A recorded interview (Farm Like a Hero series) by Richard Perkins with Sandra Wentz about Paardebloemhoeve, a 40-hectare organic Belgian farm. The conversation covers the farm’s transition and collaborative structure, enterprises added since 2018 (pastured egg mobiles, broilers, market garden/CSA, beekeeping), scale (two Hundermobil egg mobiles with ~200 layers each, ~1 ha market garden) and how tasks are divided among family and partners.
Chapters
Welcome to a new episode of Farm Like a Hero, folks. I'm Richard Perkins. Today I'm here with Sandra Wentz of Paderblumhoven in belgium. That's a 40 hectare diverse farm, and it's the collaborate effort of Sandra and his partner, Pauline and her mother and stepfather. It's been their organic dairy farm over the last decades, but since 2018, they've been working together and added pastured egg mobiles, pastured boilers, a market garden, csa, as well as bees, and some other interesting things. So it's a super exciting farm. Got lots of exciting things to talk about. Sandra, thanks so much for taking the time out to join us today.
Hi, Richard. Thanks for having me.
Yeah, it's great to speak with you. I'm curious if you could start us off with how this thing came to be. So it sounds like you've really come into farming and started up a collaboration on an existing farm. How did that all come about? And, yeah, maybe give us the backstory there.
The backstory. It actually started about, I guess, eight years ago. I went on a travel trip around Australia, where I started woofing on all kinds of farms. And there I had the opportunity to go work with a professional beekeeper. And when I came back to Belgium, I started beekeeping because I missed the agricultural kind of life. After a couple of years, the mother of Pauline, my girlfriend, now started trying to lure me to the farm because they're organic and they have tons of dandelion flowers in the paddocks. And that's how I came here with the bees and got to meet the daughter. That's how it all started.
Okay, so then you started up your relationship, and I guess Pauline's got a natural interest in farming too. Like what's. Or is that not the case? Is that something that's been influenced more by you?
Yeah, she's more a singer songwriter and she didn't have any real background into farming. So, yeah, it all started when we came to live together on the farm, and then it all went out from there.
So then where's been the main sort of sources of inspiration, like, beyond beekeeping? Like, what got you into the sort of enterprises that you're involved with now?
Your videos on YouTube.
Okay.
Then a lot of books of Joel Saleton, videos of Corey Stone and Jean Marie Fortier, and that's how we got our knowledge.
That's awesome. And I've been looking through your Instagram. You got beautiful Instagram of what's going on at the farm. I really recommend people have a Look at that. It looks like you've got a lot going on. And how does it actually work on the ground in terms of managing the different enterprises? Like what are, how do you split.
Up the responsibilities for those different things for the cows? That still stays with Stan, my father in law. So I just help out whenever he needs help. And then from the garden I do the planning. The ordering of transplants and everything. And the chickens is kind of something everybody looks at. And my girlfriend picks, collects all the eggs every day. And then the feeding and adding water and all. That's our job or my job.
Nice. And just describe it for people who are just listening to this. Like, how many hens, what size market garden have you got going on there?
We have two chicken mobiles from Hundermobil and they have 200 chickens each layer hens. And then the market garden is around one hectare. This year we started with broilers. For now only one pen. But yeah, we'll see how it goes.
And then from there you're testing out the production and management.
Yeah. And if we can add it to all the other tasks for now, because this is the first year we also have one other person working at the farm to help us. So it's kind of feeling what, what can we handle?
I've got to say it looks beautiful and you obviously working really hard, but that's a huge market garden to be running. I know you're running like with a bcs, is that right? Like the sort of standard hand tools and the bcs.
Yeah, yeah.
That's a beautiful garden for your. Is that like you hadn't gotten before? Right.
The only gardening experience was in Australia working on an organic vegetable and herb farm.
Okay. So you got some on the ground stuff and then really learned a lot from online.
Yeah, that's correct.
That's amazing. Like it looks beautiful. It looks like you've been at it a long time. I'd like to start hearing about your egg mobiles. Is that right? It's the German company that makes those.
Yeah, that's correct.
Yeah. And I understand the fairly expensive investment. Maybe we can talk a bit about that. But they're, they're pretty interesting model to look at because a lot of people have had trouble with our style Egmobiles with their regulations in different countries. And I know that that model is, it's really built specifically for like the middle of Europe's regulations, you could say. Like here in Sweden we have different regulations on top of the European ones and it's. Is that right? It's like lifting up on hydraulic wheels. So the whole. The whole body of the Eggmobile lifts off the ground as you move it. Maybe you can just describe the whole. The company you got it from and the special features of the Eggmobile.
Yeah, we have it from hundermobilbauland. That's. That's their name. And we have the first model.
