Får får inte får, får får lamm

So the gang are off to get the sheep. We're bringing the sheep up to the barn now for lambing and just to keep better observation on them when they go into that phase. Not for a while yet, but nice to have them up at the farmyard. So we're going to start building onto the existing perimeter fence where the cows are kept in winter in the larch plantation. And we've got a gate section here that will allow us to have easy access. But our aim is to replace some of the perimeter fencing that we use currently all around the farm with gate structures like this. And we're going to build a new, better winter housing for them that's got a pad that we can scrape out manure from, better for making compost. And so we might end up replacing sections of the fencing with this kind of fencing to enable us to better use the space, better handle the animals as well as be able to create little pens or crushes for dealing with the animals when we need to. Now I've run the farm without a tractor for seven years now, but as I get older and have a problem with my back, I've had a herniated disc since I was 14. It just is a repetitive problem with the profession of farming. Finally I got round to buying a small tractor. It's a compact machine, but it's a very strong machine. It's a DK5010 from Coyote. It's got a thousand kilos lifting capacity on the forks here. To enable us to do that, we've got a bit of counterweight. There's about 500 kilos on the back here, so it makes it safe for lifting up bales, etc. Road registered. Don't really need that. Obviously with a roll cage pretty important, but this can be lowered so we can access our polytunnel for cleaning out after the winter layers. But it's a compact four wheel drive machine with. You can turn the four wheel drive on and off. So great for lifting piles of wood like this. Now there are tons and tons of timber here and in the past I would have just carried this by hand or quad and trailer into the forest and walked it the last bit. I'm getting too old for that. This is many tonnes of timber and I've got a lot of platforms to build. So this machine's got its work cut out for it in moving in materials, in digging out compost from the animal bedding and it'll be used for constructing better field gates in places, moving gravel around. We're going to Be building big parking space to improve the facilities here. So no end of uses for this machine. So we haven't sorted the space out yet. We've just got to haylage bell in there. But we'll make little cubicles for lambing. You can hear some cars driving on the ice on the big lake. It's probably quite thick ice now. It's been minus 20 for quite a few days. Beautiful skies. Look at this blue. It's that sort of cold that makes your nose numb and your ears hurt if you don't have a hat. As they say in Sweden. It's not bad weather. Just don't have the right clothes. It's a shame. This cold and wintery weather is really beautiful. But it is putting a halt to all my building projects. I've got plenty of office work and writing to do, but I'm keen to get out and on the land doing work. Got a lot of timber to get up into the forest and start constructing. The ground maybe is not so hard under the trees because of the protection here. Anyway. Girls and kids are letting the sheep out, trying not to let the cows out. And hopefully it'll be a straightforward process and they will walk where we want them. But you never know when you're moving animals. Gobbledygos sitting here in the snow. We're going to be doing bronze turkeys this year from a lady who's not super far away who raises them. So nice for us to get away from the white hybrid birds and to do a bronze turkey. They're much slower growing, they take nearly double the time. But we've got time and I'm interested in having turkeys again. We didn't have them last year and I really miss some turkeys and pigs. Things that I've really missed. So excited to get the gobbledygo on the roll again. Another thing we're planning this year is to put in a few hundred more apple trees and we're looking at dwarfing trees. B9 rootstock, which is a really hardy rootstock here for dwarfing trees to go up on the inside of the fence along the roads. The wind breaks them that we put in with willow cuttings using the key lime plough. They just didn't take in a lot of places because we had an extreme drought and that just didn't serve them well at all. And so we've designed up an irrigation system for dwarfing trees which need pretty good irrigation throughout the summer. And we're thinking we can have hundreds of apple trees just lining the fence. Line. So B9s need staking and it will be an abundant additional crop. But the trouble is, I think with the pandemic last year, all the home gardeners have been buying up all the trees. So I actually can't find a supplier who's got the quantity and varieties of trees that we're after. But I'll keep you posted because that was one of my spring projects. Is a lot more tree planting on the farm but we'll see if that's going to be able to happen this year or not. Putting out books all around the world we saw huge postal delays and we're waiting on control boxes from cattle at Heatherhill Farm in Ireland and working with him to automate these eggmobiles. And you can see how he's done that on his website Heatherhill Farm, which we linked in a previous video. I'll show you them when we get them. But they've been delayed. All the postal systems seem to have melted apart now the sheep are out. So we're going to walk them up to the barn. Leave the cows. Be interesting to see the feed ratios that they're taking between them because they've been grazing together the whole time. H. It's slippy. They're slipping a bit. It's very icy on the road here. Winston got left behind. Come on, Winston. One. Need to bring a feeder up so they don't waste too much of the haylage. Very dry silage that we like to do. It's very unreliable making hay here and get some water. Cross free water here and we can even be settled down. So what does that mean for our trusty rhino? This is basically the vehicle we use to power the whole farm these last seven years. But it will still be the mainstay. It's so much quicker and more fuel efficient than a big machine like tractor. This is used for snowplowing through the winter. This is a really nice quick connect snow plow which means you can turn the angle on this and it's very quick to take it on and off. Uses the winch to pull it up and down obviously. But we'll be using this for moving the egg mobiles as normal and for a whole host of other jobs around the farm where it pulls the trailer, collects birds for slaughter, etc. We don't need a tractor for anything like that. We'll be using it for heavy jobs or extraordinary loads that are just too much for this. But we'll still use this and the little quad for egg collection as our daily staples. No hens this winter. So just a peacock, actually. Very peaceful not having the hens. This winter, we decided to get rid of our flocks to allow for the busy projects that we've got with properties and book writing and got to balance it all somehow. So we decided to take it very easy. It's really nice having super downtime this winter and we're really finally, after seven years, getting a bit of a hang of, you know, life balance and being able to do things outside the farm that are interesting for us or give us pleasure or things we want to pursue. So I do apologize for those of you who love to follow our channel and see things that we're doing on the ground in field and, well, it's just the nature of the game. It's winter time and we're having a lot more downtime. So I hope you can celebrate with me in that, that we're fighting finally achieving a much greater balance in life and a much more relaxed pace. I just posted a photo on Facebook of the farm. We moved in a couple of days ago, seven years ago to that day, and it was just an empty blank slate. And it's amazing what we've done in such a short space of time. And we've been pretty relentless and haven't had that life balance that is so important to all of us, and some people more so than us, obviously, that they've built that in from the beginning. But we set off with an extraordinary mission and have accomplished a lot of what we set out and certainly in the timeline we set out to. So it's time that we're shifting gears and making our lives a bit more balanced and focused on other things too. So apologies for those of you who find the winter videos a bit dull because there's not so much going on. But I will take you with me when I start building on a lot of different projects around the farm that I'm excited about. Quick update from the inside. So a lot of office time at the moment we're running our regenerative agriculture masterclass, which currently runs for eight weeks during the winter. I've also been doing some online training over in Ireland in multiple series of different days. Just looked at pastured poultry and we'll be doing another pastured poultry session in a couple of weeks. I've been speaking at various conferences over in the States, so a lot of work in the background on a computer. I'm spending far more time on a computer than I tend to like, but that's part of what winter work is for me as well. As a lot of planning for the farm development, the camp site development, and running the second house over at the sea as an Airbnb this year. So lots of things that take up a lot of time and just a lot of computer stuff and spreadsheets and all that fun stuff. The Kickstarter has only got five days to go and it's sitting just less than 50%. So it's a good chance this will not be funded, folks. It's the last chance to get involved with that if you want to see this book come into publication. I'm kind of in two minds and I'm not particularly interested in really pushing it, I think because the the whole point of the Kickstarter was to test out whether it was a viable option to print it, bring it into print and start a series. But if there's not the demand, then it's not something I want to do to bring it to print. So it's really down to you guys in the next five days if you want to see it happen. I'd be a little bit sad because I think it's a fantastic resource for people if they are interested in learning from the voices of so many people. But yeah, I don't think I will do. I think I'll just drop the project entirely at this point if it's not funded. But I'm not so interested to push it just for the reasons I've explained. Really excited about the builds book. We've been going through the Eggmobile recently as well as all our boiler pens and it's starting to really shape up to be an incredible book. We're moving on to nest box options and other things like that now. So that's a little update from the indoor space. But last chance to get behind this project if you want to see that, come to fru. Sam.