FARM LIKE A HERO EXPERIENCE: Søtoftes Jordbrug & Gårdmejeri, DK

Okay. Welcome to a new episode of Farm Like a Hero, folks. I'm Richard Perkins. Today I'm here with Mikkel and Marie from Sotofte in Denmark. Mikkel was one of our early core team members who you might remember from our YouTube video back in August 2017 where he started up an epic market garden and lay a flock with Anders and Katrine who are also interns from the farm. And they already had existing beef herd and a lot's changed on the farm since then. And the gardens are now run by another couple. And Mikaela Marie have gone on to build a fully fitted dairy and run a pasture based milking operation as well as 1200 hens in three chicken caravans that they imported from Australia. Previously selling exclusively wholesale. This year's required a total pivot to farm pickups and private customers and then back again to wholesale within a few months. So excited to catch up and hear your story. Thanks so much for joining us today, folks. So tell us a bit about the transition because when I was there making that video that a lot of people will have seen, you had a pretty epic startup year and a lot's changed. You've bought the neighboring farm and built a dairy, offloaded the veg. Tell us a bit about the process over the last few years.

Yeah, so last time you visited was, I think made a second video in 2018, which was the last season that where I ran the vegetables, the market garden. I think we just met each other before that season. So at the end of 2017 I think, but. I think I just got fed up with vegetables and that was not what I wanted to do. And at the same time the neighbor farm got up for sale. So that gave us a chance to start a grass based dairy because that would give us enough land. So during winter 2018 I spent some time thinking about what to do with the vegetables and one day I called a friend and I asked if he wanted to take over and he did, but you know, he couldn't. And then I asked, but who can then take over? And he thought a bit about it and he gave me a number to a couple that I had never met and I called them and they, yeah, within, I don't know, three weeks or something, they moved in to the community and they took over the garden and are now running it as their. Well, they are in the middle of their second season now and running it as their, their own company. And we are then working closely together around deliveries and customers. So to the public we seem like one entity with a Big portfolio of dairy and eggs and a market garden with vegetables. So sort of one farm, but within the farm we are two separate businesses.

That's pretty amazing, the chances of that because you found someone to take over the garden. You've always had an interest in grazing and holistic management and those things. And then you met Marie, who's a cheese expert. Marie, tell us a bit about the studies you did. I mean, you've got pretty specialist knowledge in dairy and old ways of doing it, haven't you?

I actually just finished my education march this year on dairy engineering and my thesis was very much about natural fermentations and cheese cultures, which I want to bring forward with this dairy project.

Amazing.

Yeah. So I think I felt that it was a perfect match because if you want to work with raw milk cheese, you need to have the best raw milk quality that you can get. Yeah. And I thought that I were to start up a dairy in Copenhagen or something. But of course you need to be very close to the cows to get the best milk. So yeah, I think it was a good match.

And you had that opportunity to buy neighboring farm. That's like a once in a lifetime opportunity really to have an adjacent piece of land. That's. I mean that wouldn't come up again, would it? So that was a pretty amazing opportunity that. How much land did you get now? What's the hectorage of grazing you have now?

It's close to 50 hectares.

How's that been with the. Before we get on to what you're up to, tell us a bit about the arrangement with the gardeners. It's pretty amazing you found someone who can just self manage and take that on. But what. How did you set up the arrangement with them?

So they had been looking for a place for about five years actually and they are educated gardeners. So they. We sat down and then we put a price tag on each of the investments and things that I had implemented. And then we agreed on a price for like the full package, like all the infrastructure and all the tools and structures and so on. And then. And then they are then leasing the.

Land.

Through us and we are leasing it from a foundation.

So the family foundation that owns the whole farm that people will have seen. You're leasing the farmland off them and they're leasing it off you. So they essentially bought out the assets for the market garden and then rent the lands. Yeah, and so that's perfect. That's taken that off you. But it also has a complementary product still. That's that your customers already knew and enjoyed already.

Yes. So it was. It was very. Well, I wouldn't say it was very easy, but it was a, you know, it was just about getting the seeds in the ground. And there was already a, you know, a list of customers that could be contacted and that knew the product and what we were doing. So, yeah, I mean, the sales I had already built up as a channel for sales. So.

Yeah.

Tell us a bit about this year, then, because most people have just seen a big rise in private customers, but you've had to pivot from totally wholesale to totally private and back again in a few months, which is pretty unusual, I guess.

Yeah. So when our prime minister, she. Well, it actually starts before that, because the weeks up until Denmark closed down, we got more and more worried about the situation because we were obviously totally aware of that our sales, you know, might disappear very soon. And then she went on, our prime minister, she went on television, and she. It was a Wednesday evening, and she closed down the country from that Friday. And she closed down, you know, all restaurants and everything. So we just had to do something very quickly and on.

And in reference, you got, like, a thousand eggs a day piling up, right?

Yeah. At that time, we. It was a thousand eggs a day and. How much milk? 120 liters.

120. And we had a lot of eggs in stock, actually.

Yeah.

So it was.

We had. At that time, we had a bit of an overproduction, so we had been piling up eggs for three weeks probably. So we had around 20,000 eggs standing at the farm, and. Well, that is worth a lot of money. And we definitely don't have a bin that's big enough to throw them out. So, like, what are we gonna do? We sat down and talked about it.

And.

We decided to make a video that we posted on Facebook where we explained our situation, that all our customers were forced to close. And we had all these 20,000 eggs in stock, and we, you know, we basically gave them away for free. So we charged one Danish kroner an.

Egg, which is, what, like a third of a quarter of what you normally.

Sell for less than a quarter.

Okay.

So it's 0.€13 an egg, which is basically for free. It's cheaper than you buy a conventional egg for in the supermarket, probably. But we thought it would be necessary to get rid of them. And we definitely did get rid of them because we posted the video on Facebook Sunday evening. And when we woke up Monday morning, it had already been shared, like, a few hundred times, and lots of comments and you know, and then during the. So what we said in the video was that we would open like a drive in farm shop Monday afternoon from 3 to 5. But already during the morning people start coming down the road and wanted to buy eggs. The phone was cold ringing all the time with journalists and people who want to buy thousand eggs and you know.

Thousand eggs.

Yeah, because they were so cheap. So they saw an opportunity to make business themselves. They wanted to resell.

And it was not only people from the local area, it was the whole of Denmark, like as far as you can go from here, who wanted to come and buy many eggs. Yeah.

So a lot of support also for like people understanding that that was a bit of a crisis point with restaurants.

Being shut down suddenly, but also just very cheap eggs. We experienced that many people were, wanted to talk and you know, see who are we. But also a lot of people just wanted to have, you know, cheap eggs because it was a pretty good offer.

And I guess that paved the way for, you know, that's a big open door now to then be able to sell privately for the rest of the season.

And it also, because we reacted so quickly, we were probably some of the first in Denmark to bring forward a story of how we were adapting to this new situation. So there was, you know, national tv, they came and made a long, you know, and several newspapers and I think we were in five different medias. So it, you know, it was very cheap marketing money that we, you know.

Didn'T earn anything on the X. But we really got good marketing.

Yeah, yeah.

And we didn't know about that actually. We just didn't want to throw any X.

Sure. Yeah.

And then very quickly, you know, there were, we had a, we had a car line that was 400 meters long with people wanting to buy these eggs.

And.

Many, many people had to go empty handed back home. So we decided that we wanted to make like a pre order system. And the first time we did it was on Facebook and Marie spent the whole day just receiving messages and answering an office woman. And so that was, you know, not realistic to continue that way. So within the first week I think we managed to build and launch a website where people could go and buy what they wanted and then come and pick it up two times a week where they would park the car and say the name and then we would put what they bought in the back of the car and then they could drive away again. So we minimized physical contact. And that was, I mean that basically saved our company because we've later we looked at our numbers and from the budget that we did in autumn 2019, we've only gotten 8% down in sales.

Amazing.

At that time. So. And you know, many, many companies, they suffer 90, 95, 99% of loss in turnover.

You know.

Oh, well done. Amazing.