LIVE Q&A : General farm topics with Richard

Okay, so welcome. If you are watching this live and joining us and if you are watching the replay, then my intention is to just turn up here on YouTube and answer questions with the best ability I have. And it's turned into our winter season here. So it's characteristically at the end of October, we shut down the farm. Mainly we have cows and sheep and we have laying hens over the winter. But that affords me a whole bunch more time. So I'm on a fairly busy winter schedule. I'm off to Germany in a few days and then Croatia to teach and lecture. And then I'm going sailing with my friend Christian and doing a training in sailing towards my goal of circumnavigating one day. But I, yeah, I wanted to just turn up and available to answer questions about farming for people that are excited too. I've never done a YouTube live session before. I may or may not do them again. I'll see how it goes and whether it's deemed useful by yourselves and by me. So I'm just gonna read through questions as they pop up and talk about them and I hopefully if there's some, some good questions, we'll get into some good topics. I will not be able to keep up with a ridiculous amount of questions. So we'll see how we go. I'll answer things the best I can. First question I'm seeing here is about farming in Southeast Asia. Well, so I have quite a lot of experience in Southeast Asia. I lived in Thailand for some several years and I'm particularly interested in tropical agroforestry. Now I actually contemplated buying land in Thailand before I ended up buying this farm. I think my online training is definitely not focused on the tropics. I think that the business aspects and the planning aspects are transferable anywhere. But. But I think all of your species, all of your contextual stuff is so different that I don't know if I recommend it. I think if you want to learn about context, setting, farm design and planning, there's a lot that is transferable. But I think you're better off going to someone in the tropics who's specialized in what you're doing. This is what I would say to anyone. If you want to put your life and your life savings and your blood, sweat and tears into setting up a farm, then the very best thing you could possibly do is go spend a season or more at a place doing exactly what you want to do. And you know that's going to look different for all of us. But I think that's the quickest ticket, as it were, and throw yourself into it. The people that have come through our farm who have gone off and have really flown are people who have that, you know, get up and go get an attitude and they throw themselves into everything they're doing in life. And I think that's, that speaks volumes and there's nothing like getting real tangible experience in the context that you're working in. So I'm not here just to try and sell stuff. I, you know, I think there's a lot of very deep information in online training. It's definitely not the glitziest and it's definitely not going to work for everyone. I am a big advocate of mixed farming. You know, I'm absolutely clear that this is how farming has always been done for most of agricultural history and there's very important reasons why. And I think the trends that we see nowadays have different things behind them that perhaps we can explore. But it's, there's something about mixed farming that I think is fundamental and a big part of our past and a big part of our future for food resiliency, local community resiliency. But I don't think our training is necessarily the best for everyone. I think it's for those who really want to approach us as a livelihood and business and who want to get clear about the specific topics that we are including in that training. And you can find all that in the information on making smallfarmswork.info you see a breakdown of each chapter. I'm going to be overhauling that training next year, adding a lot more content. But I would say for the tropics, you know, things like syntropic agriculture, when that came out, that's exactly what I would be doing in Southeast Asia. I would be incorporating animals into that. But high density trees over annuals and pasture is the way to go there. What are some specific cultivars of nuts, fruits and berries that you've had success within your zones? There are perennial plant lists for various regions. I've documented some. I have some available on our website for our region of all the sort of high trees, medium trees, shrubs, etc for things. I, you know, I think nuts is a big one. That's, I mean we are really far north and there are no commercial nut growers. I mean, hazel could be something here, but I think there's a lot of scope for weirdos like me and maybe some of you breeding nuts in more extreme climates commercially, but you know, someone's got to do it and agricultural institutions, etcetera Are not going to do that. In terms of fruits and berries, I think the berry, fruits are massively, you know, the potential of adding berries into like a veg scheme or something like that is huge. And the one that's caught my attention this year is Aronia because Aronia, we have a bunch of Aronia but we have quite a diverse planting of fruits and berries and at a scale where it's not really enough to do anything unique with, you know, it's more homesteading on our scale and feeding a lot of people that come through here. We do sell some berries, etc. But it's not a major part of our farm. But Aronia is one of these really underdone berries. It's so resilient, it's so medicinal and you know, it's such an abundant yield of high density food compared to any other berry you can grow here that basically we had from the droughts that we've suffered. A couple of years ago a lot of our hazel died back. We have about 500 cultivar hazels on the farm. Some of them died off even well established trees. And my thought this year has been I'm going to replace them with Aronia. And there is no Aronia based wine, for example, in Sweden. Sweden has a monopoly on alcohol. So you buy alcohol in a government shop and nobody sells Aronia wine. But it's, I mean I think that's a massive market for this cold climate where you can treat those plants so badly and they, they are just yielding so abundantly. And I think for extreme climates like ours, that is a really unsung hero. Yeah. So I'm going to just, I'll just buzz through these and pick up where I can. I think if there's a bunch of people signing on, I'm not going to be able to keep up. But I will do my best to, to see how we go. Hi Matthew, what's your current thoughts on soil remineralization for vegetable production especially? Are you testing your soils yearly and amending? No, I don't test soil at all and I'm interested in the idea of adding a bit of everything you can be bothered to do, whether that's biofertilizers, compost, teas, adding compost, adding biochar. Basically I'm doing a bit of all of it and I understand that soil is way more complex than that and I will add rock dusts into things like bioferts and compost. And my basic rule of thumb is anything you want to add to your soil Put it through biology first. So we have aerobic biology and good compost and we have anaerobic biology in things like biofertilizer, the sort of MPK mimic, as it were. And if you put nutrients through biology, then you are putting them on the ground as a plant available nutrient that can take care of itself. That's the basic approach I have. I think remineralization is important, but I think life is more important than the mineral component. I think it's clear that most soils are damaged and the life component is more important to focus on than actually physically putting minerals. And I'm not saying you don't need to put minerals, I'm not saying you shouldn't test your soil. I'm just saying I don't and it's not interesting to me to do that. And I feel like most soil testing is so reductionist. It tells you very little about how soil actually works, which is way more complex than that. And so that's up to you. But we are doing a no dig market garden as I'm guessing most of you followers know. So we are adding a huge amount of compost which has now become, we can do that off farm. We use peat as a bedding, a deep litter bedding for our chickens and cows and produce about 70 cubic meters a year, which is more than we need for our market garden. We also use chicken manure as fertilizer for high fertility crops. But I don't do any testing. Plants show you what you need to know if you're paying attention. And farming is all about paying attention. So that's my approach. So you missed the Kickstarter. I'm basically the Kickstarter ran its course. It was amazing to watch and thank you for everyone getting behind that. The book will be for sale when I get back from holiday in March and it's. I can't help anyone. If you missed the Kickstarter, it was there for a month and it was widely spread and it's. You have to sort of dial in at the other end of that. I can't deal with individual things. I have to deal with posting out 3000 books as soon as I can. Would I recommend buying 1 year old X Free Range Layers? No, not really. I mean if you want to run a, you know, maybe some would criticize my approach for being too clinical. But it's hard to make money farming and you can do it. It's hard work, it always has been and you can be smart about it, but it's always a numbers game and it Comes down to tight margins. And I would not want when it comes to spring for me, I want the freshest birds on pasture, possible laying like going into lay. And I want all my birds the same age because in that way I know exactly when my eggs will go. The eggs come in like this and then level off for the season. And I can also predict their decline. So by replacing a whole flock at the same time, I know when, where my numbers are. And I work with pre sales and subscription sales. So it allows me to manage a business. And if you, if you're buying in birds that are a year old like free range is usually not very good for birds. It's good for human consumers. It's not good for birds. If you go on the Internet and look at any typical free range industry operation, I'm making an assumption here. You're talking about industrial birds, but they basically have a place they live and a bunch of mud around it and then some grass around the edges. They don't visit. And free range is not how to manage chickens. It's not good for chickens. It's good for human consumer who sees green box of eggs, smiley sunshine chicken looking happy on the front and turns brain off. That's not how we farm and time control. Grazing is where it's at for the land, for the birds, for the product, for everything. So I would buy good quality birds from a small producer if you can. We buy ours from Sweden's smallest producer. They produce a couple hundred thousand birds a year. That might sound like a lot, but the next bigger producer is in the millions. So we're working with a small family farm. They do a really good service. And in our context in Sweden, where it's -30 at the time that you would need to start your flock to be able to get them out on pasture, you would need a whole heated facility to be able to raise those birds from eggs. And it would cost you more than we can buy them. So it's a simple business decision not to raise them ourselves. Personally, after one year of being free range, those birds are half knackered. I wouldn't buy them. I would get new flocks and replace them every year. They're four months old at point of lay, maybe five months, depends on the breed. So if you can sell those birds to other people, small holders that want, you know, 20, 30 birds, or you sell them as meat birds, you're basically replacing the price of the bird. So it doesn't actually matter how long you keep it, it doesn't affect the welfare of the bird in any way. And that's my approach, due to our climatic and economic situation here. How many days do you leave in between the animals? I don't understand the question. We graze our cows and sheep together and we typically follow four days behind with the chickens because that's when the fly cycle or the maggot cycle is at its peak and most of the beneficial insects have left the cow pats. How long it is until they come back to the same place depends entirely on our grazing plan that we make at the start of the year, refine and adjust as we need to throughout the season. Grass here takes between 15 and 45 days to recover. So we plan the grazing using holistic plan grazing to make sure we never overgraze a single grass plant. And that's very easy to do. It looks complicated and sounds complicated, but it's very simple. When you get started with it, it's like everything. You do it for a year and then you're like, aha. And you know a million times more about it. And you know, anyone can do that. Is it possible to produce. Sorry? Is it impossible to embrace permaculture concepts even in flat areas with orchard in straight rows, no slope, no trees? Permaculture concepts? Look, you know, I think a lot of people get stuck thinking permaculture is meant to look a certain way and I detest that idea. That comes from it's ignorance. It's not what it's about at all. It's about intelligent design to meet our needs whilst caring for the whole. That means it's got to be ecologically beneficial, it's got to be beneficial for the organisms within that system. It's got to respect the physiology of plants and animals. It's got to make us money if we're trying to make a living from it. And it's got to be producing epic quality produce for our customers. If any of those are not intact, it's not going to work. So you can apply design thinking to any situation you like. You could apply it to a balcony or to a thousand hectare ranch or a back garden. It doesn't make any difference. So I don't know if you're getting stuck in conceptual stuff there, but of course you can apply it. You know, what could you do in an orchard? Well, most orchards are spaced traditionally in a way that you can fit other support species in. Let's say you have an apple orchard. Well, apples come from Kazakhstan. And where do they grow? They grow in forests with mature canopy trees over the top of Them at wide spacings and various layers of shrubs and understory below them in heavily fungal soils, in mature, mature soils, where ammonium is the primary source of nitrogen. And so how do you take that sort of pattern language and apply that to your orchard? Well, the best way to do it, and it's the standard orchard, which is typically planted in block planting, would be to turn those into rows. And you could then plant support species in between. You could put things that are shifted towards the fungal spectrum that is any perennial plant. You could chop them when they're woody and tall in the season and put woody material on the ground. You could feed fungal compost teas. You could add rock dust, all the things that fungi like to eat. You could put thick mulches on the ground. You could have living plants on the ground. You can start to grow other crops in between, start to put back some of the ecology that supports those systems to thrive, and do it in a way that makes sense logistically in terms of harvesting and processing, because that's the main job of an orchardist. Animals have traditionally always been used in orchards and great for the nutrient cycle. We know that every ecosystem on Earth, its nutrient cycle is managed by animals. So poultry, sheep, some pasture species of pigs, such as American guinea hogs or kunikunis, can be run on pasture in between. Plenty of ways you can apply this thinking. If you look at the ecological design principles of any ecological design thinker, they're all things that you can go outside and you can observe for yourself in nature. There's no wizardry, there's no mystical thing going on. It's all pretty basic ecological stuff that people have observed and tried to relate in a comprehensible way. And it's all pretty simple. It just seems unfamiliar if you're not used to it. And we've grown up, most of us removed from these things. But it doesn't need to look anyway. Permaculture does not include a herb spiral, a banana circle, any of this crap. Like, forget all that. Like, if Huge Culture was useful, you would see some of us vegetable growers using it, right? It doesn't need to look a certain way. And I get really disheartened when books come out that talk about nonsense that no one professionals actually using, you know, and we're not stuck in any permaculture kind of stuff. You can see, we still call our farm Ridgedale Permaculture, but we are interested in farming, I.e. production landscapes that make a living, which is very different from homesteading. Where you don't have regulations and you don't have economy to think about. But as soon as you do, you need to really integrate everything that works and throw out all the things that don't work. And so I'm fundamentally an integration list using all the design approaches and principles I've come across around the world. And I'm not. I don't want to be in a pigeonhole or. I don't care for that kind of thinking or identity. It's not interesting to me in any way. It's nice if. If people can tell me where you. Where you're listening in from as well. I see a few people left in Washington. It's nice to see where people are tuning in from plans for the eggmobile. There is dimensions on there. It's pretty straightforward to build. I mean, it doesn't need to look like ours. I tell people I've seen maybe six, seven dozen eggmobiles look like ours popping up in Europe and around the world. But we built ours with very specific context. It had to fit through a very narrow gate. It had to be able to be wind resistant in the extreme gales we get, because we're situated in a valley between two ridges. So our property is called Orson, which in Swedish is ridge. And we're in Frikstal and the valley of Friken, the lake here. So we actually have two valleys around us. And sometimes we get these storms and they come over the lake to the south of us and they split off around the ridges. Sometimes they concentrate and come up that valley. And when they do, they're catastrophic. They blow chickens along. They blow yurt roofs off. They're really devastating. So we wanted to know that we could park those egg mobiles into that wind that happens in the spring once or tw and be safe. But you don't need to build it like us. The regulations around eggmobiles are about perch space, nest space, entrance space, little things like that. So once you've got your local regulations, you can start to mathematically plan it out. Now, a lot of the egg mobiles that you can buy professionally are much bigger for the same amount of birds than ours, which wouldn't work on our farm because it's small, lumpy land and we're turning around tree lanes. And also they have all of the roosts for the. At the same height. And I don't personally like that. Like, chickens are hierarchical. They're meant to sleep at different heights. I'm not saying that just having slants with different roosts is ideal either, but it's got to work somehow. But if you let poultry roost in a tree, they will roost at different heights according to their hierarchy. And I think, you know, as far as we can, we should be respecting the physiology of the creatures that we are working with. So there's basic measurements in there and photos that you can see. And you've got to be able to build it from that. Really. It's, you know, it's going to need adjusting to your context, ground conditions and regulations, etc. Okay. South Africa and Europe, Ukraine, Lithuania. Cool. It's nice to. Yeah, it's nice to just be able to have a little space like this I'm not aware of. Okay, there's a lot of questions. Let's see, What's the difference between our book and online course? The online course is very much there's nothing fancy, bells and whistles stuff. It's filmed with someone filming me looking around the farm and how we do. It's filming some of our lectures and education series. It's got downloads with spreadsheets so you can plug in. Okay, broilers. If I buy a broiler chick in Poland, it cost me this much, my organic feed cost me this much and it spits out numbers at you so you can plan your enterprise, etc. I would say the book covers a lot of stuff, including things that we don't do with our farm. The online training is designed to give you a real deep insight into where things are at our farm and how we think about it and, and bring you into some of our training setting. Yeah, I don't want to talk about, you know, it's like it's. You can find a lot of information about them online and I don't want to just be sitting here trying to focus on that. And I'm not, you know, those things are there for people that want to invest in them. And I'm not going to do a hard sell thing. I just can't be bothered. I'd rather talk about chickens, I think. If I use evergreen cover crops, does it keep microlife inside the soil during the winter like cover crops is definitely something to consider if you're in a tillage system. I do not till and so I don't use cover crops. I use compost to cover the soil and I keep plants living in the ground in our veg garden as long as possible through the year. And then when I do cut the plants out, I leave the roots to decompose in the soil. Some of you Most of you, probably in milder climates then cover crops could be a good thing, but they require you to till typically unless you tarp them out. I'm not sure tarping is that great for the soil. And I'm convinced that tillage isn't great for the soil. So rather than use cover crops, I would rather cover the ground and not need them. And I'm not saying you shouldn't do that. If you're in a tillage system, I'm sure that it's much better than not having cover crops and everything you can do to keep soil life active. Great. Go for it. Solar cycles. I'm not in a position to talk about solar cycles. I do not know enough about it to elevate my opinion about these things to any. You know, it's not the place to discuss that. A couple of days ago I ate meat for the first time in 30 years. Okay, well, you got to eat what's good for you. Based on what I say, I've been re educating myself about diet a lot. And I also not that excited to talk about it because I just feel like it's like those of us that have inner practices, spiritual practices, these are not things to necessarily talk about their things to do for yourself. But it's good that you seem like that was a good idea. I've only been eating meat and fat for over a month now and I feel fantastic. And I'm not doing that forever, but I'm doing it for now and I feel great. But if you do eat meat, then sure, eat wild meat and eat meat from good farms. Like that's your responsibility. Go out and find your farmers and connect with them because they usually are amazing people that have a lot of thought and care behind what they're doing. And that's the basis of food security, is farmers and consumers talking, connecting and working together. What EU funds did you use to start up your fund? I didn't use any EU funds. We don't take subsidies. I think we get some stupid little subsidy for having these heirloom cows that we have these Fjell Ku. There's native Swedish cow, but it's like a hundred dollars a year or something. It's, you know, it's not something that's interesting. Well, I'm not saying you shouldn't take EU funding. I think there's two types of fundings in the EU streams. There's, I would say from my opinion, there's a constructive type of subsidy that allows for the construction of useful things like fencing perhaps, or Water bodies like ponds and wetlands, etc. And then there's the sort of subsidies that you get for cutting the grass once a year, not having animals if you're a landowner. And I detest that. I think that's, you know, if I was able to make the decision I would eliminate them kind of subsidies. I think they're really at the root of some of the problems with farming. We didn't use funding. We started with very little money. We took a small loan from like an eco bank and a small similar sized loan from a past student of mine who was willing to invest inheritance money into projects that they supported. And that's something we did. If you can get funding, then go for it. But just bear in mind, you know, be really careful to see that A, it won't take too much of your time up and B, it won't require you to jump through hoops. Like I would much rather make a little business decision that I can go and earn some money to do to have the complete freedom in my management. Like flexibility and freedom in management is, is way more important than finances because you can earn those finances by doing something smart, you know, and it's, I would say it's fundamental for this type of farming to maintain absolute control, to be able to do whatever you need to do when you, to do it. Like when you can move your animals to wherever you want at the precise time for the right reason that you have. And if your land subsidy requires you to do certain things, then get rid of it. That's not, you know, you can't manage a farm like this in that way. What do I think about the methane climate issue with heuristic grazing? I think that's a bunch of nonsense. Like we used to have herds of hundreds of millions of animals around the grasslands of the world, which evolved perfectly to deal with that. I think you'll find methane is a much, you know, the way livestock on the large scale is raised is responsible for much bigger travesties than anything raised on pasture could ever be. And I think some of you know I come from Sweden, which promotes itself on clean energy based on water, right? But methane, I mean, more people have been displaced by megadams in the last hundred years than wars. Megadams are usually made by projects funded by the imf, the World Bank. They come into countries they are immune from prosecution. They displace up to 1 million people like in the Yellow river in China, and say they're giving them land back somewhere else and water for farming. That water gets siphoned off for industry, industrial farming, etc. And when you stop river systems like that, you have anaerobic digestion. And we all know the byproduct of anaerobic digestion is methane and carbon dioxide. This is a country I'm in that promotes itself on clean energy. Am I concerned about livestock on pasture producing methane? No. What a load of twaddle. I'm not even. Yeah, let's leave it at that. Where do your laying hens stay over the winter? They stay in the greenhouse where we raise tomatoes. We have a thousand tomato plants in the summer and once those plants come out, we top them at the end of August. This year we did it in the middle of August. We pull them out in October, we put down 10, 15 centimeters of peat moss. We bring the birds in, put some of their nest boxes and some roosts in there, and they stay there over the winter. We don't provide heat and that deep litter will warm up to. I think there's videos I put last year or ometime when it's minus 30 outside and it's 15, 16 degrees in the bedding, so the air in the tunnel is not warm, but the bedding is warm. You know how birds like to get down and do little dust baths, so they get a bit of warmth from that. And yeah, they seem to do fine. And their production tails off. We don't give them light either. We'll put lights that comes on automatically in the morning to get them to lay eggs in the ne. But we don't light the space. We use natural light and that works well for us. Are you offering internships soon? No, next year I'm not planning to offer internships. I'm actually considering something dramatically different. And at the moment it looks like Johanna will remain and manage the farm next season. And I'm planning to go. I haven't left the farm in summer since I got here, and obviously it's a very busy time of year. But I would like to take a little distance and get a little bit of perspective on how to go forward with my educational work and how to go forward in other areas. And quite a long story short, I'm interested to go around Europe and visit farms that we've influenced, document them, because it's come to my attention in the last year or two just what an impact it's had. And I genuinely mean, like, I really haven't understood that until very recently. And like some of the videos I put last year, I know that they have a really big influence on the people that I visit and there is a massive amount of people doing amazing work that nobody necessarily hears about. And a lot of the farms that are well known are over in the States or places like that. And I think I would like to help support lifting up people and networking and connecting people. And that's something that's been on my mind a lot. It's very hard to find employable people. It's very hard to find right people. I know it's a lot of people coming here on our long term programs, go off and start business together and do exceedingly amazing things. And so one thing I would like to do is put more energy and effort into networking people because it's quite easy. From the, from where I sit, I can see like how that person would work really well with that person and you know, facilitate because here in Europe, for those of you listening in from abroad, it's very hard to get access to land here. And so little collaborations like that can be very potent and beneficial. And I've created a few in the past with some of our past students and they've been extremely successful, some of them documented on our channel. So I'm thinking of taking quite a bit of the summer out and doing that and coming back managing the farm remotely with some trusted people and, and coming back for key moments where it's helpful for me to be there. That's my plan right now. That might change and so we'll see. Sounds like okay, the hairy farmer. You pretty dry this year. That sounds real bad. We've had a good wet year and too wet in some ways. But it's totally different every year here. So. Yeah, so yeah, that answers the internship programs. To be honest with the internship program, look, this is where I'm at with it. It's exhausting to have people to farm people at the same time as trying to run a farm. It's complex. It takes a massive amount of inputs emotionally and energetically and financially. It costs a lot to have people and errors get made when there's too many people. There's a lot of, you know, I've thought about this every day for years, half my life. And what I do see is that there is nowhere like this that people can go learn. And that's a big problem. And I'm not sure if I want to be keep responding to that. I understand the value it creates when I see participants go off and do epic stuff. But possibly there's a way the government can fund it. Possibly there's an evolution to happen there. I don't know, but to work with a very small number of people on the ground feels. Feels quite old school when there might be a better way to leverage my time and energy digitally. It's something, you know, I don't necessarily have the skill to do that fully, but I could collaborate with other people and I need to take some time out to consider where's the best way to use my energy. Because as I approach 40, I'm definitely not as energetic as I used to be. And I would like to keep leveraging my position to get as many people started farming smart as possible. And that's been my mission. You started a thousand pasture poultry in South Africa. That's awesome, Derek. That sounds amazing. I really want to come and document some of these and I might try. And I talked before about possibly doing like a podcast, and I did read all the feedback and response from that. And I do also share the view that many people shared. That video is much more powerful. I know that a lot of people love to listen to podcasts while they're working, etc. And I do value that too. But I think with farming, you know, video shows a million things that talking can't. And I also think as a mixed farmer, I'm a good candidate for, for doing that because it will probably help me ask the right questions, as it were, that we've seen this massive rise in popularity with market gardening, etc. And that's great, but market gardening is the least efficient of all farm enterprises I've ever come across. And I think that a lot of people coming into the space just don't know that. And they're not told that because there's very few people farming really. And so I, I feel partly responsible. I would love to document more people doing poultry. We've seen some of our students go off and make facilities, slaughter facilities, and lots of people doing eggs and, and birds and having the greats go at it and doing good business. And I would like to document somebody. So coming back around what the reason I mentioned that Derek responded to your comment there was that maybe instead of a podcast, what I could do is do videos where I'm going to people's farms and really digging into what they're doing, but also bring people onto the channel in an interview context, maybe with slides or. I don't know. I'm, you know, it's something I've thought about, but I would love to give elevation to people doing awesome stuff because we need it. And it's so helpful for people to see multiple ways of Doing things. I've seen too many people try and mimic the exact way we've done a certain thing. But it's so contextual based and it's so nuanced. It's not that I'm special, it's not that this is the right way to do it. And I tell people that over and over again. It's like, hey, here's why I'm doing it. And because of time or money or whatever, I'm trying to steer something towards. But it. I know that people get stuck. Like we're, we're stuck as humans wanting standardized solutions to everything. But farming is like the furthest place from that you could get. It's like you can't have standardized solutions. If you want standardized solutions, you'd be an industrial farmer and you know, a technician, not a farmer. So yeah. So yeah, I hope to hear about more success stories and it's great to hear that that's going good for you. Have I seen the biggest little farm? No, I haven't. It's not crossed my path. Roundtable podcast idea. Yeah, it could be very cool. I would like to do that. I would like to get more people engaged and ask testing questions like, still so many people don't talk about financial stuff. It seems so taboo in most of our countries and that's not useful. People need to get real about reality of it. And it's a big part of what I've tried to put into the book Regenerative Agriculture is trying to break down. I've had so many participants to trainings, online trainings where, you know, their, their dream is not matched to their skill base, their land base, their resource base, financially, etc. And that's what I've tried to do in a way that's not been done in farming literature ever. And I can see why it's almost impossible to do that because of the contextual. You know, a lot of the book is explaining the contextual points, which does make it useful for people to be able to translate it to their setting. But it is really hard to put it across. Like if people come here for months on trainings at our farm, I've got time to develop ideas and that can be very potent. But these things take time. I can't explain to someone in half an hour those finer details. They have to build up a whole pattern language of understanding over a long period and it's. Yeah, it's tricky. Okay. There seems to be. I lost my, Lost my place here. Regarding the tropics. I see there's More comments about tropics. It's. It's not the time. Like if someone gets me out to the tropics, then I would happily run another training over there focused purely on the tropics. I have a lot of knowledge and experience of the tropics, especially in Thailand, but it's not something I can talk frivolously about. It needs to be unpacked and my tendency has been to run much longer term trainings because it's great you can get inspired and meet some people going on a weekend thing about this, but that's not where knowledge comes from. And it's best to unpack these things over time that you can feel and smell and sense them and see responses to things that you've done. And that's been the sort of pattern of what we tried to do here. Yeah, but you can get me out to the tropics in the winter months here. Then I can consider that. How many hens per square meter is optimum? Well, it comes down to regulation. I think it's up to eight birds in Swedish regulation per square meter. Possibly you don't want more than five. Let me just do a quick calculation because it like what you're allowed and what's optimal are two very different things. Let me just quickly calculate. Yeah. Like probably comfortably 2 to 4, depends how long your winter is, how you feed them and many other things. But you don't want to pile birds in too densely. It's stressful. If you create stress, you'll get pecking, you'll get feather damage, you'll get cannibalism, possibly. You can also have an outdoor space most of the winter. That's fine too. Yeah. How do I store caterpillar tunnels over the winter? I leave the frame up unless I'm moving it or I'll move it beforehand. And I fold up the plastic, put it in the barn. I tie up all the components, label them all so you can work it out easily in the spring. If they're wet poor, I just put them, you know, it's typically always wet when we pack up. So I put them away. Wet the yurts. I'll dry them out in the roof of the barn. But I don't mind packing polytunnel plastic wet. It's plastic and I'll just pressure wash it in the spring and I'll watch the weather and if it's dry, I'll try and do it on the dry day. But that's the way it is. What's the thing that takes most of the farmers time. Well, sales and marketing and accounting, that takes up a lot of back end time that people usually do not prioritize and finding things if they haven't organized their workshop or workflows. Like we've got our sales down to these RICO rings. So we do, you know, two or three a week in the summer. That's an hour to prep and then an hour drop off. And that's, you know, they're the most efficient sales approaches I've seen anywhere in the world. We'll drop €5,6000 of products in an hour. In the winter we do one a week for half an hour. It's very efficient, but a lot of decision making, accounting, boring stuff, you know, moving chickens, two minutes of salad and pen. Moving cows takes me 10 minutes in the morning. Moving an egg mobile takes me 20 minutes. Collecting eggs, packing eggs, it doesn't take much time. It's dross around it. That's probably not what you're excited about if you're getting into it. That's what takes time. So you got to plan time. Well, it's good to get up early and get all the admin stuff done and do your chores like all animal moves we do before breakfast and you know, have a rhythm. It's good to have a rhythm. Yep. Farming is lots of long hours, but it can be smart hours too. You know, you can, you can definitely plan to have weekends. I love it when some of our, you know, a lot of our interns really clarify their context and they plan to have good weekends off and you know, time off in the season and it's important to do that. I, you know, I characteristically have not had enough time off and now that's bottled up into. Right. I'm taking the season away because I've been doing two full time jobs for many years. But that's not the situation most people in. So I don't recommend. Would I consider coming to Southeast Asia? Yes, I'm coming to Southeast Asia in January and February, but I am not necessarily gonna look to do a training then. But I, I love the place. I've been coming to Southeast Asia since I was 18 most years until more recently. But it's somewhere I lived a long time and I would definitely consider doing a training there. And it would be really good to do it at a working productive farm if you can find any. I'll leave it at that. Is it possible to get a copy of Making Small Farms Work? No, it's out of print and it's. I think I have Two beaten up copies that got sent back from South Africa. South Africa has worse postal system than Sweden, it seems. Like, What sorts of Aronia? The main one is called Viking. I think Viking is the main commercial variety. They don't taste good, right? That's the thing, they suck. It's like all the things that are good for us aren't very tasty, right. It seems. But Aronia can be turned into, you know, fruit leather, wines, put with honey. It could be processed in some way and, and I think it needs to be. I know some people eat them raw. I've got better things to eat, to be honest. But yeah. What's your opinion on the future of small farmers in the eu? Well, stuff like this, but not exactly like what we're doing here. People like taking the bits of the that fit and scaling it to their land base, their financial situation and their local market and supporting each other to do more and more of that. I want to see towns surrounded by a hundred of these little farms working together, not competing with each other and collaborating. A lot of people are getting into this type of farming and trying to set up and trying to get their sales together. But if we collaborate more, it'd be easier to have, hey, well, I'm not a farmer, but I'm a tech guy and I could sell all your products for you, all of you farmers or whatever. You know, it could look many ways, but I just think the future is, in my eyes, needs to be a lot of small farms doing diverse products, working together and yeah, adapting to climate change. It's very hard to know how to consider that. I mean, precaution for windbreaking, for water resources, for building your soil fertility so that once resources aren't available, you know, in my lifetime, I can understand that people will not be willing to sell you manure, straw, hay, anything like that, because you're just sending your nutrients out your gate. You can't afford to send anything off farm that doesn't fly or walk off on its own. And it will be in my lifetime, I'm sure that people will stop doing that. So in the meantime, I'm not against using that and buying it in and building my pasture, that's one way I'm building resiliency for the future. It's up to you. But putting in windbreaks, shelter belts and water bodies and building carbon rich topsoil that can hold and store water where plants actually want it, they're key. And that's all you can do. Looking at species choice, you know, local, hardy, adapted Breeds of plants and animals, that's the way to go. And that would be the case even if there was nothing going on. With a weirding climate, I think it just makes sense. Okay, Question from Dano. Dano from Argentina. Would your farm be sustainable without foreign compost or feed inputs? No, definitely not. I mean, I could not raise the amount of poultry we do here without imported feed, for sure. There's no doubt about that. And in the beginning, I bought in compost for the garden. I can make that compost myself. But to be honest, it's cheaper to buy it than my time to make it. I do both. But, you know, in that context, sustainability is kind of a, you know, it's too narrow a question because nothing's sustainable. I mean, you're sitting at a computer or a phone using the Internet to listen to me waffle on about sustainability. Doesn't make sense. You know, like, you probably have a vehicle or the majority of people here probably have a vehicle or use a vehicle. Like, you know, it. It's a. I don't know, that's a rabbit hole to go down. It's like we should move towards closing nutrient loops as far as we can on our land. But, you know, we are interacting with a global economy and global distribution network every single day, you know, and it's. You've got to be pragmatic. Like, I can't produce a viable economy unless I just grew vegetables. But vegetables aren't a full diet. You know, I don't even know anyone that only eats vegetables. And I don't want to know anyone that only eats vegetables. And yeah, it, you know, like, you've got to do what you can do. What I'm doing with that, Daniel, I. I hope I pronounce your name correctly there, but it's. I'm trying to build my pasture in whatever way I can whilst making a financial viable business whilst building my soil and producing better food than customers can buy here right now. I've said since the day I started this farm, you can go and look up old documents we put out before we moved here. You could go and see old videos where. What I would like to do in my context is rather than raise chickens, I would love to raise rabbits, geese, things that can turn sunlight to grass to protein. That's the most sustainable form of farming. It's a million times more sustainable on ground vegetables. But how many geese have you bought in the last year? And how many rabbits? Maybe in Argentina you eat more of those. But around here, I don't know anyone that's ever bought a goose or ever bought a rabbit. The only people that eat rabbits are the sort of weirdos that will grow their own. And the only people eat geese. Shoot them. So. So what I'm doing is I'm getting my foot in the door, producing a product that's familiar to people in their cultural context. Chicken. They. All the time. It makes me money, builds my soil, and it's way better chicken than anyone else in Sweden's got. And so it meets my holistic context. As long as those things are working, that's great. Now, I also am aware of the flaws. I need to rely on an industrial hatchery with the genetics, because you're not really going to compete without the right genetics. And I have to buy in grain. Sure, I understand, but I would rather be farming and influencing the food system than sitting in an armchair philosophizing about why it is I can't farm because nothing's perfect. Farming doesn't make sense. In a lot of ways, it's an irony. But, you know, we've been damaging soil and habitat ever since we started farming, and there's no way around that. We can just do smarter. And if people change their diet over time, we can do things, you know, so I'm not ignoring those problems. But unless I've got my foot in the door and I can be like, hey, Mrs. Jones, you love our pastured chicken. Have you considered the benefit of pastured geese? You know, if I'm not even a food producer, I don't get a say in that. You know, nobody really, you know, if you're not a food producer, no one really cares about your opinion about farming, because it's not interesting, it's not meaningful. And so my approach is build up my pasture, build up my soil so that if that crunch comes, which in my. If I, you know, extrapolate my understanding of the world, people will not radically change their diet here until they're forced to. And that's typically how most cultures go. There's a few exceptions, but very few exceptions. You know, people tend to be forced into those sort of situations rather than choose them, other than a very small minority of people. And by that point, I would have done the breeding work, and my pastors will be able to amply supply from the land I've got. In the meantime, I'm going to keep running the enterprises that work well, because you've got to. It's got to work financially, you know, I could not sell geese here. They would cost about 80 or €90 a bird. And I don't know a single customer of ours that would buy one. Same goes for rabbits. We did have rabbits and we've had geese. But for homesteading, First steps, someone with no experience. First steps, getting into regenerative agriculture. I think I spoke to that at the start of the year. Like, you go spend a season with someone doing the type of thing you want to do in the style of thing you want to do, someone that you think you might get along with in the sort of cultural context that you can imagine yourself in and in a similar marketplace. You know, like, some people have great systems, but they're jerks. And some people have great systems, but they live in a city of a million people where you're never going to have access from your rural setting. Some people are amazing farmers, but they can't communicate their ideas or whatever. So you've got to decide, like, where it is that fits where you're interested in learning and then be of service to those people. They're usually going to be very busy and need, like, careful observers who have timely interaction, who have some basic skills, get trained up that you can. If there's somewhere you see online that you feel like is really going for it, then you can probably assume that many other people would like to go and be there, too. So you've got to see where you stick out, make yourself valuable and throw yourself in. And it's like everything in life, the more you throw yourself in, the more you get out of it. And I feel like if you're starting with nothing, like, running a business is really hard. 95% of all small businesses fail. And there's probably not even any data about the percentage of small farm businesses, but I imagine it would be a little bit higher. So running a business is hard. And running a farm, if you have no farming experience, that's about as tall a climb as you could make for yourself. You know, it's difficult. You need training. You know, go find training. It's very easy to get jazzed up by wonderful ideas you see on YouTube, things like this. And I really don't mean this in any condescending way. I'm talking in a general way for the benefit of anyone that's thinking of going into this. It's very easy to get caught up in, you know, glossy images and the nice bits of things. But you need to go see it, smell it, taste it, sense it and really see can, you know, do I want to do this? We have so many people coming here. They are set, they're going to be market gardeners. They leave here and set up poultry businesses because they can just see for a third of the time, I can earn more money doing something that's actually a lot more pleasurable than this graph or whatever. And the other way around too, I'm sure, you know, but that could save you a lot of time, a lot of expense and a lot of messing around. Like, go find somewhere to go put time in and see for yourself in your own experience so that, you know, you know, learning remotely, books, digital stuff, that's all great, but at some point it's got to transfer into knowing, into your senses of, like, I can do this. It's why I've done so much work with time and motion studies here, pushing people to look at their own limits. It's like, hey, look, this is how I do it. This is how I pack eggs. This is how long it takes me. And what I'm doing. Now you do it. See how long it takes you. And, okay, you're going to be a bit slower because you're just new to this. But, like, here's how you could speed it up. Okay, cool. Now you're twice as fast. So look, now you could plan a business that you know what it takes to run in a day and how long it's going to take you and all the record keeping you need and the regulations you've got to meet, and now you can actually formulate a plan. But you can only do that in experience, you know, because a lot of people have lovely ideas about what they think they might like to be doing, but when they actually get to it, it really turns out not to be what they want to do. I wish ag schools gave people this kind of experience, but they don't. The eggmobiles is a funny one because it is about craft. The organic standards. In Sweden, the standards written for indoor birds only. Okay. And so they. They need to account the area outside. I'm just aware that my battery is going. Give me one minute. I'm just getting my charger. In terms of poultry in Swedish settings, it's a little bit. You know, they're very new to the idea of raising birds in this way. And so the standards are written for. Now and it's not correct. Anyway. Our eggmobiles are 3.5 times. Yeah, maybe you're right. Yeah. The birds are outside all day and they are. I'm sorry about this. I've got too many things plugged in and I need to find an empty plug pretty quickly. The. I'm a little Bit stuck because there's a lack of plugs here. Give me one second. Okay. I think I'm good. Yes. Sorry about that. In terms of swedish. Charging. In terms of Swedish regulations. There we go, we're charging. Sorry about that. In terms of Swedish regulations, the. The birds are only inside at the point they lay eggs and when they're asleep and so they. We've had the European Organic Standards round and they are not. They haven't been concerned about that. We haven't had Krav people, so I don't know if they will object to that. It might be. You have to give them a supplemental scratching area around or under the egg mobile at night. I don't. I don't know about the Krav settings, to be honest, because I'm not interested to follow them. We use Krav foods, so Krav is like a Swedish organic thing, but because they're being moved every day, I think you need to talk to the regulator about the, you know, they're uncomparable systems and there needs to be a bit of pushback against the regulation. But we've not had problems here and we've had all of the enterprises. Inspector sprouting fodder. I'm assuming you're thinking for birds, etc. They say digestive percentage is much higher and it saves money on food costs. I have not. And I like for sure you can sprout grains, etc. And seeds for layers. It's a whole operation in itself. It needs to be done hygienically. It's a case of mathematics and the timing of. And the scale you're operating at. We've typically got 1200 layers here and running the sprouting for that would just be nuts. I would much rather have a, you know, concentrated, easy to move around, feed base and then give them fresh pasture every day where they get a lot of insects and greens, which I just think is. It frees up time, you know, it would be interesting to see someone doing a similar scale layer operation and look at the time involved and whether those savings are actually, you know, I have no doubt it brings some nutrition, but they get that nutrition from the pasture anyway. So I think it's negligible benefit. And I don't reckon you'd save money. I reckon you'd save physical money on food costs, but you would spend more than that in your time. Like my time is worth way more then I can imagine the benefits of that would bring. So I. I'm not interested in doing it. How did you get a yeoman's plough to Sweden? I bought it in Australia. That's the only place to get them typically. And they ship them anywhere in the world. And I rented, if people want to use it around here. There is a key lime plow in England, there is a key lime plough in Germany, I believe. I think there's one in Italy, Spain. So they're around and you only use them once, twice. So don't buy one, just rent one. Or buy the shanks and stick them on a normal plough frame. Or buy just the tips, the wombat tips, especially for pasture development, and weld them onto a standard subsoiler frame. Subsoilers have existed over 100 years in every country in the Western world. Usually sitting behind the barn. They used to be horse drawn, probably sitting there rusting now. And the. The thing that makes a yeoman's plough particularly useful is the pattern it's used on and the dynamic of the tip in the soil. It has this incredibly explosive action in the subsoil. But I wouldn't buy a key lime plow. I only bought one because I was going to be going down in the south of Europe more to do installation work. But Jesus Ruiz is down in Spain, he's a topographer, he does a lot of work down there. So it just felt totally pointless me going down there when there's already a professional working there. So just by at the most shanks and best, just the tips and stick them on an old plow frame and use them in the right pattern. That's the important bit that makes water do a lot more work. Do I clip wings of chickens? Nope. Do I give any reading tips for starting out in small scale farming? It totally depends what you want to farm. I do send out reading lists with people. I think there is some recommended reading in the back of some of our websites somewhere. And in the back of our book there is recommended reading. Compost and chicken thing. No, not interested. Chickens are performance birds. If you try save money on chicken feed, you lose on eggs. It's very evident. And I don't need chickens to make compost. I want them to make compost for the market garden. But you can't feed food scraps to chickens in Europe. That seems to be something that's going on in, in America. But you can't do that. I can. I can mix them inure with peat moss and make a compost. Mixing that with peat moss and cow manure from the cows and put that on my veg Garden and I could, you know, it's a homestead thing or a commercial compost thing. It's not a practical solution for a chicken egg producer. Do we use Korean natural farming techniques? Jacob is asking. Yes, sometimes I do stuff with IMO's and indigenous microorganisms and I do things like different plant ferments and biofertilizers. They are great. Do them as much as you can be bothered to do them. Time is a limiting factor. Worm boxes and vermicomposting. I think vermicomposting is a great thing for household waste disposal and probably in my context, I would keep it at that. I might be more interested in doing that at scale in the tropics, but not here. I'd rather feed waste to a household pig and eat bacon. That's my approach. Trying to convince your son in Washington, Tabitha is trying to convince her son to go into farming, not finance and marketing. Well, having a background in finance and marketing would be useful for anyone trying to farm because that's where success is made or broken. I've had a few clients that have tried to encourage me to convince their kids to go into farming and I've just assessed within a few minutes that they have no interest to go into farming. I don't think it's a good thing to try and convince someone to go into. I think you have to be extremely passionate or it's not going to work out. And that's the simplest way I could answer that, I think. But having a background in something complementary is really good. You know, marketing, financials, bookkeeping, all that stuff is absolutely helpful. You know, growing veg is easy. It wants to grow itself. We take far too much credit for things that do things for themselves. Like actually making the business work is decision making, accounting, selling, number crunching, what is complete chicken food. We buy organic layer feed, for example, or broiler feed. And it's mostly composed of grains, it has different minerals, vitamins in, and it's been compiled by the industry after huge amounts of data and. And we have to be very careful. I say this all the time to people coming here on trainings. It's very easy to criticize the industry and you know, we all know the damaging effects of industry, but they do produce a lot of scientific data and you probably don't. So I would much rather take advice on how to feed a chicken optimally from the industry than from a backyard person who has no real data. And so buy good quality organic feeds fitted to the physiological needs of your birds. For example, here Laying feeds layer hens. You can buy organic feed with soya. Did chickens evolve to eat soy? No, you can buy it with fish meal. Did they evolve to eat fish? Not really, but they did evolve to eat meat protein. Like they are omnivores and they're kana omnivores. And so I would prioritize that for the well being of the birds. And that's choices we all have to make. But we should be getting clued up about the resources and choices available and the physiology of the we're working with. But all poultry feed is made primarily of grains in different mixtures. But it's very different from just grain. If you try and raise poultry on just grain, your performance will be terrible and your health of your birds will be really bad. Do I use farm dogs? We have a sheepdog that doesn't like sheep and yeah, she's not very useful farm dog. I would love to have a really amazing. I grew up in a country where sheepdogs are still, you know, amazing to see skilled sheepdogs. There's big scope for livestock guardian dogs. Although I don't know those of you that follow us closely. Our friend Mikkel in Denmark, he was keeping Maremas with his laying flock and he's just been told he can't do that for risk of salmonella, even though he gets salmonella tested every two weeks. And the type of salmonella that affects dogs I don't think even affects birds. So yeah, you got to research that. But livestock guardian dogs and sheepdogs definitely have their place. Thai Pascal from France. Thanks. I'm just trying to find questions here. Okay. I'm. I'm a bit behind I guess with questions, but I'm seeing where some of you called in from. That's cool. Lots of people from all over. I really hope to get out to the States at some point. Maybe next winter or something. It might be something that I do on my sailing trip is. Is doing a big tour the States. I think I could have a lot of use over there in some way. Cool. Okay. Just trying to find more questions. How's carnivore diet going? Well, it's going really good. Thanks. I'm. I do not believe that humans are carnivores. I think we're omnivores, but probably evolved heavily carnivore. I don't want to get into any debates with anyone, but I. For the last month I'm just eating meat, fat, animal fat, salt, and I've eaten a few eggs and a little bit of cheese. But very little. And I feel fantastic. And I do not intend to keep doing that forever, but I am doing it until I feel a need to change. And then I will probably introduce a few more things. But I. All I can say is that the biggest thing for me is I have totally eliminated carbs from my diet. 100% other than any minute trace of carbs that you would find in meat or whatever. And that feels amazing. Like I. I never believed that that was possible and now I can't believe. I used to eat carbs every day of my life and I'm sure nearly everyone did. And that's made a massive impact. My brain is fast and sharp and my body feels good and I'm going to keep doing it. Like my digestion feels great. I don't think about food today. I've eaten a sirloin steak raised out here and that's it. I feel great. Okay. As many topics, geology, botany, zoology, mycology, that can help with achievable output. Yeah, I think that. I think farming involves all this. Why farming so interesting? It involves all trades and all. You know, it's amazing the amount of learning that can go on. And I feel like I have a. I have an extensive reading list. I'm going to make a note of this because I'm gonna stick it on our website or something. I'll make a note of it over here because it's, it's something I give to people and it's like when people are here, we go into all kinds of stuff because it's. We have a long time to develop things. But I will, I will make an effort to post a recommended reading list that goes into fields, you know, much wider than the specifics of like raising a chicken or growing a vegetable. And I've endeavored to do that a bit in a book as well. You missed the Kickstarter for the new book. The new book is going to be for sale on Regenerative Agriculture Co. And it won't be. I mean it will be for sale as an ebook much sooner, but I will not be selling hard copies till I get back from holiday in February. And Making Small Farms Work is not in print anymore. This new book includes and transcends it and so I would highly recommend you get that. If you buy the ebook version, you'll get it somewhere in November. And if you buy the hard book copy outside of the Kickstarter, you will not get it to the spring. And that's. That's the way it is. Cool. Good to hear, Timmy. I'M excited to catch up with you and see where you guys get to. And I know that you were trying to go there. Oh. But yeah, it'll be good to catch up with you. Tim was one of our interns and he's an awesome dude. I don't have advice. Jennifer's asking about advice on obtaining land from farmers who want to retire. I don't know that. I know that. Like I was just at the Oxford Real Farming Conference in the UK last January and I think a lot of elderly farmers go there looking to find young people they want to like hand over to in a way. I don't know if something similar exists in America, but perhaps other Americans could comment on that. There are different movements that have come up that I've seen where people write legal agreements and sort of open sources, legal agreements to make it easier to obtain land. But I don't, I can't give you anything super concrete on that. You know, putting in, yeah, land is, is hard to access. Aquaponics. I, to be honest, I'm not interested in aquaponics. I, I love aquaculture, like whole systems. I'm not interested in reductionist closed loop series systems. They're not closed loop. They're not, you know, do you want to eat out my no dig market garden or out of an IBC tank with some goldfish in it? It's like I'm being cynical, but I, I've been cynical, but I, I don't believe in it. I believe in natural systems and you know, the efficiency of an aquatic system is mind blowing. And to put that in a tank, I mean, you'd only ever think of that if you lived in a big city and I've never lived in the city, so it's just too far away from my relationship to life. I, you know, I'm sure some people are doing amazing things with it, but it's, I'm never going to eat anything from an aquaponics system. Why do I think tarping is ineffective? No, I don't think it's ineffective. I expect it kills weeds, but I feel like it probably damages the soil in ways we don't know. It's like flame weeding. I would never flame weed my garden. Like putting massive amounts of gas and hot flame onto the soil. No, that doesn't sound good. You know, we have the cleanest market garden I've ever seen and we just put compost on the surface. We don't do, you know, we do very little weeding and the market gardeners you see that have Clean guns, they use excessive tillage, lots of tarping, flame weeding. It's like that. There's no argument that that is good for the soil. It's not good for the soil, so don't do it. There's better ways. What do I think of agricultural policy in the uk? I don't want to get into that unless I'm back in the UK at some point, because that's a can of worms right there. I don't think I'm at the Oxford Real Farming Conference this year, but I. Yeah, I would need to have that conversation over a glass of whiskey after the conference. Do you put dead birds in the ground under crops? Like, if you're a commercial producer, you have to make sure the way you get rid of dead animals is meeting approval, which means, like, if you can compost things like that, that would be way more optimal, but there's tight regulations around that and so you have to get them removed and stuff like this. So you need to look at your local regulations. Like, as I said, homesteading and commercial farming are two very different beasts because you suddenly have the regulations come in place. If you're starting no dig gardens, Macy, if you're talking about putting compost on grass, like, if you want to build no dig beds, I recommend putting down compost and then so putting down cardboard if you can, and then compost 6 inches, 15 centimeters thick as you can. If you put it on thick, you'll get a little bit of some of the perennials like we had, a little bit of horsetail, a little bit of couch grass. This is the time of year to do it, and you keep on top of those little light bits and they disappear. Just keep doing it. If you. I just see there's another comment here about couch grass. Just spend the first year picking out what comes back and you weaken it and you weaken it and you're tricking the ecology and you're turning it into something very different. If you stay on top of it, I guarantee you you will have much easier time gardening in the long run, for sure. Like, we don't get hardly any. The things that we get now are things that have blown in, like trees, like birch trees, and they, you know, you can just pick them out because they're not rooted deeply, but we're not putting much time into that. Do I have a date for the book yet? I mentioned that. Okay, I'm just going to wrap up a few more questions, then I'm heading off to Semapham. How am I getting addresses to Send you the books. I made a little update on Kickstarter, so anyone that's back to Kickstarter campaign, I am sending out a survey in two days and it will ask you for your address and the name you want the book sent to, etc. So you will, if you've backed the campaign, you will get an email about that and I will take it from there. The book has been sent to the printers. We're waiting for confirmation if it goes well. I'm quite busy in the next weeks in several different countries, but I, I hope to even hop to the printers and go film it being printed. I really love to see the machinery and the process and I'm interested in them kind of things and, and also promote the company that's printing it because they're an ethical printer. They did a really nice work with us before and they're just lovely people. So I would like to go and show what goes on in that process, just out of curiosity and also promote them for anyone else that wants printing done. Will I be updating about the compost trials from early in the year? To be honest, that was a bit of a letdown, wasn't it? I never followed it up, but it was, it was a letdown. I think the one beds got totally trashed from the rain coming off the roof, so that wiped out the. One of the experiments. But it, it was very hard to determine anything useful. I think the only way to have done that would have been to like really put more time into making them quite distinctly different in, you know, I. How to say, you know, they all started on land that used to be tree beds and then it was pig paddocks, so it all had pig manure and that was like a year or two old and so I don't know. So then adding a little bit of chicken manure, a little bit of biofot, I just don't know. You know, it would be better in a way to make a totally fresh setting for all of that and, and then really weigh the produce and really like, you know, we're so busy here in the summer, it just got kind of ignored a bit and it's a bit of a shame, but basically, no, I don't have any distinct takeaway other than if you're going to make a trial, make your trial better, which was my fault. I should have have done that better. I, you know, I wouldn't want to. I didn't see anything I could report back and I think you would need a lot more care put in to make anything really viable and I still stand behind. Cover the soul. Keep plants growing as long as you can through the year. Keep living old dead roots in the ground as much as possible. Do a bit of everything you can and understand that whatever you know is way more complicated than that. Complex than that. I don't want to talk about changing climate. I think it is way too complex and I don't believe you and I don't believe me. I would be doing exactly the same regardless of any event it. And I think that's an important thing you could take for me and reflect on if, if you really want to know what I think. I'm not doing what I'm doing to try and fix anything out there. I'm doing what I do because I love what I do. I'm quite good at what I do and I can help others do it and I'm not trying to fix anything that's maybe a bit deep to get into at this time of night, but that's all I will say. Okay, we've been here for an hour and a half. Would I like to come sailing? Yeah, totally. I'm actually going on a like a day skipper training. So I sailed small boats when I was young. I have this dream to sail around the world in a bigger boat, take family. And so I'm doing a training with my friend Christian for two weeks. So we're then from, you know, we're then allowed to go hire boats and take them out. I would like to get some experience with other people but I, I have this vision to sail around the world is one of my life goals since reading swallows on Amazon since I was, you know, seven. And I'll be able to take the family and I would love to do it as an educational trip, teaching. I would like to offer free training in poor countries and take money from people in well off countries to help fund that and make a lot of video on the way and that's, you know, I'm just trying to formulate how to incorporate all my life goals and so would I like to come sailing over there? Yes, please. How much less output would you have without buying feed from the outside? Well, we've talked about that a bit, but it's, I mean that's too big to answer in the sentence, like we're all buying stuff from the outside. You know, where'd you get your electric from? Where'd you get half your food from? Where'd you get your petrol from? It's like, like we don't need to be totally Self contained, you know, it doesn't exist. I don't know a farm that's producing any useful amount of food that is totally self contained. That's not how the world works. The world is totally self contained. So I don't want to go deep into that. I mean that I could spend a week answering that question. Could we encourage other people to take some of our past students taking on interns? Yes, I think like, like our definition of internship is quite different. It's not just working on a farm. It's spending a lot of time in class with me looking at business, looking at management, looking at all the back end stuff. So our interns are doing very little valuable farm work in. It's not the clearest way to say it like they're doing some farm work, but they're doing targeted farm work so that they understand in their experienced certain key things. We have a team that run the farm and we don't need additional hands like we have when an internship is running. We have too many people for any given thing and that can become extremely detrimental. So we try and target it in a way that's too complicated to explain in simple way. But it's a lot of classroom time. So what I think is not really doing like that, but what, what I'm. I spoke about at the beginning is trying to create. I would like to put more time into networking like a personal network where it's like, I know Darren will work really great with Sandra, but I know that Darren is not a good match for John at all, you know, and so some kind of like personal network or some level of verification of people that. I don't know how to put it, but I think you get what I'm talking about. You know, it's got to be a personal network and it doesn't necessarily need to revolve around me, but it could revolve if I make the network, it could revolve around the people I know and their sphere. Something like this to, you know, a lot of people need experience and a lot of people need help. There's a big ongoing thing with, you know, employment, learning. It's like I have met very few employable people in Sweden and they're not people, Swedish people, it's people from all over the world. But it's. It's very hard to find people who could generate, you know, if I pay someone ten grand, they. That cost me twenty grand. They've got to earn at least that for the company as well to be worth it. Otherwise I just wouldn't bother having them. So it's very hard to find good employees. But where can you get the experience to be a good employee? Well, you can't learn it Ag school. It's this big dilemma and I'm, you know, I'm speaking about it very briefly but it's, it's something on my mind for over a decade that I've been educating people. It's like we need places like this. But I also, you know, it's, we need things far beyond my reach and yeah, I want to take time out and speak to people in different fields. Most of my study and time thinking is actually outside of the field of farming. And so I'm looking to connect in and collaborate with people who think in totally different ways to see how to leverage my own work in this field. And I have no idea. I will keep sharing and documenting what I do, but I think we need a lot more places for people to learn and we need a lot more small farms. Yeah. How many people now as does your farm use in a typical week in the summer months? Well, this is something I've documented intensely in a book. It takes, you know, I think I can run Layer and Boiler Enterprise and it's not full time except for Slaughter day when I need a team. The gardens can be run by one person if they're good, I mean really good. But I've only met two people in the whole time I've been here that can run the garden on their own. So how long does it take? What? How long does it take who? Is the question. Because you know, I know how long it takes me and I don't know how long it takes you. I would say it's four full time people's work to run this farm at full production in the summer and it's one person, one to two hours a day for the winter, which is six months of the year. Right. So bear that in mind because that's three full time salaries. Yes. Okay. Excuse me, I haven't been able to view everything here. I would like to know if this has been a useful process for people, but perhaps you could let me know in the comments below the actual video. I don't even know how this comes out if it makes like a normal YouTube video with it, but I won't be able to see them all here I guess. But I'm, I'm open to the idea of being available to people in this format if it's, if it's useful, if it's just me babbling on and it's not useful, then I don't need to do it also. Yeah. If microgreens suited your context, Rob from Finland, what do you think you would grow? Well, the easiest microgreens are sunflower, pea, radish. If you're growing them for fodder, then sunflower and pea, they're really easy. If you're growing them for fodder, they're really, really easy because they don't have to look nice. You could let them go leggy and bigger, you know, if you're feeding chickens with them, etc. They are the three easiest microgreens, for sure. What we've done is we've been selling like €10,000 of micros over the winter and then giving them the empty tray. So we'll. We use the greens, the quick cuts from these guys, we use their quick stand to put the greens harvester on, push the trays through. It's really efficient if you're doing a lot of microgreens. And then we'll take the whole seed tray and just chuck the compost, the little stems and all the seeds that didn't germinate into the chickens. And they love it. For anyone keeping chickens over the winter, put time into giving them treats like that because they go stir crazy otherwise, you know, imagine living 100 people in a train carriage for six months is driving nuts. So my analogies are not very good. But, you know, roots, hanging, carrots off a nail, just the head height of a chicken where it can only just reach that, you know, keeps the chicken happy for an hour or two. And microgreen sprouts, etc. It's really great. But stick with the easy ones. Get it down. Get the growing conditions down 15 to 18 degrees, some nice airflow, and you can't really go wrong. Sven. People dreaming of being farmers might not be great at working for others, following orders. It depends if you want to learn. Like, the people that learn the most and do the best are the people that throw themselves into whatever role they're in, in whatever situation in life that, that, you know, in a simple way. I think that's the way it is. How to decide on the right farm land to get. Is there a recommended process? Yes, there is. It's in our book. It's in our new book. It's like, first get your holistic context sorted. Most people don't do it because it's a lot of thinking and a lot of clarifying. What you never got encouraged by mother, father, brother, sisters, school, university, lovers, wives, husbands to do so do that it's why I don't consult much anymore. It's like unless someone is crystal clear what they're going for in life, I can't help them at all. You know, it's like if you can present me your holistic context and, and all the data, then I could design a beautiful farm for you. But if you can't even tell me what you're shooting for in life, I couldn't help you at all. So that's the first step. Next step is looking at market streams and possible enterprises that you could see yourself doing and starting from there. It's a long process potentially, and it might be worth hiring a professional to look at once you've got to that point whether the land you're looking at is suitable for the things you want to do. I've been on a few consultancies where I have convinced someone not to do their life dream, and that's been a very successful outcome. It might have crushed their dreams, but they would have wasted a lot of money doing something that their skills or whatever just wasn't up to, you know, so get very crystal clear on the why, first and foremost. And that process is in our book. And that's what our trainings are about for people. Peter, if too many people are coming to your table to eat and not help, then close your door. Don't let them anywhere near the table. It's a big thing. You know, I get comments about free help and, you know, it's obvious, like YouTube, these sort of platforms, people do share a lot of dross and often make very, you know, nonsense comments. And there's no such thing as free anything. Like it's expensive to have people and host people. And especially in the country where we are, it's, you know, there's nothing free and quality is, you know, I've written a whole chapter about each end of the spectrum. You know, I've worked with employees, I've worked with volunteers, I've worked with paying students. And there's pros and cons to all of them. There's no right or wrong, there's context to speak to, and there's certainly no such thing as free labor. That's the only sort of person that would say that has never experienced that in any way at all. It's most efficient to have employees, but it's very hard to find employees for this type of farming because where did they get trained? I've had people sent here by some of the most famous people on earth in this field, and they've Been useless. Just because someone is good over here doesn't mean it translates to this time, place and circumstance. And it's why I pretty much don't recommend anyone because it's just not fair, you know, I'd rather just Skype with someone, look in their eyes and talk to them and read what I see because it's. It never really works out. All right, I'm gonna take a few more and then I'm gonna go. So I. Can you talk about using spent grains? Spent grains are great. We used to feed our pigs on spent grains. They have about 25 to 35% of their nutrient left in, depends on the brewing process, etc. They are good supplemental feeds for. For, excuse me, for pigs. I wouldn't use them for poultry. I wouldn't use them for herbivores that obviously don't eat grain. Pigs is where it's at. But I would use it as part of a mixed feed with vegetable waste, broken eggs, with whatever. And grains, whole grains. Like we always had grains on hand. If these bent grains ran out and I estimated. Well, it's in our book. There's a chapter on pigs and I talk about the offsetting of costs with that. Etc. No big market gardens in southern and continental Europe there? There are a few. I can't list them off the top of my head, but I'm going to go and visit them all next year. So I will film them and we'll see in depth what they're up to. Any farm failure stories? Possibly the only main failures I've heard from from our interns are people taking on too much and just having to like stop doing a bit of the farm, you know, taking on too many enterprises. And it's something I've been very cautious to tell people about coming to our farm is that if it was just me and Johanna trying to raise, you know, a living and have a family here, we wouldn't do half the things we're doing. I'm very clear about that to everyone. It's like I'm very into mixed farming, but I would not have a market garden. I wouldn't probably have planted trees everywhere and I probably wouldn't have cows. I'd probably just raise poultry, you know, and I'd have very easy life working part time and decent money. The people I've seen go away and do too much, they've had to rein it back in a bit. And that's the main failures I've heard of. Yeah, there's a lot of serious people coming here, you know, So a high proportion of them have done epic and done really good. And many of them are about to. Some of them haven't started, I guess, but I want to go visit them, particularly our past participants, because I think you'll find a theme when I document them, you'll find a theme that's quite powerful running through that. What qualities are important to have as a farmer. I think I could do a whole video on that. But to make a successful living in this type of farming, you need to be a bloody hard worker who can work fast, learn quick. You need to have very good visualization skills. You need to have a whole range of trade skills, even if they're simple, but good with practical things and tools. Tools, mechanics, plumbing, electrics, stuff, you know, a practical know how of how stuff works that, you know, DIY style, diligent and observational. You know, this type of farming is purely about observing and, you know, going out your way to go and see things. Going to the back of the forest at 11:30 at night because you didn't do that for the last two weeks. You know, going over there where you never went that year, just to sit for half an hour and watch things like. It might sound abstract, but I learned the most of anyone here because I spend a lot of time going, looking everywhere, all the time. That's a big part of my job, is I get up before anyone else and I go and look around the farm. I go see stuff, I notice things, I see creatures, I see elk every day. I have people here for four months who leave having not seen an elk and I've seen them every single day that year. And that translates to watching how things are going and knowing when to respond. You know, this type of farming is purely about observing and timely interaction. It's all easy. Anyone can raise birds, anyone can raise cows, anyone can raise sheep, grow vegetables, whatever. You know, it's harder to run a business and do all that stuff. But observing is key. Okay, last couple and then I'm. I am off. Am I going to get Spain this year? No, next year I would travel and I will hopefully go across all of Europe. I'm going to basically hook up with all of our past participants and then I'm going to open it up to this is what I'm thinking now. I will open it up to the public suggestions of farms to check out. They need to be production farms, not just wacky, inspiring stuff. It's got to be production farms that are happy to talk about finances, happy to talk about pros and cons. Errors, etc, challenges. And I'm going to prioritize our past training participants, of which there are dozens. I could film and update you from some of the ones I have filmed. And then I'm going to open up to public suggestions and also invitations for training and try and use some training opportunities to network and fund a bit of a trip because it will cost quite a lot to. I'll be driving around Europe. I think that's my plan for now. Yeah. Panzer. Don't know how you meant to say that. I realized I have to hold back on what I want if I want to start successful. Decided to start with layers as a main focus and maybe a little market gun. I think it's a good idea like do one or two enterprises max at full operation. If you start to. If you spread yourself too thin, you. It will just be too much, too stressful. Relationships end, money gets spent, breakdowns, divorces, everything. Don't do it. Yeah, it's much better to get one thing nailed. But market gardening is the most labor intensive thing you could get yourself caught up in. So be very careful not saying don't do it. I'm just saying if you start a market garden to get the revenue out of a market garden, you're going to be doing it at a scale where you have time for nothing else else. And I'm gonna make some kind of videos about this in the future. I just think that most people don't know this and most market gardeners that you see in the Internet aren't coming from a farming background. They're market growers. And so they can't contextualize or warn you about this. But I've seen many people get locked up in growing veg and not having time for things they actually wanted to do. So be careful because if you do a layer operation, I can run 1200 layers in an hour, 20 minutes, an hour, 30 minutes a day. So you know you ain't gonna get that out of edge garden. Even if it does give you some months off, you won't have time to set up the other things or plant a hedgerow or make a fence or whatever it is you need to do. So I want to talk more about that and that's a nice roundtable thing to talk about with some other farmers perhaps because it's something I feel I need to speak up to more and more because as my experience is as a mixed farmer. Yeah, cool, that's good. Sprout says smash that. Like if you appreciate video and want more, that's a Good way to show me. I just don't to want a lot of comments saying, oh great, you know, show me in the quickest way if you think it's useful. And that's good for me. Like I'm happy to spend some time over the winter when I'm less busy to share if it's useful. All right, I'm gonna take two more and then that's it. How did you get capital before farming? I have already I to that. So we, I had about €20,000. I then set about borrowing €80,000 and we bought the farm was a little bit less than that. So we had some money to be able to start up the enterprises. Would I raise egg layers from chicks? No, it's cheaper here to buy point and lay hens because of the time of year they need to be raised. Don't get too excited about starting perennial crops. Perennial crops like orchards, trees, they don't give you money for ages. Use enterprises that pay you instantly. Like, if you're not starting with an enterprise that makes you money in the first year, you're going to have to be an industrial farmer or work off the farm. Don't work off the farm if you can help it. You need to live in the middle of your farm. And all the best smart farmers I know live right in the middle of their farm and work full time. You know, what do you need to do not to need to work outside? You know, start with products that people eat that make money quickly. It's why we do broilers, turkeys, layers. They make money fast and pay off all their costs and make money straight away. You can't do that with many other enterprises. All the enterprises we do in our farm do that. So be very careful. And that's, I hope the new book will really help a lot of you with those kind of questions. Because that's the whole aim of the book is to lay it out like, if you've got $50,000 to invest and you've got two hectares, these are three things you could do. And nothing else is going to work in this field. Like, you can't do that, you can't do that. You can't do that side. You have to work in this realm. It's, you know, I, I, the reason I've written it in that way is I know that a lot of people coming into this type of type of farming don't come from a farming background. And I think it's really important that they do because farmers are some of the most like tough nutted people you can speak to. They're so stuck in pride and arrogance. We do it this way because grandfather did it this way. And that's got a beautiful characteristic to it at one point. But it's also very hard to change conditioning of decades. And most farmers are 50, 60 years old. So I believe in a young entrepreneurial generation of people coming into farming. But therefore they need some recipes and ideas because they're coming without a sense of how hard does a ball kick when it kicks you in the face or whatever it is. Like, there's no context for like, you know, what a 15 ton machine rolling over your leg would be like or whatever. All right, we're gonna have to save some questions there. Thanks for supporting the Kickstarter. That's great. Yeah, no, I'm gonna, I'll see how I feel about this and any comments that come up and be interested to hear any from feedback from people that watch this after the event. But we've been here a couple of hours. I'm going to sign off and go and spend some time with Ragnar. So thanks for, for coming on board and I'm very happy to hear feedback and thoughts or different formats suggesting, et cetera. I'm not an expert in doing these live things, so do feel happy to leave comments in there and yeah, look forward to connecting in this way again. Good evening.