Europe has the best regenerative farmers in the world...

Welcome back to another episode, folks. In today's video, I want to celebrate regenerative farmers in Europe and all over the world. And in fact today I finished the Farm Like a Hero tour.

So I want to talk a bit about that. If you're new to the channel. My name is Richard Perkins and I run with my partner here, Ridgedale Farm in Sweden. We're up at 59 degrees north and this farm's become well known all around the world for pioneering approaches to regenerative agriculture. No dig market gardening with compost on top of the ground and wood chips in the pathways. We're on top of pasture here and farming beautiful veg in our very short growing season. Three months without frost here typically. As well as pastured poultry that we've adapted from popular models like the Salatin model models. And we have an on farm processing unit for slaughtering chickens for local sales, well as smoking them and processing other things. We have sheep and cows and often pigs up in the forest. And so this is a beautiful, small productive farm that if you haven't heard of us, then you can find out a whole bunch more in our book Regenerative Agriculture. And my websites are in the links below.

Two new GoPro Hero 9s.

Look at that. One of them has a little grip so we can make some video with this thing. And then this one is a floating one that you can also wear as a grippy.

So I can use both hands and I can be showing you things. So just set that up. Agree to the software. Want to install that? Skip the setup, skip the date. We'll just call it 1st of January. Who cares about time? Battery is quite low.

But what this one will allow me.

To do is be working on stuff like this with both hands and you can see the footage. Now I don't have any and what it means is I can show you how I'm doing stuff, how I am filming. Pretty cool. It's got a little screen on the front that's a bit laggy but good enough for us. So hopefully this will make some cool new style footage. Very nice.

So everything I've ever filmed on this channel pretty much has been with iPhone and I do it like that. But I've just bought two brand new Hero9 GoPros. Now I've done that for a couple of reasons. One is I see that GoPros have moved on a long way since I first had the original one when I filmed a tour around Europe a decade ago. Now looking at regenerative agriculture and inspiring enterprises at that Time. But I bought the new one because it's got a forward facing screen so you can set up shots easily. And I got one with a bitey grip so I can actually show you.

What I'm doing around the farm.

And I thought that's pretty cool because often I'm just whipping out my phone to show you little things that I'm doing. But actually you'd benefit far more from seeing what I'm doing with my hands, like when I'm transplanting or when I'm servicing eggmobiles, whatever it is. So the bitey grip is super nice for me and I'm going to experiment to see if I like the footage from these. And so this is just my iPhone and now I'm talking to the GoPro. So we'll see what the colors come out and how the screen footage looks like. Switching back to iPhone, switching back to GoPro, switching back to iPhone, switching back to GoPro. And we'll just see how that looks. But I think it will open up possibility to do a whole load new innovative shooting for you to show you around the farm processes. But we're coming to the end of the season now and it's going to be a quiet winter, so we're not sure when what I'll be putting out over the winter, but I hope to collaborate with a bunch of folks and put out a lot of great stuff for you.

Hello monkey.

What's that on your head?

The praying mantis. Praying mantis is on your head.

So I'm not showing you around the farm so much in this video. I just want to talk about the farm like a hero experience I've been running all season, which was going to be a tour around Europe's best up and coming regenerative farmers. Except Covid happened and that's been great for most people's sales all over the world, it seems, but it meant I couldn't go on a tour. So I've been at the farm and I've been interviewing some of the best upcoming regenerative farmers in Europe throughout the summer. And today was the last interview. I'm super excited about everything I've heard, seen and to be able to share that with you via my platform. And I think it's the start of a lot of collaborations to lift up and shine light on the unsung heroes here. Because one of the biggest takeaways I've taken from this tour is that we have the best regenerative farmers on the planet here in Europe. And often Europeans are looking to America where people perhaps have louder voices or bigger presence in the field, but actually people here are running the best numbers, the most lean operations and the most diverse operations that I've seen anywhere on the planet. And my job has been largely for the last half of my life, keeping up to date with everything going on in this field. And so I've been so humbled, so impressed by the amazing stories of all the people that I've got to speak to this summer and just want to share gratitude for all of those people doing amazing work, as well as all the people I didn't get to speak to. And I know that there are far more people in this field than I could possibly find time to speak to, but it's been so great to just hear everyone's stories and the journeys people have been through to create their dreams and visions out of just pure passion and the will that comes from that. People in all kinds of economic circumstances, with totally different resource spaces, totally different access to market, etc. But just making it work. And I think a few common themes have come out for me. Farming is hard work. It doesn't matter how smart we can be about design and toolage, etc. It's hard work and it requires passion, but it's passion that fuels it and it's passion that sells these products. And there's a massive increase in demand for local, organic, beyond organic, healthy produce. And everyone's seeing that, especially with COVID this year. But hopefully, and I think most of the people I've spoken to this year, feel that it's like really starting a shift. And things like regenerative agriculture are being talked about in the mainstream more and more. And whilst there's a bunch of corporate greenwashing in that too, it's also becoming popular on some of the world's biggest podcast platforms, etc. And so it's amazing to see that groundswell. And it's led me to a lot of introspection and thinking too. One thing that comes to mind is that after the success of the RICO rings here in Sweden, that we've been a large part of promoting and setting up some ourselves, is that market saturation is very real. The whole point of this farm was to create a model and a learning space and a springboard for people to go off and set up farms intelligently and smartly and avoiding lots of time and costly mistakes themselves. And it's been very successful with that. But what I have seen is that the RICO rings are now getting full, the market is getting saturated for local pasture, raised eggs or beautifully grown vegetables, etc. And so that really made me interested in seeing how people are innovating with value adding, with bringing in expert vegetarian chefs to make meal boxes around the products, to upsell the products by doing a little bit more work and a little bit more marketing to innovative ways of sales like totally automated digital farm vending machines in Ireland where people can come and serve themselves. And it's amazing what people get up to with their creativity and their different resource bases. But I think this is where the movement needs to head next is one thing is growing amazing produce and selling enough to make a business run and get a good livelihood, but the next thing is starting to cater for the conveniences that most people, let's face it, in the western world, are used to today, with delivery, with value adding, with ease of preparing meals. When you come home from work and often where we are in Sweden, both parents work and you come home and you've got kids, people want convenience, people want easefulness. And there's a lot of room in the market for connecting businesses together for collaborations. You know, another idea that comes to mind is the opening of farm restaurants or farm shops connected to restaurants and really taking things up another level. It's been incredible just hearing the array of strategies and to hear how successful people are being with the simple practices they've learned or been inspired by here. We've seen our method of no dig market gardening that you see behind me roll out all over the world and it's amazing to see people starting up with very little weed pressure, with good economy, with the right tools, just doing an amazing job. The same can be said for our pastured poultry. I put a video recently about some of the eggmobiles that have spurned out of this place for our low cost homemade eggmobiles that are now rolling around fields all over the world. And that's pretty amazing to see. And yeah, it's been amazing to hear the feedback from our book Regenerative Agriculture and just how much that's influence people in making smart business choices, keeping really good records, building spreadsheets in the manner that they've seen documented, and just really taking business to where it should be. You know, anyone running a business needs to be diligent and plan well. And it's amazing to hear how useful a resource that's been. And we've heard so many times about the challenges that come with working with a partner, working with a loved one, managing children and all the things it takes to run a farm. And it's so beautiful to have a platform for people to share their stories but then also share feedback and advice to others. And obviously our context are all so totally different, but it seems clear to me that there's this curve of development and learning that everyone goes through. Three or four years of just grinding to get a business going and get systems in place. And then a time for pausing, stepping back and seeing, okay, there's things in our life that we stop doing. Our social life, our interests and hobbies, we're not giving enough time to each other, our kids, whatever it is. And then re evaluating, readdressing, context and taking a new pathway. It's very much a process. I feel like I'm in myself here at our farm. But it's very beautiful to hear people's stories and realize we're all in exactly the same boat, as it were. It's hard work, we work long hours, we don't get paid what we should do for the amazing work we do, but we're doing it because of a love of the systems we work within. To be part and to be managing the orchestration of an ecosystem is an incredible feeling and I guess most of us would rather do this than anything else in the world and that's why we've chosen this pathway. It's beautiful to hear those stories for anyone that's not been involved in the Farm Like a Hero experience. The episodes will be rolling out now till another few weeks, but there's still time to get involved. It's a low cost membership site and you'll have access to all the long form interviews. And we're making a PDF book of all of the farms that we would have visited in person, in ebook form form, so that we get the visual element of all those farms and hear their story in a different perspective again in written form. And I think that's going to be a beautiful resource for people in Europe to be able to find people who are already dialed in to the sorts of operations that they want to pursue. I think it's been an incredible season and just amazing for me to be the one listening rather than the one talking. So I've really enjoyed that. And if you want to get involved then farmlikeahero.com you can get instant access to the whole range of interviews. And for anyone that's about to start farming, I think you wouldn't find better value for money to hear from the experience of dozens and dozens of amazing farmers and the journeys they've been on. And so I think this is an exceptional package for anyone that's about to start farming and give food and fodder to think about all winter long. Really. So that's it for today folks. I'll put out some videos soon walking around the farm, showing you what's going on as we start packing down. And we'll talk about the pack down on the channel as we go into our long winter restful mode. But thanks so much for watching our videos as always. Hope you enjoyed that and we'll look forward to seeing you in a video soon. Bye for now.