A Richard Perkins YouTube video (LETTING THE ANIMALS DO THE CHORES S4 ● E107) documenting the use of farm animals as living tools to reduce maintenance work: sheep used as lawn-mowers, chickens for scratching tree lanes and clearing mulch, cows and pigs to graze and inoculate woodland soil. The video also reports very wet weather (an unusually wet September), farm impacts (soggy fields, vole damage to trees), brief produce notes (salad mix ingredients), a wildlife sighting (golden eagle), and course/booking notes (32 people expected on a market gardening course). Perkins expresses cautious optimism about biodiversity and announces upcoming farm training and book shipments.
Today's video is about using our animals as tools. So cutting a lawn for the campers. We've got 32 people coming on the market gardening course and the camping in Buckyfield. What better way to cut the grass than with a lawnmower? They're in with the turkeys, but turkey's not so sure about the whole thing. This is what the weather's been like for two weeks now. It's just downpours after downpours. It's the wettest year. September we've had prolonged. September is often very wet here. But this is hard for gardens, this is hard for animals and it's really hard for people to spend a lot of time outdoors. Cows are moving to Reuben's pen. We want them to eat some of the tree leaves and some mixed forage, bring some of their pastoral gut flora to the forest system, helping us turn it back to agrin forest. In the same way, we're starting to use the hens in a different way to go through the tree lanes, cleaning it out first. And the reason we're doing this is to try and just like leave the ground in a way that's less attractive for sawk the vole. We lost a lot of trees to voles last winter. It was very mild winter. So this time of year it's very wet on the ground. We've had the wettest few weeks we've ever had at the farm. And I want to leave this grass for winter grazing. So we're letting the chickens come in and really sort of scratch up the mulch. But they also sort of compact the bedding from last year in a way that I'm hoping is easier to spot any boreholes and I don't know, it's an experiment, but using animals as tools I had to do work for us. Otherwise cutting in here is quite a lot of work across all the different lanes we have down the farm. So we'll see. I'll update you on how it goes. But I'm liking their impact so far. They're really enjoying the little habitat, scratching around through the mulch and seeing what's in there. It turns out the turkeys are a little bit apprehensive of the sheep. I'm considering using the sheep to take down the banks here. Yesterday I saw my first golden eagle. I'm losing my voice a bit actually, but I saw a golden eagle being chased by two buzzards that live up in the forest forest behind us. It was huge. I mean it must have had 2 meter wingspan. And I Didn't know that there were golden eagles around here because I haven't seen one before. But it's been so much wildlife and birds this year. It's really given me a lot of confidence that we're doing good things. Sheep have done a really good job lawn mowing, so they've been in here since yesterday afternoon. Grass is ready for campers. So my objective today with the sheep is just to move them along, cutting all the banks, basically. You see, it gets overgrown and I'm generally doing the ground maintenance and I just can't keep up with it with everything else I'm doing. So let's see how it goes. We've got a nesting guinea fowl on the bank here, so we got to be mindful of that. But we're going to see how good these land mowers are. Here they come. You can see how weather's been here. It never gets. It's just been unbelievable. I'm trying to avoid driving in the fields right now. It's just too soggy. The gardens are doing okay, considering. I mean, this is the standing water just from the last day of rain, but. Oh, a lot of rain. Soggy, soggy. Still getting those carrots. Meat's still coming out. What have you got there, man?
This is one of our salad mixes today. Got a couple of different mustard greens in here.
Nice. And then this is our other epic.
Salad mix for the day. So we've got mizuna, rocket kale, beets, spinach, chard. We're gonna mix that all up. They're gonna love that one.
And mix in some of the All.
Star gourmet mushroom as well.
Beauty. Yeah. Challenging weather, no.
Challenging weather. It's been raining every day for. I don't think we've used our irrigation system for five weeks.
Yeah. Yeah. It's been the wettest September. Yeah.
But we've got a lot of food in the ground and the row covers are working well. We've got some good enough drainage to keep things going, and it's good.
Herbie Hancock.
Herbie Hancock.
Yeah. What do you think, Maggie? What noise does sheep make? Egg lover. Me. This is a nice state of recovery. It's had Reuben in here, but there's a lot of forbs come back in here and they're taking a lot of leaves like poplar. Not sure where Viola and her calves are, but there's a lot of forage in here. So we're just going to see how long it takes until they've taken a lot of the material and Seem a bit hungrier. These are mountain cows and this is the sort of material they would have been put onto in the winter. Probably taking the last of the tree leaves before they fell and then just scavenging for what they could find. It's a nice environment for a cow. Some of the oaks coming back. We have so many oak trees now. And by having them grazed through here, it's going to improve the grass and forage as well as having them deposit some of the manure from the pasture in here and start inoculating the woodland soil with more pastoral stuff. And it, you know, it's turning back nicely. This was brash when we came here and they just cut down the spruce and three seasons in, there's a lot of nice orbs and grasses coming up. There's rico, beautiful remains, carrots, some leeks still and some beautiful nerotonda, which we like a lot. So the forage isn't great in here. So we've just left them here for a few hours, but they've taken it down a bit and cleared along the fence a bit. Very nice. Now they're off down the road. Probably just a couple of hours to a spot and then we'll move them on again. Thin strips they're coming into. Just passing over on the other side of the road now. And they're going to make their way down to the right there. Good job, sheep. They've only been here now. It's really nice using animals to do the work first. You see the chickens in the tree lanes. They're taking down the ground cover. And there's more over here and just really like laying the ground flat to save maintenance. Sheep are doing the grass cutting. Pigs are in the forest, turning that back to agroforestry. Cows are reaping the benefits of that, allowing animals to do some of the work for us. Whilst here we're benefiting from different species that you don't find in the pasture. Same with the cows in the woodland. They're going to eat some woody species. These guys are ready to move on, though. Thanks as always for watching our videos. I'm a bit horse in the throat, so I won't be making videos for a couple of days. Rest my voice before the weekend and the market garden training. We're going to be filming that with Tio, who was here on the farm scale permacoliture course last year, and that's going to be exciting. Thanks for everyone that's supporting us by purchasing the book. I've got a lot of books to send out, and that's awesome. And we'll catch you in the next video.
