I JUST SHIPPED 10 TONS OF BOOKS (Regenerative Agriculture)

So this book has been two years in the making now and it really began going to Thailand, the country I know very well to have an extended writing retreat. So today's video is quite different. Not focused on making videos at the moment. I'm focused on writing and I'm here in one of my favorite cities in the world in Chiang Mai in the north of Thailand. It's been an almost impossible book to write and the core theme has been as a comparative analysis. So whole farm planning, but then comparative analysis of many different enterprises that fit in this space. In order to respond to questions that I receive repeatedly as an educator and mentor for people coming into farming, I really looked at Making Small Farms Work, which we sent out to over 80 countries and got great results reviews for. But that book was very quickly written. It was about getting information out really quickly. The editing wasn't great and so I wanted to update that book thoroughly and ended up doubling the number of chapters and really updating the economics and details, the spreadsheets and data that really make the granulated decision making functional on a small farm. So I started outlining the book concept, started fleshing it out and hit a wall quite a few times. Had to put the book down here and there and then came back to it and started really working on it last winter again and got a lot of the way through. I was in the process of working on the screen a lot, so then I'd have to print out copies to see really what it looks like on paper. It's very different to working on a screen to what something looks like in your hand. I had more help with this book with setting out the indesign format and my editor did. Did an amazing job really changing the order of the contents of the book and giving me a lot of feedback and calls for reflection. And yeah, it was a very interesting process and I really set out to write a book that just doesn't exist in the farming literature. It's never been done before to have a comparative analysis of such diverse range of enterprises. And I feel like that is a really important element of our work, getting into the numbers, etc. Joel Salatin's work always really inspired me in the beginning because he was someone willing to share money and data that other people weren't. And I feel like we've taken that and gone a whole new level with it. And I think that's really what's important for people coming into this, especially people coming into this who are not from a farming background to get a sense of scale and the money needed to be invested to get certain outcomes, etc. And whilst that will vary in different countries, different contexts, I think the underlying pattern language remains the same. And that's what makes this book powerful and of benefit to so many people. So after a bunch of prototyping and helping gain attention online through updating everyone with snippets, etc, we then ran what became the most highly funded Kickstarter in the field of farming ever. I believe today we're slaughing chickens, which is a fantastic time to tell you about regenerative agriculture. It's got chapters all about how to slaughter chickens, how to run the slaughter step by step by step. That was beyond all my expectations. I knew the book would get funded, but I didn't quite know how far that would go. And it's been amazing to receive the support to be able to get this print run done in full colour and out to the printers. And we went to the printers to see how that would look. We've made it. We've made it at the printers. What do you think of that whole thing? I think you cannot do this by in your home in open source. It's not possible. It's pretty amazing machine. Very cool. I've just got home from two weeks of sailing in sunny Gibraltar back to cold Sweden, where it started snowing again today. These arrived when I was away and it looks fantastic. I'm really happy with the quality of the print and it's much smaller than the copies that I was preparing myself for testing, so it's well within the weight limit and I should have all the labels together by the 31st of January, which means I'll be shipping these out in the first few days of January to all the people that supported Kickstarter primarily, and only once that is done, then I will offer it up for sale. So here we are. I don't have the labels yet. I've got all the boxes back at the farm, but I'm here with all the books and today I'm just focused on signing books and I've got about eight pallets to do. I've only done two already, but I've only been here a couple of hours. I think I can do about a pallet an hour and a half. So I'm just going through it, putting a signature on the front page here and then stacking them all up. And I think I'll get this finished by tomorrow, then I've got to come back with all the boxes and package and labor them all the Good thing about renting a warehouse like this is it's right on the main road where a delivery truck dropped off all the books very easily with the forklift behind the wall. And what I can do once all the books are boxed and packaged is I can wrap them back up with a protective wrapping and have the post service pick them all up at once, which will give them a bit of a day's job, but it's much preferable than taking them myself. Normally when I'm just selling books from the farm, you know, on a day to day basis, then because we live quite rurally, the post service will actually pick them up. So that saves a lot of hassle. But that's if I'm dealing with, you know, 50, 100 books a week or something. But when there's several thousands go out, everything's got to be a little bit more scaled up. It's a pleasure to do. I just listen to podcasts and getting into the groove of it and it's quite enjoyable just to be relaxed and listening on podcasts and signing books and thinking about all the amazing people that are going to read this book. It's such a pleasure. So this is how the books have come to me, in pallets stacked up in four, which is quite convenient. A big part of the job now is just unpacking all the books carefully, which will make it much easier when I get to the boxing and labeling because all the books you see behind all ready to go. So it'll be much quicker just to make a production line with that. I was going to hire people to help me, but I think I'll do it myself. I quite like seeing everyone's names on the labels and just having a meditative process is quite nice. So I'm going to shut the camera down and start moving a bit quicker again because it's a lot to do and the days are short. These are your signed books. I've been hard at it today and every single one of the open books has been signed by me, so I'm looking forward to getting these packaged. So another important part of the process is printing. So I use postnord's PAX OFF online system and it's a little finicky. It's running in a Windows machine inside my Mac and I paid a company to turn a spreadsheet into the labels for me and then they come out like this. So this is the printing service that Postnord use. You can see I'm printing first class and so these get stuck onto the boxes so far, I've only printed about 600. It takes some time and they are going to upload a thousand today on New Year's Eve, and the last thousand will come by the 4th of January, which gives me just enough time to get these out before we go on holiday. For a sense of scale. This is about 600 boxes and labels out of 3,000. So these will get labels stuck on and then be packed up at the warehouse. Darling, sitting here, putting on these labels and then I'll go up to the warehouse to actually pack them. This is how they come out on the double sheet. And it's really nice for me to actually be looking at the names and addresses of everyone that's bought the book. I often make little workflows like this. I'm very happy sitting on the floor or crouching when I'm working in the garden, etc. It's how I've always worked, so it can be quite efficient. We have these really nice book boxes. So these open up and it forms a little compartment for the book when you lift these up and tuck this one in. And so the book should be really well protected. And yeah, it's been really fun just looking. I've literally seen every country I can think of. It's every European country and then Southeast Asia, Bookstore, Vietnam and the Philippines and Thailand. There's books to Japan and China and Mongolia, South America, all over South America, North America and Canada. It's really nice to see the names and addresses of people that are buying the book and to think about all these farms that might pop up. But, yeah, let us know when you get the book. If you can put a post on Instagram or Facebook, just show us a picture of you with the book, wherever you are. That'd be awesome. I think it'll be great to start sharing where this book ends up and we'll form a network online through that. So one thing that goes on with the printing to create these labels is that sometimes the machine cannot work out what someone's true address is. So I don't know if you'll make this out, but I come into this program here and it shows me all the labels ready to print, but some are invalid, like this one. Somebody's postal code is incorrect. So I need to then go into it, find their email address, go on to Kickstarter, look them up over on Kickstarter here, and then I can find what their correct address is here. For example, it's missing the city, the primary city. So then I can input that and save it again. So about possibly, Probably 10% needs manually addressing like that. So it takes a long time to print out 3,000 labels like this. And because the printing program is running via Windows, it's a bit buggy and sometimes it crashes. But as long as the job has made it to the print queue, which you won't be able to see on the screen, so well, it works out in the end, but it's a lot of faffing. It's full day's work to print all these labels, but in the beginning when I sent out making small farms work, I was doing all this by hand, writing everything out by hand on envelopes. This is definitely a big step up and how it's done in the industry, but it makes a lot of sense before the sun's up to start the process of packaging. This is the bit I'm most concerned about. It's going to take a while because the boxes require multiple steps to fold them out. So it's going to be a slow process and it's probably the biggest part of the job. And I've got to repack them onto pallets to be able to get the postal company to come pick up hundreds of books at a time in pallets. So we'll see how that goes. Okay, so, new beginnings, New year. What I've got to do now is pack up each of these books into one of these boxes. They're fiddly. You've got to make up the box and tuck this flap in so it takes some time to put it together. I'm going to have to basically work out the fastest way to do this and then stack these finished books onto a pallet that can be wrapped and they will go out. So I kept all the protective cornering and these boxes are pretty good quality, so hopefully I'll be able to pile through a lot today before I go and pick up my daughter. So process of packaging takes about an hour to assemble one of these pallets. And we've got a deadline now for Tuesday. It's Friday now, but I've got to deal with stuff at the farm, take care of our son and the busy packing before we go away for two months. Still got a thousand more boxes to come. This is what I've got assembled so far, but there's going to be 19 pallets going out of here on Tuesday if all goes to plan. And then the book will be available for sale shortly after online for the general public. And they will be getting packed by the service that I'm using near Stockholm. That works with handicapped people. And so that allows me to start selling the book while we're away on holiday. So busy days, lots to do. So this is where I'm at, folks. I reckon by my estimation, six hours left of packaging and wrapping pallets and then we'll be getting these out to you on Tuesday next week. So we are down to last 500 books and deadline is tomorrow to have all the pallets wrapped and ready and get everything out the door. So, busy day today. Just finishing the last bit off. And now that I'm transferring the books over to the company in Stockholm and that I've talked about, the last of the signed books is going out today. So there's a few people on the Kickstarter campaign who didn't respond to the survey. And so they unfortunately will not get signed copies. And that's because I've got to just send pallets of books over there. So there's no way to be able to manage that. But we've had ample time and so that's the decision I've had to make. Otherwise we wouldn't get it from a couple of months. And I think it's preferable to get the book than to get one with my signature in any way. So Grace is here, and Grace is organizing seven copies to go to the libraries in Sweden. And so when you register an ISBN, that's the number on the back of the book here. When you register a book, you have to send copies, legal copies, to the libraries here in Sweden. That's seven copies. And that means it'll get inputted into the global system. So good job, Gracie. It. Okay, nearly 10 tons of books are packed and they're going out tomorrow. So last step now. I've just got to wrap these pallets up to protect them on their journey to our local town to the sorting center, and then they'll be on their way. Okay? So thank you so much everyone who bought this one. Kickstarter, that's what it looks like. I finished. There's 10 tons of books behind me. They're all going out tomorrow morning. So fantastic achievement. I'm super proud of all of you that supported the campaign and I'm quite proud of myself now. It's been a much bigger job than I thought it would be be. But I'm happy it's all coming to a close. Johanna asked why I did it all myself and why I didn't employ people to help me. But, you know, one thing I love about this process of self publishing is I get to read Every single name and address of who buys the book. And I did that with my last book too. And I love it because I see just all the amazing places this book is ending up. And I've literally seen 80 countries as I've been packing these and many old friends, many people I know through professional networks. So it's really great to see those names and just get a sense of who's buying the book. Now something I'm doing, which I've never done before, is shipping out books to a packaging company now. So that means it allows me to offload the packaging which means I can sell books while I'm away for the next couple of months. And interestingly, I mean this book has quickly become the most successful pre ordered book about farming ever in the history of the world, I think, I imagine. And I set up a little email form for people that want to know when it's for sale and 2,000 people have signed up for that already in the last couple of weeks. So it looks to be a great textbook for the, for the genre, for this generation. So I hope that's the case. I would love to hear from you what you think about it. When you get your book, please tag a picture of you on Facebook or whatever social media you use. Instagram. We'd love to see where these end up and I'm super excited to hear your comments and feedback. So please do be in touch with that. It's happening. Okay, Lori is here to pick everything up but I've still got 20 books to do the last minute one. So we're getting them finished and the lorry's loading up. He's got room for 18 pallets. That's exactly how many we have to put on. Just got the last books done in the nick of time as well as got a cheeky jang cedar and six row cedar on here. Just reflecting. It's an exciting moment for me to have all the these books finally going out to you all. But just reflecting, I'm going to spend more on postage this year than it costs to buy our farm. That's kind of insane. A six figure postage bill. Okay, that's it. Full lorry. I hope you really enjoy the book. I'm going on holiday now for two, two months. I'm going to have an amazing time. See you very soon.