Farmer Talk: Sundhult, Sweden

Welcome back to another video, folks. This year, because there's not going to be so much going on at the farm, I've decided to start a weekly series where I'll be phoning up farmers around Europe, around the world and just having conversations about whatever's up with those people and how they run their farms. What's going? Well, a bit like the farm, like a hero experience that are ran, but just leisurely and long form conversation. It's great to connect, hear about each other's farms, get inspiration, hear feedback from different processes and different time, places and circumstance. So we're kicking off with a farm in Sweden with my friend Christian, who runs a beautiful farm with his wife Johanna. They run a collaborative grazing operation and run pastured poultry and produce food for homestead purposes as well, selling on rico. So these are long form conversations. You can listen to it like a podcast. It's on YouTube. I'm not going to start a podcast and it's just going to be on YouTube. So up to you whether you just have it playing in the background or in earphones. But I hope you enjoy the conversation and let us know below in the comments if there's people you think I should speak to this year in this series.

Okay. Today I'm joined by Christian Dalquist from Sundholt, further south in Sweden, and they have a mixed farm he runs together with his wife Johanna, and they also work in collaboration with their neighbors. Kristin, thanks so much for taking the time to be with us today.

Thank you for having me.

Tell us a bit about Sindhalt in a nutshell, like how big is the farm, where's the farm and what's going on there?

Yeah, the farm is located in the southwest of Sweden. Nearest town, big city is Gothenburg at the west coast of Sweden. And we live about 130 kilometers southeast of Gothenburg. Nearby Ullererd, where the famous store Geikos is located. It's the biggest mall in Scandinavia. I think they have about 5 million customers each year to that place. So it is the largest tourist place in Sweden. And we live about 12km from Ulareydan. And there is a farm, mostly forest because we have about 50 km to the coast and the tree line starts about 10 km west of us. And so it's mostly forest dominated our land. So I think we have almost 100 hectares production forestry. So it's mainly forestry, but we haven't found the forest that much yet. It's something that we will develop coming years. We have some small, small lands, fields in this forest and it's quite much hills and wetlands, rocky fields. So it's not suitable for farming with other things than animals. But we have, as you said, as I can see, inspired by Ridgedale and eggmobile. And we have about 300 hens at the time. We have built a second one of the eggmobiles, so we can have up to 500 hens in the summertime. But now in the wintertime we have 300 in a polytunnel. We have a very small market garden that we haven't developed that much just for homesteading, more or less. And we will keep it that way for now when we are building up the other branches enterprises here on the farm. And because we do a lot of things, as you said, we have the collaboration company Enterprise, with our neighbors, which have nine owners and to run the Highland cattle.

Right?

Yeah, there are Highland cattles at the farm and we have. We have different herds, so. And have it on our. The owner's land first and then we lease land in the neighbor area. So we are nine people that owns this collaboration enterprise. But let's say we are two to four that work with operation more kind of.

Yeah, yeah.

And we do some of the rotational adaptive bracing in our farm, in everything that we do. And what we noticed when we started is that the previous owner of this farm has been in the family for, I think it's 350 years or something. So when we took over at the start of the millennium, Hannah's father had a pig farm and he started pig farming at the middle of the 80s. After that, a thunderstorm has had hit the old barn here on the farm. So he built a new.

Like it bend down the barn.

Yeah, yeah. And there was a, you know, the typical Swedish small with some cows, some pigs, some horses and so on. So they built a completely new structure dedicated for pigs with workshops and so on around. So that started in, I think it was in the middle of the 80s, 84 or something like that. And kept on going to the millennia.

Did you guys throw up around that a bit? Because I know you're both engineers by training, right. How did you end up taking on the farm?

Yeah, if we see that. Hannah's father, my wife's father, he was. He's a mechanical engineer. And when he took over when his uncle passed away, Hilding, he was working at Saab with the airplanes of Saab. So he moved here and continued working with SM mechanical engineering the first year until the barn burnt down. And then he switched to be a farmer. And I'm a Small town or small village boy? I'm not a farm boy. I from a small, small village about 50 km from here that is called Hiltabrug. But it had a factory the middle of the village and everyone worked there industrial. Everyone had the industrial mindset. It actually was the biggest paper mill, newspaper mill in the world that was totally integrated that had lumber in one side and put out the paper rolls in the other side. So I worked every vacation I had from school and so on at the factory and so really had the factory industrial mindset. And very interesting to see the paper roll labels with paper rolls that should go to USA and Arabia and so on. So very much industrial. My wife had did go to agricultural school but switched to be a computer engineer and working now as a part time computer engineer with developing industrial network cards for industrial.

So that leaves you're working full time on the farm and Hannah's working half time.

Yeah, since 2013 I think 1413, something like that. I've been working at the farm or with things around from. From home in a way. But I have a degree in electrical engineering and a master science in computer computer science. So I worked as a developer for. In computer engineering as well for. For a lot of years. But I sat in the office and looked out in the wind. So nice weather today. I should be in the forest but I had to sit in the office and that doesn't feel that good at all. So I went into my chief and my boss and said I can't work here anymore. I didn't know what to do. I just resigned from work.

Okay. Did you feel like an obligation through inheriting the family farm? Did that. Did you feel obliged to like do something with that?

Yeah, a bit, of course. And there are a lot of possibilities to develop and work and I really like. I'm kind of restless mind and I think the farming is very, very nice to have. The seasons you have different types of work, different times of year and almost none of the other works the jobs I had have has this differentiation in the time of year. So I think that was something that was. It talked to me to have different things but. But as I said, I'm not a farm boy so I have to learn everything from the bottom, forestry and everything. And I'm still learning and I think it's just a small percentage that I know and I'm a curious person so I like to study but I guess I'm not that practical. So Hannah has to do more of the practical work out in the fields and so on. So I dig through some materials and study and said to Hannah, this, we should try this. So that's why we come about to find Ridgedale and your operations. I know very, very we have the taking your masterclass. And I know it was the 27th of December 2018. We started your masterclass and then we did. I think you have eight hours of videos or something like that. And we just looked every day, eight, ten hours a day. Because Hannah, who is working part time, she is free from that work in bunches. So she had some that work. So we just study, study, study, study. So at the end of January, we decided to order chickens, 200 chickens. And we had no infrastructure, no nothing at all. So we just. We were so inspired by the masterclass. So we just did go for it. But we had started the Sohens Pharma, the collaboration with neighbors some two years before.

Tell us about this collaboration. Because it's like you've got an unusual grazing setup in that you've got to manage more than one herd in little forest paddocks that need moving. It's not the same as most people's operation. But then you're also doing it as a collaboration. So I'd love to hear.

One thing. I have a passion for countryside development and how can we live in the countryside taking advantage of the resources we have. And one thing is that we have the land and we should make the best of the land that we can. And our neighbor Jared came to ask if we would like to. To start something with him because he had some highland cattle. And I think it's six, seven Highland cattle. And it was too little to earn any money. It was just a hobby for him. So otherwise he should just send them to slaughtery and stop having animals on his land and the leased land. He leased some land around here or we could do something together and use both farms land. So we decided to go with it. And we invited every neighbors neighbor in geographical area here and said that we should start something. And we have put something in. In the papers for. For agreement for the company that you have to live in this geographical area or have some kind of. Yeah, you have lived here or you have neighbors here, connection to that place, family. Exactly. Some kind of connection to be owner of this company. This company owns the herd of animals, the Highland cattles, but doesn't employ anyone. So the company then hire us for doing the operations and rent from machinery and so on. And so we have two to four people that doing the daily operations, mostly two that move their cattle around and so on. But some days you need more when yeah some of the work need more people and then we step in together and most everyone has another work enterprise up. So we none is working full time within the collaboration company enterprise. So I think that's a key because having animals maybe isn't a full time job as we have it with rotational adaptive grazing. So we do other things like my wife is a part time computer programmer and for me I have been working with a fiber optic network here in this area and doing some other things as well. And I like that to have diverse things with different things to do and I guess it's because I'm not a farm boy so I like to have other things to do as well.

I guess it takes away some of the responsibility. Right. That's one of the hardest things I've experienced is that responsibility seven days a week, 365 days a year. It's tiring in some ways to not be able to easily leave or have people to rely on.

Yeah, we have our neighbor Jerry that came to us which he has his daughter have relatives in Japan. So they did go with a Trans Siberian Railway over and left for several weeks. But we could just step in if someone is sick or anything. We just stepped in for each other. We have continuous communication through digital medias as messenger on the phone and we have shared notes in the. So we can see all the time where every animal is and everything is shared digitally.

That's where you can bring all of your other skills into this I can see and I want to get into it later talking but I wanted to ask you Christian, how does the company actually function? So it's owns the livestock and it pays you for machine rental and labor. And then when you sell the beef, what happens there? Do you all share profit or do you keep it in the company and share meat or we sell it in.

Mainly we sell it in. Reckon we can start there in different recurrings here around us and. But the profit from selling the meat going to the company and then the company pays for the labor and so on. So we try to. The companies shouldn't do any profit in that way. It should go out in labor rather. We also own bed and breakfast. We bought a house where we have our farm shop where we also sell meat and some other people's locally produced food and so. And then rental floor the rooms we have.

So what? So the benefit of this kind of corporation is people can step in and out a bit as they wish and earn a bit of money. You get Some trade off with the land management and meat supply for your family.

And most, most, most farmers here in, in this area where the forestry has begun in from the coastline. The big farms are at the coastline of Sweden and they have animals out on pasture and they have to have their own pasture at the summertime. And then they sent them up in these woodlands in the forestry and they have. What do you call it?

EU subsidies.

Subsidy. Yes, that's the word. Otherwise you get the farmer here in our neighborhood get the EU subsidized or you have amount of money for every day per animal. But as we, we started to have our own operation, we can, we could take more. We had a better profit per. Per animal because we could refine the product sent from the farm instead of having animals just for summertime, get a small amount of money. And then the farmer at the coastline, they were doing a big profit. So that's one of the things that, as I said, we want to live and make the most of our resources here in our neighborhood and just refining the things that we could. It's animals meet. It is in the forestry. Take just not sending forest timber, lumber to the industrial factories, but maybe do something more with. With the lumber here.

And that's. So then you run that as the cooperative bit. And I can see that's a really nice quality of life.

Yeah, it's a cooperative. And then the other has one vote and so on. Yes. So you can't sell your share to another part unless they live in this geographical area or have some connection to this geographical area. So we try to have the company stay put here in the area to the benefit of the people who lives here.

It's a really nice way to do it. And I can see especially for big animals, that's a really nice strategy. But then you do the other things as your own company.

So yeah, the chicken in our farm and the market garden, the very small market garden just for homesteading. As for now it's in our farm. So we have the other owners, they have a bit bigger forestry I think. And one Jerry, he has his own sawmill and so on. So we have some different enterprises for the different owners and we have some working at daycare for children and so on.

Nice. What is your inspirations? You said you took my online course, but I know you've been inspired by a lot of people. Like tell us a bit about some of your influences and what's like inspired that cooperative community model in particular.

I think that part is something that when Jerry came to us and asked Us we just put up in fact the first thing we did it was we wrote a paper. This is how we would like to have it to work. We should be open to people. We should take care of our land environment and so on, so on. And there was. We have. I think it's 10 bullet points that is the center of the company. Nothing about making a large profit. It says that we should live a decent life with the resources we have here. So just that part is. I can't remember that we have been inspired from someone else with that structure of the company. But when we started the company then how we should take care of our resources there. We have as I said several mentors because today we in the digital area era we have the possibility to have mentors all over the world as different from way back when we didn't have Internet and so on. Now we can have peer to peer discussion with other small farmers that we couldn't have before. And that has inspired us very much to have as Richdale or Joel Salatin and for that matter old school as was and Howard and so on. You have an old podcast and you can listen to and be inspired and update your. Your thinking and. And just some something is just mind blowing because as I said I. I'm very much a breed of industrial thinking with just in time and. And so on for. For a big very big factory. So there is a mindset that has to. To reset and start over and that that's where Internet and the inspires inspiration from different mentors has been a very huge factor to not be scared to try because you can solve almost everything and you have. There is almost any anyone that you can speak to or ask and. And get ideas from to. To get you developed and go on further and take better care of your resources there.

Yeah nice. And you're actually like spearheading some of that. You've set up a Facebook group for pastured poultry here in Sweden and also you working on your YouTube channel that's in Swedish but maybe tell us the names of those for Swedish people that can check them out.

Yeah, Sundhult is the name of the YouTube channel and that's one thing that we have done here in Sundhelt. We decided to be a Swedish channel. Almost like your channel for English speaking. The English speaking world. So but we thought that was a gap to inspire in Swedish because not everyone is that comfortable with the English and think it's a bit hard to understand what's going on in the different videos. So we had a goal to Inspire the small scale forms in different ways in Swedish. And I think we just started that journey so we tried to step it up and talk about what we do in our farm here and how we developed your egmobile to suit our lands and so on.

We'll get into that shortly. What about the Facebook groups? Really useful for Swedish producers and it's the sort of thing that people need to set up in every country like for Germany, for France, so that you can get really into the specific regulations and climatic conditions and bird flu and all the things that are going on in different places.

Yeah, it's very different in different parts of Sweden and different parts of Europe. So there's, there's a place for many of these groups and have the peer to peer discussion. And I think it's very nice to have this Facebook group because there's no structure or formal organization. Often we could do some kind of society or union, whatever to, to have collaboration between what subject. It could be any subject. Now it's pastured layers. So I think that loose group discussion going on and I think it's very, very important to have that. And we have. Because it's peer to peer, people have different knowledge in different parts. So together we make it a force to make it work to have a small scale farm doing paste pastured layers. And yeah, it could be bigger as well. But it's really nice, I think.

Christian, one thing that's super nice about it is it's not like a hierarchical thing. Like something that often happens in Facebook groups is if it's set up by a prominent figure or something, then it's. It gets sort of biased in one way of thinking and I touch in with the group because I can see it translated into English. So it's easy for me to follow along and it. That's the quality that shines through for me is it's just like people really coming together to help each other in a. In a really nice way.

And it's not only me, it's perfect in here in Sweden. And we started this group just to have the peer to peer and not, as you said, there shouldn't be the hierarchical structure of the people interacting in the group. So we have to step back and let the discussion go on. But if we have something to add to the conversation, we do. But you have to step back and let the peer to peer discussion going on to know that there are different people with different knowledge with different challenges and there isn't one solution for how to interpret the regulations and so on. So you have to have an open discussion and let the collective mind thing do its thing and have several different solutions to a problem.

Yeah, yeah, nicely put. Before we talk about hens and your egg mobiles, I want to just go back to the highland cattle that you run because you're part of this scheme in Sweden to have animals outside all year. Right. And it's something that it's hard for people to understand that are further south in Europe I guess. But here in Sweden even very hardy climate adapted animals need to be given inside shelter like our native Hialkou cows. Even though they, I've put up a new shelter this winter and they never use it, they never go in there and they're like obviously hardy enough to be outside, especially in the forest where they can get down out of a draw or whatever. But this is an interesting program, John, to just tell us a bit how that works and what's involved.

Yeah, I think it's for the project about 1st of November to last of February that you have to have them then you have to have a shelter down. But we pay amount of money to have them outdoors all, all year round and we have a veterinarian come by once a year and look for every. We have a quite small herd then. So they, they check every animal in the herd to see that they.

You have like 70, 80 head.

Yeah, I think we have about 50 now. So. And they check, we have natural places, natural shelters with rocks and some forest where they can go inside and have some shelter from rain and wind and so on. So they go and check those places. We put some straw and wood chippings in some places that we think they want to, to sleep and so but as you say they, they select other places and, and it's. I think it's very funny at summertime and to, to see where, where the animal stands and you, you start thinking why do they stand at just that location? And then you go there and, and you feel the, the breeze in a hot day that you understand that this is the correct place to feel some cooling breeze and so on and other way around. Now at the wintertime they stand in places where it's a bit warmer but it's hard to. It isn't the place that you should select as a human. That animal has a feeling for which places they should use and so on.

It's the same with grazing, right. It's like their lives depend on it and it's such a humbling teacher to really watch animals in that way and see that of course they know better than you.

Yeah, yeah. And then that's. As an engineer coming to farming, it's very interesting to be that, that observer of our land and animals and everything of the ecological system around us. I think that if you had, if I had been brought up at the farm, I haven't had the same mind of observation as I have now as coming in as an engineer for this farming operation. So I take that as something good for me to be that observer.

Yeah, I am. That's what it's all about, right?

Yeah. But they go outside all the time, all year round. And now at the winter time we do bale grazing when it was a bit better weather here. Now it's quite wet and the land is quite muddy. We did put out the bales in October when the land was still a bit hard and put out all bales in the pasture that we should use in the wintertime. And then we just let them to have bales after one after another in the wintertime.

Yeah.

So we don't have to mess up the pastures with drying trackless with a heavy, very heavy bales. Then the passage is just destroyed with the surface.

Are you fed enough south that you will freeze and thaw and freeze and thaw.

So this year is the first year that we have done only bay racing before we had some different, we have tested different options with, with the feeding with the animals. But this, this with the bail grazing is very good for us and it look very muddy when, when the animals have been through there. But it's just a bit of the surface and it, when, when the spring comes it just lushes again.

So yeah, perfect. And that's. So it's a bit like in one level it feels a bit silly that you have to pay money to, to be able to do this. But on another way it's a lot cheaper than building the infrastructure to house animals and having to put bedding down repeatedly and to take it out with a machine and all of that. So it's.

And we couldn't afford to have structures, buildings to house that many animals here. So for us it's the only option I think with these small, very small fields. And so we lease land in our neighborhood and we use the owner's land and as I said, we have rotational adaptive grazing in our small fields in the summertime. As soon as it's possible we start to doing this rotational grazing and we have. Because at our land we. There hasn't been that much animals not year, all year round, but in the summertime. But we, we can see when we have the animals in the wintertime as well the vegetation is different, totally different what it has been before. So in this I think we have had year round in three years I think we see that the grass is much more grass. It's different types of grasses in the pastures and so on. So we see that we are changing the possibility to have even more animals on our land. So I think the industrial way to farm has. We haven't take care of the resources in our small land, small scale farmland. So I think it's interesting to see and something we want to show in our YouTube channel and so on.

It gives you a lot of confidence now and that's the knowing when you see for yourself the results.

Yeah, but we always hear from they who have farmed in other ways for many years with tractors and so on that it should. You can't do in that way and you will have problems with whatever with a lot of different things. But we have noticed that it works and as I said we can see that just giving up ploughing and letting more different type of grass coming up. We have a better season of, of grazing and so on. So we, we can see the small, small difference from year to year. Yeah, that's it. As an observer it's very interesting to see that and, and not using any fertilizer or so on. So yeah. More than chicken manure.

What's the idea of that scheme? Is it like a pilot scheme and they're gonna open it out to make it easier for people do you think over time to have animals outside all year?

You talk about this winter program. Yeah, I think the first time in Sweden it was a bigger ranch in south of Sweden in Skne that just. They go have to talk to the officials and this works here in southern Sweden and they come up with this program. But I don't know really why it's so hard, why we have to pay that amount. We have a quite small herd and we have only in a strict area. So we don't have to pay that much. If you have a bigger herd and you have a bigger area or even several areas you have to put up. I don't remember how much more it costs but then it getting quite expensive. So. So one way that it works for us is that we have it quite small scale operation.

So I think essentially it's paying the vets fee.

Yeah. And you pay for animals and then the amount of land you're using and so on. So that there are some different steps in the in the fee for having a part of this program. So I think that's why not that many try it in Sweden because they can't see the profit of it, the revenue of that kind of operation because it hasn't been done that much in Sweden. So I think they have a fear of. Of not making it economical, feasible. So.

Well, I guess you know of most of the people like it's most of the regenerative ag folk that are doing it and it's. It's really interesting to see and I guess it's also just seeing it takes time for things to change. But we talked about before like they start to consider things with eggmobiles and I know like a lot of people that have come through my farm have had to adapt the egg mobiles to their country's specific regulations or interpretations of regulations. And it's a slow process but we see things start to change slowly and maybe it's a good segue into talking about your egg mobile. And I know that you folks applied your engineering brains to the process. So maybe describe a bit what. Well tell us about the one we see behind you and the sort of design considerations that you put into them.

We took Tokyo masterclass and we ordered 200 chickens in the end of January 2019 and I think we should in June, I think the. Hence the chicken would arrive. So we hadn't. We had non structure for chicken at our farm and we had to start doing something and because we had done your masterclass we we just copied your. Your egg mobile with some small changes but mostly and that's wonderful because that got us started and you have to do it just start doing something to get to the next level. And so we have used this for three summers and this summer we built our own modification of your egg mobile. And from what we learned having that in our land and how we operate with collecting eggs and different things, problems that we had with water or yeah everything. So we made our own version. But I think it's. Here is the Internet again. There are many, many types of bills and you can lend ideas from different and build your own. But it's very nice to have a structure that is so tested as yours is. It has been used for in many countries and different sizes of farms and so on. So it's a proven concept. So it's a very good start for anyone that want to try this with egg mobiles. And I think many more people should try it in their small scale farm because it's doing wonders to the land, to the pastures And I think many people want to buy this kind of eggs.

Mm. For sure. It's a great gateway product now, too.

Yeah. And many people know that that chicken doesn't. The industrial chicken farms with thousands and thousands, ten thousands, forty thousand chicken doesn't have that kind of life that you as egg consumer would like them to have.

Yeah, exactly.

So I think it's a very, very good product to open eyes for. For food production generally.

Yeah.

Because it's quite easy to understand with the caged hens and. And so on and industrial factories with no windows and just artificial lights and not having actual ecological land to scratch and search for worms and insects and do the grazing and so on. So it's very easy to talk to people and have them to understand food production and things that we have, as with pesticides and so on, and what land and animals do in combination for the environment, for our own health and for the animal health and for the land health and so on. So it's a very good way to talk about food production to have eggs.

But tell us a bit more about the. Because you've been automating the new one or did you automate the old one as well?

No, we haven't automated that much. We have some with the water. We have a water tank and put. So we have. I don't know if you call it water bells for water drinkers. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And. But just the only thing where we have automated is the lighting where we could. Can have timers. We think it's quite nice to go out to the pasture, exercise and to look after. To be with the chickens. But what we have done in the new eggmobile is we have made a separate room for the. For the nesting box that we can close. We. We take all the chickens out of. Of that little room and collect all the eggs with no. With no hens in. In that room. So we can take our time. And we have.

Because. Are you referring to like in. In the. Like in my Eggmobile, for example, you've got hens, like, trying to get around you and walking over things and. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And. And this room we shuttered for the night, so when they sit, they have another compartment that. Where they sit overnight so the manure doesn't come into the nesting box at all. And so we open that door early in the morning and shut it in the afternoon so they don't sit and sleep in the room for the nesting box. And almost the same as you, we have put some net as flooring for the nesting box. So the dirt and if there is a cracked egg, it's just go through to the bottom. And one thing that you have a compartment that you open to collect eggs. We just put a loose board on and so we just slide it into the. To the nest when we are collecting eggs. So it's no hidden hinges or something like that. So it's very easy to. You can take this board, take it away, and then you can take all the mats.

Yeah, change the mats easier.

And when you slide the board in, you can put the tray upside the nesting box area and just collect egg. Having the trays sitting on the board.

That's nice because I always work on the floor, but I'm quite used to crouching on my heels. That's like a natural way I sit, but I see it's really not comfy for a lot of people.

And we lifted the nestes a bit from the floor and put a platform in between that we can slide away when we are collecting and put at the middle of. We have nestes on. On both sides. And so we have a platform where they're jumping up and going up so we. We can stand up when collecting.

Yeah, it's nice.

We don't have to bend and crunch and so on.

So nice.

Small. Small. Different.

Yeah, but it's those little details that add up to.

One more thing that we did. As you have your roosters, what you call it Roosts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have that along your egg bill. We have put it 90 degrees and made like a triangle like this. And we have a door into the. That room, that area. And that make us have area to put cradles. What do you call it for? Not cradles. When you. When you're getting the hens in crates. The crates, yeah.

When the young birds are delivered, you can put the whole crate through.

Yeah, exactly. And if we taking them to slaughtery, as we do as well, we can take the whole cradle and stack them in. In this area. When we. And also when we. We put them into the polytunnel or take them out, it's very easy to have that compartment, that room underneath the roosters. So it's very nice. And no manure at the nesting box, because there's no nesting box in this.

That's very nice. When you put them in the tunnel in winter, do you dock the egg mobile to the tunnel? Do you have it all in the tunnel?

We take them. We take them by hand and count them when we move in them. So at the evening when they have started to sleep we get egg mobile to the tunnel and then we move them by hand so we can count among the many they are and so on.

And with the bird flu this spring we had the eggman bills docked to the tunnel. And I think that this, it's a very good idea. I think it's a good idea in that it reduces stress of moving homes, as it were, but also a little bit more protected for egg laying that it's. It's still dark and it's. It's staying warmer. The eggs don't freeze so easily if you want to run without heat or anything like that.

The only downside we had talked to use the eggmobile in the wintertime as well docked to the tunnel. But the only downside is that you get resting time for the eggmobile through.

The winter for license.

Yeah, exactly. And you can clean it out really well. If you're using it all the time, then you don't have that time and resting time for the eggmobile.

Yeah.

But now we have two eggmobiles so there was a photo of that to make it possible to switch and so on when changing her.

Tell us a bit about your spent birds because you've been marketing like pulled hen, like pulled pork is a very common thing here in Sweden but you've been. You send the birds off to slaughter and you sell them either whole or as pooled.

Yes, as a whole at the recordings. So. And again with Internet we can do some marketing with through our Facebook page and newsletters so on and we can suggest how you can cook your chicken, your hen. Because hen is. Everyone talks about the curry hen but there are so many different ways to cook hen. So we have done some cold hen as taco instead of meat and tacos and, and as a burger.

And it's really tasty, right?

Yeah, it's very good and it's easy to. To cook. So it's. And we have had a lot of people a bit older that says, oh, do you sell hen? You can't get this in the, in the store. But I remember hen was so good when I was a little boy, little girl. So there is a demand for hen and, and as I said before about food production now people see that there's a second uses of the layers when you buy egg from industrial facility. You don't know what happened to the hen after they stopped laying eggs. But here we can say no. The hens that you have had eggs from now you can have the, the meat from the hands and make something more so that there's this Longer circle of life. Yeah. That. That people can see.

That's great. Yeah. I've seen some of your Instagram posts on that and it looks really great. Is it working that. Are you able to sell the hens?

Yeah.

In the volume that you have and.

Yeah, we haven't marketing the hands that much. But we sell out of the hands as well. We do, but we don't have that much hands. About 300 a year we had have so far. Now we will. I guess we will go for 500, 400, 500 hence this year, I guess.

And that's all through Rico that you sell.

Yeah, mostly through Ricoh and the small farm shop that we have in this sequence. Farmer, the corporation enterprise that we have where we have a small farm shop that. Where we sell. So we have people coming asking for hand there as well.

And anything.

They are frozen. So we sell all year round. We do a slaughter at autumn we have done for the past two years anyway. And then we have them frozen. So we sell throughout the year but we sell them out.

Yeah. Two questions. One is I'm curious how much it costs to have to get the hen back from the slaughtering.

Remember, I haven't done the economics for that part. The problem for us here, or in fact in most of the southern Sweden is there are so few slaughtery for small animals like hens and rabbits and so on. So we have to go a bit. So you have to take that into account as well. The transportation of. So mobile slaughter should have a great.

Someone's got to do it.

Yeah. And so we have played with the thought to have a slaughter here. But we don't want to be a slaughtery operation.

No.

And to make it profitable and make investment for slaughtering then you have to put through some.

Some chickens to make it.

Make it work. So there's a mismatch there.

Yeah.

But maybe we will set up our own slaughter later on, but only have a very few slaughtery slaughter days for our own. Because as you. You have your own slaughter and you know it's. If you should slaughter anyone else's, then it's a lot of more work.

Yeah. A lot of paperwork, veterinarians and so on.

So it's. It's not economical then.

So. Yeah. And. But you're able to sell the hens at a similar sort of kilo price to what we would sell boilers for, for example.

Yeah, yeah.

It's pretty good.

Yeah. Yeah. It hasn't been an issue. No. No one has said anything about. About the price of. Of the hands that's great. As well as as the eggs because we sell at records as said and we have a bit higher price than competitors at the same recurring and they when they don't sell out they lower the price. But we had more customers. They choose to have a customer that tells the story that you know what's going on on the farm rather than buy a cheap egg from from someone else. Even if it's market as small scale pastured.

What do you sell eggs for? Nuorica?

We have our 30 trays. We take 130 Swedish crowns. And one thing that we have that I think no one else have in the rigorins we are. We have a plastic trays as your yellow ones that we have as recycling system. So we sell it and the customer comes back with a tray and we reuse them, take them and wash them off and we use them again. So they pay the disposal. I think it calls deposit.

Yeah, yeah.

Deposit, yes. Of 10 crowns for the tray and then we reuse them over and over again.

So that's great. That saves all the inventory and having to store those things because we buy massive pallets at a time and then you've got to find somewhere to put them that's got to be dust free and meeting all the regulations there.

Yeah. And when you buy them, if you. You have to buy them in that big amount to with the transportation cost and so on and then you have to store them and at the recurrings. It's just a brilliant marketing because you see we use this red red trace and you can see the people in the parking lot coming with a ray trace and everyone knows which which seller they are going to. So it's a very good marketing trick to to have these red trays where people going for some back at reco ring.

Nice. Anything to say about Reco rings? I mean I've talked a lot about it that people following my channel will hopefully know what Reco is and heard me talk about it. But anything you want to say about your perspective on Rekko Rings?

I think it's a brilliant concept and why it's working. I think it's because of Facebook. It's a free platform where a lot of people is they spending a lot of time at Facebook and they see in the feed that something is going on. I think it's much harder to make it an own platform and having people going to that platform. In Facebook you are at the platform and suddenly you see that oh it's recoil again and then you get a reminder of maybe I should buy some locally produced food. So I think one key point that it's working that well is the platform Facebook. Facebook is multinational corporation and so on. But it's a free platform that we can use for our advantages. And just having the connection, the communication with the customer. We try to answer every single. You answer when you as a customer order something, you make it as a comment in Facebook from, from the. From the seller that you will buy from and you make comment and then the seller put some answer that we noted that you order this. And we try to make it personal and we have different answers to everyone try to have different answers and get a bit personal. We know some person is a hockey father and his kids, his boys is playing ice hockey and eating a lot of eggs and we can make something in our answer to point at that. So we have a kind of communication with our customers that is very hard to have in any other platform. If you're using a webshop platform, you don't get that personal communication. The people just order and then it's done and you get automated mail and so on. But you lose that personal touch in the communication which I think is our small scale farm advantage to have that relationship with our customers.

That's a really nice point Christine because it's something I've always expressed is it's nice to have that direct personal communication, but it's also nice that it's very contained and brief. It's not listening to someone tell you about their cats for half an hour and just buy a tray of eggs and but most people are just doing copy and paste tech for bestowing like thanks for your order, whatever and everyone's response like I can remember we'll have like 100, 200 orders. And it's. It's not personal at all. It's just thanks for your order. So it's really nice to be able.

To often, often the. The seller have a. You have the order number 12 please give it when you come to to collect your order. So but I think you can say that, but you can thank you for just change some words in every. Every answer. And I think that we're talking Facebook. Facebook has its algorithm and if you have different. If you have the same answer almost then you are a bot. Some somewhat. If you have different answer, I think you trigger the algorithm to get you higher in that RICO group.

Interesting. And it doesn't take so long so it's worth it. And I like that.

Of course you use the same phrases but different days and so on. So it's not that hard to put up with the differentiation of the phrases you use. We will let the hen lay eggs for you. We will fill a red tray for you. We will fill a tray and we will fill a tray with medium large eggs. And you have already. You have different answers to the same order.

No. You guys won a bunch of money now for. Was it an environmental award? Tell us a bit about that.

Yeah, it was very surprising. It was a electrical company that trades for electricity in Sweden that we doesn't use. We doesn't use that company. But we won their climate prize. They have a fund for climate initiatives. So before they have made some projects and now this year they had some of 100,000 Swedish crowns that they would let someone have. And that was us this year. And because of. We are talking about environment. We. We use solar panels, we drive electric cars and tells a lot of what. What the problems is with owning electric cars and advantages and solar panel, how much does it generate, what's the economics and so on. And of course our small scale farm operations and mostly we got this price just that we are talking a lot of environmental issues and what you as a sole person, what you can do by yourself to do something about environment.

This is things that people. I'll put links in the show notes to YouTube and Instagram and that's a great place where people can see like your eggmobile and how you've set up the nests and things like that there.

Yeah, so we did. When we built our second eggmobile, we made a very thorough description of every step we made and told everyone it's open for everyone to. To see how we built our egg.

And There's Stuff on YouTube if you can understand Swedish also.

Yeah, we. We have had some asking for. To translate it to English with English sub subtitles. So maybe we will do that.

Have you, have you seen the automated subtitles like from Swedish to English, do they function?

No, no, I think it. It doesn't work that well.

No.

What I've tried, I have tried to. To just make it from Swedish to Swedish subtitles, but it hasn't worked that well as well. So the Swedish language is quite hard. Yeah, yeah, it works almost for English. It works very much better for English subtitles.

I see you posting a lot about entrepreneurialism and I mean you've obviously got a lot of topics you're interested in around the farm, but I'm curious what's you're looking at like micro business entrepreneurialism. Is that. Have you got other things in the pipeline that you're building up around the farm.

We always try to find new things to do and as I say, I'm a curious man, like to learn new things all the time. So one thing is with solar panels and electric cars. So I do some keynotes about those things as well as one part as one enterprise. So we have on form, open forms and we have keynotes and lectures at the farm about the farm operation as well as for electric cars and so on. So but as. As I said from at the beginning, I. I have a passion for the countryside. What can we do with in the countryside? And I think there one one thing is to. To find things to do outside farming, but doing from the countryside. And I think I mentioned it briefly that I have been working with a fiber optic network here and have put a lot, a lot of time in that for some years now. Both me and Hannah have. We have. I don't want to count the amount of hours we spent to build the fiber optic network in this area.

You mean you were one of the initiators to create the network there?

Yeah, and I was the project manager when building. So every day I was out looking for the diggers and everything. So it kept going as we would like it to do. Now we have if there should be, if there's groundwork in some kind of wastewater or anything you new a new road or something, then you have to mark out the fiber optics over the different lands. And that's something I do. I go outside. So I this afternoon I will go to a place where there will be a new wastewater work done and I will go there and mark out where the fiber optic goes in that. In that lens. So there are different. So but the fib optics is one we have talked about the digital Facebook and communication through mentors through. Through the Internet, YouTube and so on. So I think the Internet and fiber optics is a base of being entrepreneurial in the countryside. Yeah, I think it's brilliant. You can have a web shop selling whatever you want wherever in the world you are situated.

It makes me laugh because we signed a €3,000 agreement for fiber optic before it even bought the house. That's how important it is living out here.

Yeah, it is. And Sweden have it gets more and more digital for making all stuff from banking and everything in society. When you are going to have the doctor's appointment you can do it through the website and so on. And you can have a doctor's appointment through the Internet as well. So the fiber optics is. Is one of the piler for building a good society. I think as well as good.

Tell me any. Any of the sort of recent books you've been reading that you think are must reads for people.

I think there are a lot of books that you should be but I think Joel Salatin's latest book. No, maybe it's not the latest book. I don't remember the title but I have to look it up. Don't remember. See because that that book takes the. The small scale enterprise and farming from many different perspective. And.

Was it your successful farm business?

Yep, yep, exactly that one. That was very inspiring. Even if we have been doing this for some years but just the mindset and one thing is that Joel sees the digital, the communication via Internet that it's very important and I think that's one thing that hasn't been one of his points before. But in this book just that building relations and building relations through Internet is one very big key point for a small scale farm to have the direct connection to the consumer. So and that the relationship and of course diversity for me it's what can I do with the forestry buying a small band band meal and so on so that you see that you can build off the resources you have on your farm because situation it's context based from where you live and what do you want to do with your life as well. And as for me, you don't have to do just one thing. You don't have to just be a farmer if you have like corporation as we with our neighbors we can do different things. I can do the fiber optics work, I can do lecture keynotes about electric cars and yeah different things. So I think that sounds like you've.

Got a really nice balance going on. Is that fair to say?

I think we have a lot of things going on maybe a bit too much and I think we started with our own small scale operation in 2019 and just started coming up to 2020 and coming to Mars and then Covid hit and then you have to rethink everything because we aim to have a lot of open farms and discussions and so on our farm. But all of that just disappeared and has been then for up till now and it's continuing. So we haven't had that spin off of economical that we thought that we should have. So mainly because we couldn't launch the things the enterprises part that we had in mind when.

Yeah. How's the COVID situation affected the Ricoh rings? Like how have you managed the Ricoh?

Yeah, it was different in different wreck rings some Started well and did go well for almost a year. And last winter, spring, sometime there it just dropped and now it's just lashing again with customers. And we have never had that good sale at that recurring. So what we could see at the beginning of COVID is that I think every recurring just raised a bit in sales. But yeah, I think many people did think of where do we get food if there is a crisis and it don't have to be war or something, it could be natural, catastrophical in some part of the world, then we don't get the food that we are used to buying the store. So I think there's a better knowledge about in the people around that we have to take better care of the land, we have to have food if the crisis hit us, whatever the crisis.

Is, it's definitely true. I was looking last year for B2 apple trees and I couldn't find a single supplier in Sweden they said that all the private people have been buying them out to put in their gardens. And yeah, it's good in a way, I guess.

Yeah. And I think the recurring. I hope there will be more small producers selling their products there because you don't have to be only a food producer. You can do it as a side hustle or so on. And I think it's. We talk about mental health among people and I think one thing is this nature being with the nature is one thing that we have lost when becoming industrial. Then you go into the factory, manufacturer doesn't have windows and so on, and you lose the connection with the nature. Instead you go for retreats and so for a small amount of time, but being in the nature, more time all the time, it's very important, I think. And so I hope that even if it's just doing a small amount of carrots in your garden and sell them at Reko, I think it's important in many different ways for our mental health and. And connection to the community. Yeah, yeah. Connection with the community and for food supply inside the country. Because before we got tractor and so on, everyone had its own market garden and a few pigs and some cows and so on. But when we industrialized and measured efficiency in. In an amount of meat or whatever, you have lost that diversity for people.

And resilience that comes with it.

Yeah.

And the skill base of how to take care of it, how to take.

Care of it and prepare food and storage, food fermentation and so on, that no, everything should go in the freezer instead of making something of the produce that you have and to be stored without electricity and so on.

What about your children Christian? Do you think they're going to end up taking on the farm?

Maybe I think they could. And I think one thing is that we talk about it's not the only thing that you have to do. You can spend your hours a day in different enterprises. I think in the generation that I was brought up in then you should go to the factory work seven to four from when you entered school to get you get retired. But I think that is something that are shifting now. We can see it in our local area that more and more houses are inhabited with younger people want to make something more with their lives not working that many hours. And yeah I think myself I have always thought about that I'm not going to retire at 65 or so but I'm not going to work with the same thing that I have been doing ever before. But I will do something else. But I hope I will continue working with something until I drop.

That sounds good. Yeah. That's a bit of the same sort of process I've been going through shifting.

Yeah And I think we must have a mental state that you don't are one kind of work job. You you can shift you can do try many things and so you aren't a carpenter from when you end school until you retire. We must have a society where you can shift and do many different things that's important and it's us as people that decide that it's okay to do this. I think we have a lot of papers and education to certify that the people can do one thing with Internet and online schooling and so on. We can shift our knowledge continuously all the time. So you not there's just a paper doesn't say what you can it it's how curious and what you want to learn that's important. And we as if you own a company you have to see that skill in people that they want to learn new. It's not the grades from school that tells you what that person can do but more that how curious that person is and what if it wants to learn more and new things.

That's music to my ears. That's a bit of the sort of process I've been going through the last couple of years with the difficulty of putting myself out on social media and things and then feeling obliged to keep doing something because someone else has expectations of that. Then yeah it's really nice way to end this conversation. It's been pleasure to talk with you Christian. Thanks very much for taking the time.

Thanks. It was a pleasure to talk about our farm here in Sweden and hopefully it was inspirational for someone to try. Just go out and do it, start and if it fails, it fails. But then you have tried it.

Nice. Yeah, nice words. Thanks for that. And I'll put links to Your Instagram and YouTube and Facebook below so people can check out the farm. Thanks so much, Kristen.

Thanks.

Okay folks, if you made it this far, I'd love to hear if you enjoy these kind of conversations, I'd love to speak to dozens and dozens of farmers and just hear what's going on in different parts of the world and things that are changing and happening in the weird times that we're living through. If you've got suggestions of who I should speak to, stick them in the comments below. I'll have a look at them and I'll be sure to try and connect and put that together. You can find out about all the farms that I'll be talking to in their social media and their websites, etc. In the links below. And as always, you can find out more about my books and educational offerings in the links below. See you in a video soon.

Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't.