I'm going on a farm-roadtrip that YOU made possible

I'm off on a road trip. I'm doing something I've never done before, which is go off in the middle of the season. It's near the end of the season now, but it's unusual for me to be able to go and visit places during the actual production season. And I thought it's high time I go and catch up with some of our former students and interns and see what amazing job they're doing and document that for you guys. So I've got about 6,000km to cover in the next few weeks. I'm going eventually to the west coast of Ireland where We're teaching a 10 day regenerative agriculture training. And I thought with the different plans I had to go see some other people. I thought, well, I may as well turn this into an epic road trip. I bought myself a pop up tent. This is an awesome product from Autohome in Italy. It's a hard shell tent that very nice for taking on long distance camping. And it's highly insulated so it's quiet and much warmer so you can actually use it year round. It's an expedition tent. Something I found out about it is that you can actually use this pop up tent to camp in areas you're not allowed to camp typically because it doesn't actually extend outside of the vehicle. It means you're allowed to pull it up anywhere that you can park a vehicle basically. And so that's pretty cool because that opens up opportunities on longer distance travels. And so I'm quite excited to test this out and let you know how it goes. It's a very good quality product and wasn't the cheapest one that you can get. But I think the cheaper knockoffs are definitely lacking in quality. And when you're humming along 100 kilometers an hour, you kind of want to know you've got a decent quality thing that ain't gonna fly off your roof like a sailor. So if you're a regular to our channel, you'll know that we're not really into clickbaity titles and trying to just grow the channel for the sake of growing a channel or making videos for the sake of making videos. We're trying to benefit others through sharing direct experience and knowledge through our passion about regenerative agriculture. Building soil, building habitats, making a living, doing what we love, sharing that information with people from all around the world, trying to get people to get into farming in a smart way on a smaller scale. Basically, YouTube revenue comes from views and what I've enjoyed. I think about Keeping the focus on sharing knowledge with integrity is that I see the stats at the back end of our channel and I think we have a high view count in proportion to the amount of subscribers. You could say if I do the mathematics against other sort of channels in the field. But what I see that's really heartwarming is that a lot of our followers genuinely watch the material and that's really neat. So I'm kind of. It's kind of like customers at a market or something. I'd rather have 10 viewers who actually watch and really value and appreciate what we do than, you know, thousand viewers who mostly don't really care or just, you know, leave ridiculous comments and stuff like that. So I'm really grateful to have such a wonderful subscriber base and viewer base. So thank you for that. And on the flip side of that, the revenue created by YouTube is based on clicks. So I don't make. I mean, I make pocket money. It's not enough to invest in a rooftop tent or anything like this, but what it does allow me to do is decide rather than fly to Ireland now and do one little road trip and go and see a farm, it's allowed me to get on the road and go and see five, six farms on the way. And that's been funded by you lot. So that's amazing. And I'm super excited to work in that reciprocal way where, you know, I can bring things that I think are really valuable to see to you and that's helped to be paid for in that way. So that's amazing. I also put some of that income into buying a new microphone, which turned out to be a little bit rubbish, as some of you noticed in the last few videos. I think it's a fairly decent mic, but it's limited in the applications it can handle. It's not very good when there's busy soundscapes and you have to be careful not to be that close to it. And I'm quite used to holding a camera in front of me, so it's not so great for that. So I'm sorry about audio quality, I apologize to some degree, but as I've said many times in the past, this channel has to be about me picking up a phone out my pocket or a camera lying around and shooting just randomly, as I'm inspired to in my day, because I'm too busy to be a YouTube kind of person. I think we do alright for the resources and time we put in, but I'm not willing to spend hours and hours crafting the most beautiful cinematic videos. It's not really what interests me in life, but I'm excited to share and be a benefit in this way if I can. So thanks for understanding that. But yeah, it's good to just share that with you. And you know, I'm using all the revenue that comes from that to just go back into this and it makes it like a sustainable project in that way. And I enjoy doing it. So I'm very happy to do that. And it's never been my intention to do it to make money, as it were. It's not a significant amount of income for me at all. So, yeah, just thought I'd share that. But let's have a look at some of these projects because I'm super excited to get on the road and show you around. I'm actually going to be going quite a long way. It's about 4,000km to get to my destination in Ireland. I'm starting by going up north, right up into the highlands. This is like 600 meters above sea level. This is a farm that's run by Sophia, who was on our Market Garden course recently and her partner's family have a famous cheese making farm. So she's been able to set up selling Market Garden veg underneath her partner's farms sort of banner. She's doing amazing work. I mean, she's running this totally on her own in very challenging growing conditions. It's like a month shorter growing season than ours. So it's crazy. It's like, I don't know how she's doing it, but she's doing a fantastic job. And I think this is a farm that really needs to be documented and highlighted and she's doing a super cool job. I think you can see from the images here she's working really hard. It's a beautiful place and producing some really high quality vegetables. Just love it. So that's going to be the first stop and I might then go on up to Alesund. This is a very interesting place. I'm just going to show you. It was completely burnt down and so they rebuilt the city and it's. I mean you can see it's pretty beautiful location and I'm interested in doing a bit of fishing if I can, but I'm not going to have much time as I move through here because I'm on a bit of a schedule. I've got to be in the west of Ireland in two weeks. So I'm going to drop in another farm down in the south of Norway. This is run by Torre and Jelle, they were both here on the training last year and it's a bit of a bigger farm and they've just finished making an egg mobile a bit like ours. And they have a lot of different livestock and do a lot of work with their community and produce amazing food as well. And there's yellow there. So I'm really excited to go and see the sort of magnitude of what they're up to. They've been doing a lot of no dig market garden this year. That's been like a big job for them this year, moving all that compost and wood chip around. And so I really want to see how that's going for them. But another beautiful farm. I'm doing all these little posts that you can see the names of the farms up at the top here, so you can go follow them yourself if you're interested. And then I'm heading on down from there. I'm taking the ferry over from Norway to Denmark to save a lot of driving and I'll be going off down to see Anders. Anders and Katrine were both interns with us and they're awesome. And Anders went on to Neversink Farm in the States and the Rodale Institute and then he helped Mikaela over at Sirtoftesjordbrug in Denmark. I've made a couple of popular videos on. So he helped them in their setup and they've set up their own farm now on the back of a large established organic farm. And so they basically put up big multi span tunnels this year and this is their first year and they're actually living off site. I think they live in a shared communal house with a few other couples and they travel to the farm every day. But they're producing some epic stuff. So I'm really curious how it's going for them. And really looks like some amazing produce coming out. And then I'll be backtracking slightly to go back to see Mikkel at Sirtofte where he's got those chicken caravans. You'll probably remember some of the videos and extensive market gardens and I think a lot is changing for him. I'm not sure if we'll be filming here, but I'm just going to pop in and say hello before I head on down through Europe. Now one of my online training students is part of this amazing farm, Oxton Organics in the uk. It's one of few profitable farms in the UK that's doing mixed diverse farming and they have a beautiful market garden. They're just turning A bunch of it over to no Dig that you see in here and doing some really wide range of crops, really interesting crops, as well as a bunch of fruit and livestock there as well. And they're doing. During the course, Jake was doing an application for something like £70,000 worth of tree grants and he did some amazing design work in the online training. I was very impressed with the quality of his work. And so this is a farm I'm super excited to see and it's what's, you know, by driving and it really allows me to go and check out a lot more places. Now I also come from Wiltshire around this area and so for me it's quite an important thing to be able to go and just visit old places and connect back with memories. Having been away from Sweden for five years now, I'm really missing elements of the uk, the people and the landscapes. For me to be able to go during production season is such an amazing gift. I'm super grateful for the team here to take care of the farm while I'm away because it's such a rare thing for me to be able to leave during the production season. And I'm super excited to go check out the work of some of the people that have been through our farm and got inspired by it. So then I'm heading up to Holyhead and I love Snowdonia, so I'll probably stop in on Snowdonia on the way back to take some walks. And Holyhead is somewhere where I know quite well. I've been on Anglesey quite a lot and I'll do a spot of fishing there and take the ferry over to Dublin. Then I'm making my way over to the west coast to Moy Hill which is where we're running our training. And there's still a few spots open on that if anyone wants to come. These guys are doing an epic tree planting charity. Their home tree is their tree planting charity and they do a big csa. They've bought a lot more land to restore it back to forested land and they're really heavily engaged in their community. So they're all pro surfers that turn to community action and local politics and growing food. And I'm super excited to go and see the impact that they're having. Some beautiful surfers, some of the best surfing island at that spot. So it's very well known, but these look like an amazing, fun group of people and I'm really excited to just have hang out and absorb the atmosphere of the west coast of Ireland and just see what it's going and seeing where I can tap in and see if I can be of service to any of these farms. I'm super excited to be able to bring that to you through video. So that's where some of the income from YouTube has come. So please don't forget to share and subscribe to the channel. It helps grow the channel and spread the awareness of regenerative agriculture and proactive solutions for people to see. So that's it for today. Just quick video to let you know that I'm not going to be posting videos until I'm at other people's farms now. I'm not going to be online so much. I'm not going to be answering emails and not going to be shipping books or tools until I get back. So the farmers tools is kind of on hold. There's a lot of more products coming now. We've got Jang Seeders and we've got all the farmers friends tools and lots of amazing stuff. I'm so excited to be able to bring that to you. But that's all coming soon, so stay in tune with the channel. Click subscribe if you want to get updates. And we're looking forward to bring you some incredible viewpoints and vantage points of amazing startups from around different parts of Europe. So stay tuned. See you in the next video.