PASTURED POULTRY ARE TOP FOR SMALL FARMERS

You know, we're very pragmatic and we're not fundamentalist in our approach and we are supporting the last organic grain grower in the area. And for me that's of more value than not using grain in a way. And I think that long term I would like to develop a market for more truly pastured things like rabbits, geese. But we are pretty remote and to turn up here and try and sell a thousand pastured geese is pretty naive. I think people eat chicken every day here and so we're starting with known products and there are no good alternatives. I mean, if you go to a store in the local town, there is no competition. Nobody produces proper pastured poultry and certainly not organically. There's one organic chicken producer in Sweden, but it's a big industrial operations so it's incomparable. So, you know, we set out with the boilers as a cash flow set up for the first sort of five years. And part of the beauty of like really running this through via our holistic context is that we're willing to drop that any moment if something appears that replaces it. But for a small farm, running sheep and cows, etc. Is just not viable. You can't make that work economically. So they're more for the homestead side of it because we're feeding people at the farm and we're serving over 10,000 meals a year from the farm. So it's viable to not buy meat in, as it were. Any food that we buy in for participants here is organic and in Sweden that costs a lot of money. So it makes more sense to produce our own stuff before producing for sale to reduce our costs. High little metal. But yeah, chickens are a great one because of the like. I think to run 3,000 boilers here, I mean that could be a family income and that's needed less than 2 hectares of ground to never go on the same ground again. But you could do two passes in a season only working outdoors only for six months in a year. And that would, if it was two people dealing with all the slaughter, it would be sort of 2/3 full time work. I guess for a good family income that only takes six months. I mean it's a very doable thing. But then to stack that in with the cows and sheep and have, you know, really improving forage is paving the way for being able to do purely pasture things because it's actually making our pasture viable. And oh me though, but the layers have a much bigger impact than the boilers. The boilers do pure fertilization and the layers do this scarification as well. And they take. We did invertebrate studies the first year, and the layers are taking perhaps 40% of their diet in the summer from pasture insects and greens. But this is a little complex because they're also using probably 30% more energy because they're running around a lot. But the nutrition they will get is more, much better. But you can kind of see here what the broilers do. You see like this is a little corner of the. The boiler pan. You see this little pan. And then you can see the next move is here. And I can see that this is a boiler thing, not a layer thing. Now, if you, if you park an eggmobile, you'll get a patch like this where the eggmobile's been. But I can see this is the boilers because it's the length of the board, the pen apart. So they came through here like a month ago. But just the rebooting of the nutrient and water cycling from hens makes them worth considering as a starting enterprise for anyone, especially on small farms, because you can't really run a more profitable, extensive enterprise. So I'm very happy with them. They've been doing really nice job. I wish I could show you photos of this bit of the farm before because it was just moss and ladies mantle. That was all that was here. This one.