name off the top of my head, but there was someone I spoke to on the.

Michael. Michael Walsh.

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

Yeah. Michael's doing his own slaughtery. Yeah. Again, similar. He just had to kind of. He had his own setup and then he got the inspectors out and they wanted to make a few changes, made the changes. But I've actually seen Michael, he's kind of upgrading it as well to make it more user friendly for himself as well. He started. He kind of started off with the bare minimum and. And he's kind of as. I suppose as he's getting more money and as it's going along, he's investing a bit of money into it as well to make it more easeful for himself.

Yeah, he was doing something really curious. He was dry.

He's dry hanging them. Yeah, I haven't come across. I've come across it in the. In the legislation. It's more of a. It's typically done with game birds, you know, that kind of process. Yeah, I mean, for me, for me, the slaughter process is very simple. There's two things that are extremely important. One, that the animal is humanely dispatched so that it's rendered unconscious before you kill it. That's extremely important. And to end that meat is cooled down as fast as possible. If you follow those two principles, you'll probably run a pretty good slaughtery. And that's for me, fundamentally, that's what it boils down to. Yeah. The dry agent one, none of the butchers around, none of the people that I get to do my birds do it. But it seems to be from a game bird thing. But it is in the legislation. All right. About hanging birds with the intact and I believe I'm talking maybe 50, 60 years ago in Ireland when people would have got the Christmas turkey. The turkey would have been just slaughtered and de feathered and hung up and you would pick up your turkey with all the intestines and everything still in it and you would have to clean it out yourself at home.

And people would have in those days used all the giblets and they would.

Have known it too.

Right.

And probably the dog got the intestines and what. And whatever the people didn't eat.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's definitely fading away that people taking full use of all the giblets.

People don't even know that what to do with the whole chicken. Now here in Ireland, like they honestly, they think chicken is a chicken fillet or, you know, a chicken burger. It's. It's crazy.

So when's that you're hoping to operate that? This summer.

Oh, yeah. That's the next project now. Once I get the egg mobile signed off, I'll be starting into this. I think just before use the training course starts is our first lottery. So I have until then to get, get a chip shape.

Okay. Maybe I can help you out. I'm not sure if I'm gonna have much time either end, but that would be fun.

Yeah, I mean, it's a great space to start. Like, I have to do very little. I, I got to put a little changing room into it. That's all. And that's the only real wall structure.

Yeah.

That's going into it. And then just put in the fridge, then set up all the, the equipment, run, you know, run my water lines along the roof, run my electricity along and off I go. It should be pretty simple.

I did notice you were saying like kill cans are super expensive now. I looked up the, the.

Stunner.

The stunner that's gone up by like.

Yeah, it's probably like, what is it, like 750, 800 pound?

Yeah, yeah.

Like, but that's just inflation has been crazy. Like this last, like it must be 5, 6% there this last couple of years. So everything is just going up, even the, you know, crates, poultry crates. Everything's. It's all money. That's the problem. All these little things you need, you know, sterilizers when you start to boil it down. But again, it's it's all about as long as you know how much it costs, it's on your spreadsheet, then you know what you have to pay back and it's all good. If you have control of it, you're fine. If you're just going out buying stuff willy nilly, that's when you're in trouble and you're scratching your head wondering where did all your money go?

So you still got an element of like your homesteading and farming commercially. Right. You've got like kitchen gardens and the dairy for yourself and some meat boxes for yourself and I guess some of that too.

Yeah. So I mean one, in our holistic context, one of the main things is to produce as much of our own food as possible. And so there's big elements to that. You know, we're going to have cows and sheep on the farm and they're really for our own consumption and if we have any extra, we sell it. And I suppose that's more for. It's. Yeah, it's part of our context. We're trying to. And I suppose it does fall into the agritourism part of the enterprise. We make a lot of money on agritourism and so having a nice, you know, having those little things really add value to that as well. So you can, you know, you can a lot of these things, you can look at them from different lenses and justify them in different ways. Yeah, I think it's important for people what happens me all the time. You know, we think you have this idea you want to do something and really it's a hobby but you're going to justify it, that it's something to do with the farm. You know, you need to be very clear just. And it comes back to the numbers. What enterprises in the farm are your moneymakers? They're your centerpiece enterprises. And you know that. And you know that they are making the money and then you know the ones then that are your hobby or you know, they're, they're, they're just a little add on but they don't make you so much money. And the important reason, because everything's fine, if you've loads of time and everything's going great and that's fine, but when things start to go wrong or you know, if you get injured and you've got a limited time, well, you know what you got to look after and you got to know what you can drop quickly. And I think that's important. And it happens to me all the time. You know, I go off in this Little project, doing some random thing that, you know, it's really a hobby and I'm spent some money on it. But I need to know that if anything goes wrong, that needs to be the first thing to go.

What is the agritourism side of things for you? What's that look like?

It's very simple for me. I have a contract with couple of tour operators. So they look after all the logistics of it. They let me know when they're coming, how many people are coming off, and I give them a tour of the farm, tell them the story, and then they drive off again and I invoice them.

How did that all come to be?

It's a good story. It's like everything. Because my partner Ne was on to me a while back, a good while back, and she's like, you know, you should do tours. And I was like, nah, tours, man. I know way gotta, you know, organize the logistics. You know, I'm gonna run a tour. Who wants to come? And all this? No, no, no. Then a couple of, maybe six months later, there's a lady, a neighbor down the road, you know, word of mouth rings me up and she says, I have an American tour operator that brings tour. She actually, she's a hand weaver, so she weaves tweed by hand. And they're looking for farms to go to. They're more than this tour operator wants to give people more like a day in the life of people in the countries they go to, their massive company, they could travel to like 80 countries around the world and they're looking for a farm to go down. She's like, I was thinking to you, would you mind if I give them your number? I was like, yeah, sure. So they ring me up and the lady's like, you know, oh yeah, we'd love to come to your farm. And I said, okay. And she's like, how much? So like I dreamed up a number. And she's like, yeah, no problem. And they're like, okay, so we'll tell you a month. Or we give you at the start of the year all the dates, we let you know, a month out, how many numbers. And they all come with a tour guide. And so they just rock up. I take them round, explain what we're doing, tell them a bit of a story. Different times of the year, we're doing different stuff. And then they get back on their bus and off they go, happy on their holiday. They're doing a trial because Ireland, I never really thought of it because, like, there's massive. This whole part of Ireland is main industry is tourism.

Right.

And I didn't, I didn't. I was too constricted in my thinking that I thought I'd have to organize the logistics and everything. Whereas if I just isolate these tour operators who they make their living out of doing that and get them to do all the work, then it'll be very straightforward for me. And now I've actually got another one. We've got kelly bags as a. The. I think it is the biggest fishing port in Ireland and it's a deep water fishing port. So a lot of cruise ships come in there. So now I've got some of them coming as well.

That's awesome. So quite a passive income, really.

Well, yeah, because it's so passive. Like there's very little cost. I'm, you know, I make a cup of coffee or whatever. But like there's very little input costs. And for. And the time, it's seasonal, so it runs from March through till October. And it's, it's. Yeah, it's. It's like it's better numbers than pastured layers.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's the way many farms diversify, I guess. But it's a really nice story how that's happened because it's kind of totally ideal. It sounds like.

Yeah. But again it comes. Comes to like you got to, you know, I was of the mindset. No, no, this, you know, this is too. I'm not interested in this. It seems like too much. But that was just my, my vision of it and I was clouding my own judgment. So here I have an enterprise that, you know, can turn over 30,000 or can make me €30,000 in profit sitting there waiting for me. And my. It was only my judgment that was blocking that.

No, but it's amazing that when I think about it, you know, when I think of tours, it's like usually people are coming with a lot of technical questions. They want to be there all day, they want to pick your brains and it's a lot of, you know, you're working for any income. But that sounds super ideal. And there's this. Yeah, it's like reality TV or something that.

Yeah, pretty much. And that was my thinking on it too. And that was how I approached it. And here I have now an enterprise which is, you know, cost me like for 300 hours a week or 300 hours a year for like €30,000 and you know, €100 an hour for. And like that's just one. Like I'm supposed to. There's people out there, farmers out there too, that remember you're. They, you're only limited by your imagination. And it's. Your imagination is the only constraint on anything as well. So, you know, there's, there's probably, you know, there's a hundred other enterprises out there that I could be doing as well, similar to that, that my mind, my, my thinking is just limiting me from accessing.

I guess what's really nice about that is like the sort of quality of you can just be yourself. Right. You don't need to answer any ridiculous 100%. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And the great thing about them, a lot of these are like, it's actually the opposite. A lot of these are retired people with tons of life experience. So I'm actually tapping into all these people coming to the farm, you know, if I have a problem, you know, like, is there any electrical engineers here? Yeah. What do you think of this? You know, you've got all these people with all this life experience coming through your place. And I'm actually trying to tap into all that now, you know, trying to hear. And it's a win, win because they feel like, they feel like they're. They feel an attachment to, you know, your place and they go off and I suppose, you know, you can sell them gifts, you know, little tokens. You know, we do this thing here where we turn, we have a lot of rush because our. The ground is so wet. Soft brush is one of the main plants that can actually adapt to that environment. So generally where people overgraze, soft brush comes in to try and protect the soil. And there's this. There's a tradition that's actually as a Catholic and a Celtic tradition on the last day of January where they make these crosses from this call St. Bridget's Day. There's various origins, from pagan to Catholic origins, but basically they make these crosses with the soft brush. So I. And then that night you leave them outside and then whatever the spirits or the common bless them and you're supposed to keep them in your house then as to protect your house and you do it in your, in your bar. They would put them in the barn with the animals as well and protect the animals. And they love all these stories, you know, because they're. A lot of them are American. And so then I take my rushes and I make these crosses with them and I turn them into one of the most profitable crops in the farm.

That's great. Yeah, that's. I think that's definitely a pagan ritual, right? The Vikings had that kind of.

Yeah. There's. There's different origins from it. The one that's traditionally followed here in Ireland now is a cat has come from Catholic based. But I believe its origins go way back before that.

Yeah, that's super fun selling weeds.

You know, forget your rocket. I have to go around the neighbors stealing rushes now.

So tell us a bit about. You said before that it's important for you to have a life out the farm. And I know you've been working super hard. What's your sort of work week look like or seasonal work weeks? What do they look like nowadays and is it where you want it to be?

I mean I personally love like I love doing stuff. It's when it's relationships, people outside of that where you gotta understand if I was left my own devices I would work all the time. But that's not a holistic approach. So I have to think about other people in my life. You know, I've got lucky thing is I've got loads of nieces and nephews on the farm here as well. They live on the farm as well. So this time of year I am working on projects. All the work I do this time of year is only working on projects. And realistically this is probably my last year that I'm going to work. Really that I have a lot of infrastructure to build once the slaughter is done. That's kind of the last. I'm kind of limiting that. I'm not spending any more money on the farm per se. I'm actually the farmers now. This is going into our third proper season. The farm actually has to pay me back all the money it owes me this season and then I'm technically not going to really invest any more money. Like it's set up, I'm kind of maximized the land base I'm on, it's set up nice. So next winter I should have a lot more free time. I mean I was thinking I could start building egg mobiles and selling them but you know, I need to take it easy too. But I still try to. Winter time I try to Finish up around 6 o'. Clock. I generally don't start till I start about half six in the morning. I do some work on the laptop. There's not much light until like 8 o'. Clock. Then I try and finish up 6 o' clock every evening. So wintertime's pretty easy. Summertime isn't that hard. I try to not do projects now. Previous years I was doing projects during the summer and running all the farm. So. So basically any free time at All I was working on projects and stuff. I stopped kind of halfway through the summer last year I stopped doing that and I won't do it this summer. So you're just doing the chores. And I've got two interns in the farm this year. I'm also one big drain on me was we had. I had to take away our broilers last year. It was like a five hour round trip to get them processed. Yeah, I won't have to do that this year. So actually I'll only have to leave the farm like five times I think to pick up baby chicks and turkeys and that's it. The whole summer, theoretically, which is going to be really nice. I'm not going to be working that hard. I mean, I don't think that hard. Extremely structured now that I've got like, I've consolidated. I've taken two egg mobiles and made them one. I've halfed my labor on. I've half my labor pretty much on egg and my layer enterprise. The broilers. I've set them up. I run a. I run them in the brooder for three weeks in salt and style pens for about a week to two weeks. And then I put them into more of a like a roller pen set up then so there. And I'm only doing like a thousand 1500 broilers. So it's not that much work. It's. I think it's pretty easy, man. You know, I'm starting to get there. Obviously I have all these systems dialed in now. You know, it didn't start like that. You know, spend ages refining them and getting everything the way it needs to be. So it's unrealistic to think you're going to start and do all this, be standing here like me saying, oh, it's easy. I made loads of mistakes and learned loads of stuff the hard way to get to this point. So. But as completely realistic, I could run this farm still on my own. That the. If I was running it on my own though, it's just a long day. The issue is I have. Is the breakup. You know, you have morning chores and then you have like two hours free. And then you might have to go and do more, you know, do the brooder and then it's these little things. The day is well spread out, but there's loads of free time within the day. And I don't mind now that I. Before I wasn't living on the farm. That was tough. There was a lot of hanging around or you were trying to move things to correlate. Now that I just live across the road, it's freaking easy because I can go hang out at home or do stuff like that.

What about weekends? Is that something that interns help swim?

Yeah. What I'm. I'm trying to. There is one issue with the tours. The tours can be, like, random, you know, they're not set days. It's not like Monday, Wednesday, Friday, so. But the good thing about them is they give me notice well in advance. So, like, I can have tours on a Saturday and Sunday, but. But I could have, you know, so that I basically move my weekend suit, and I got to make that suit with my partner, you know, because she works as well, so it's kind of fine. So we just find blocks of time that work for us, and then we kind of block that time out and go and do stuff we want to do. So we could end up working, you know, 14, 15 days straight and then have maybe, you know, two blocks or two days off pretty close together or whatever. We kind of just move. It's like a crop rotation plan. Just moving it around till it works and you roll with it. That's one thing I think that I attribute to being not so busy is that I don't run any market garden or, you know, grow any veg. And we actually, I grow less and less veg because any free time I had, that's what I used to spend was like, 10 to the garden and stuff. And now I'm like, screw that. I've got friends down in Knocknery. The grow veg, I can go and buy it from them. Sure. Yeah.

Yeah. It's time versus money thing, isn't it? That's. Is that the market garden we'll be visiting on the course?

Yeah. Yeah. So Rob and Sean run an epic market garden down there. So we'll be going down there for the market garden aspects on the training course.

Super nice. That's gonna. Yeah. I'm really looking forward to coming over, man. It's gonna be super nice to see you again and to see the farm. What about your longer term? I mean, are you gonna. You want to build a house, like, with your partner? It won't be on the farm then.

Probably not. I mean, I'm just thinking in my holistic context and our goals. I'm just looking around. Me too. But I suppose this is constantly changing, but I'm just thinking, like, inflation's crazy and it can't keep going at the rate it's going. The house market. Ireland's a funny country because Our last economic bubble was built in the housing market where the banks were just handing out money, money, money and then that collapsed. We're currently riding on I believe the IT sector, you know, Google, Facebook, these big companies. That's what's driving the bubble here in Ireland. And it's got to come down soon. So I'm kind of. My general plan at the minute is to get as much capital as possible and then start acquiring land. I believe agriculture, there's like 80% of the agricultural land in Ireland is going to change hands in the next 15, 20 years. Most people don't want it, they're not making any more land. So I'm waiting for the next kind of collapse of the property market I think and acquire as much land as they can afford and then use that as assets to live off. I'm just thinking now more I suppose, you know, pensions and where's money going to come from later in life and if we have kids and they want to get an education or whatever. I'm just trying to think when I'm young, now is the time to acquire some more assets to have. I'm just looking at what's the most, what, you know, different people wanted to invest in different things. For me, I think it'll be agricultural land because one, it'll almost certainly increase in value. If you can hold onto it to the right time, it'll increase in value. But I have, what is a unique set of skills now is I can actually increase the value of that land by increasing the topsoil under it. I know how to do that. And I also have a set of skills in a business that can turn that, make that land, utilize that land and make profit from it.

Are you gonna end up building a steel house?

No, I mean I think, but I thinking out loud, we just need to buy a house. I think longer term, maybe just as a personal project, maybe we'll build a house then, you know, in 10 years time or whenever, you know, whenever things get easier and really put a lot of thought and effort into designing a nice like passive house or a well designed house. You know, something that always design, always interests me because you know, you see people generally build a house when they're a young married couple and you know like they, they're putting the big plasma TV down in the ground and then, and then they have kids and the TV needs to get put up but there's no outlets up there so they have to come out and retrofit it and then they get old and there's no, you know, there's no bedrooms downstairs and they're going up the stairs and all this kind of how to design something that is going to be multi generated, you know, go on for indefinitely. That's things that interest me.

Yeah, it's a cool thought.

So, yeah, constantly changing but you know, we'll see where life goes, you know, if the world. We're living in a funny world right now.

Yeah, that's, that's true. Look, we better wrap up here, but thanks so much for taking the time to chat. It's always a real pleasure to talk to you and I'm super inspired by what you're up to and I'm really excited to come to Ireland. It's really fun for me to come back over there and to see you at the farm and I think we're going to have an incredible training.

Yeah, I think it's going to be great for Irish farmers to have access to this sort of stimulation and education and it's going to be, it's going to be mind blowing.

Is it going to be raining?

No. I mean typically we're, you know, somersaults. This is going to, it's the best, going to be the best time of year for sure. I mean, we can't guarantee no rain, but it's going to be good.

Great. Thanks so much, Kettle and Kettle. You're putting in a lot of great informative videos on your YouTube channel. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. But anyone listening that's you can see like pretty in depth views around the farm of how you're building infrastructure, your design considerations, your business considerations and yeah, I think people can get a lot of value out of that.

Yeah, I mean I'd love to put up more content. It's just that is, that's one thing that, you know, if I just don't have the time, it doesn't happen. But hopefully with the interns in the farm this summer, things will be a lot more chilled and we'll have more time to kind of explain what we're doing and the thought that we. Why we done it.

Yeah, perfect. Anywhere else where people can find out more about the farm.

Yeah, you can follow us on Facebook and Instagram and hopefully again, as the season ramps up, we'll be putting up more content on there just to keep kind of general what's happening with the day to day and the seasons and what, what we're getting up to.

Great. Kevin, thanks so much for taking the time. See you soon this summer.

Yeah, take care, man.