Poultry Processing and general farm update...

So busy days with our pastry poultry training over the weekend. That was a great success and we managed to get the first birds through the slaughtery, teaching people how that operates. And then today we've just had our first proper slaughter with the interns and we've done extremely well. We processed a third of the birds before lunch and cleaned down at the same time. So operating at as good a speed as you could expect with a group of new people being trained. And really nice quality birds coming out too. Okay, so first order with nintends is going pretty smooth. Birds are coming through about a third of the pace that we normally work to, which is pretty good for a styling team. And they're looking good. We'll just have a quick look in the chiller. Very nice. Birds. Birds in, birds in. Birds in. Okay, Grace is coming in to Nurn. You've done the chicken before, but it's a long time ago. So you put your hair net on and then we scrub hands. So come in. Here's your knife. It's very sharp. First we have to do this bit and take the tail gland off. I'm going to do it with you next to you. So you have to copy Papa's hand movements very carefully. See how it's a very sharp knife. And I'm chopping off this tail gland. Yep. Down to the spine. Bit harder. Yeah, there. Then you've got to cut sideways a bit. Perfect. Now very sharp knife. So you pinch this bit up. You see the yellow bits in there? You better go under them. But down. Chop your fingers. That some perfectly done burn. Basically just give it a rinse. Pretty nice chicken. Okay, so very well done, team. We're cleaned up and we'll be cleaned up before lunch. Got a Skype call with Jake Eldridge is at Austin's Organics. Some will remember from a video that I showed not long ago last summer. So we're going to Skype with him, see how his season is going for the benefit of the intent. But I've just foamed down in here. There's clean on going on outside. Birds look great and we've got open day soon, so we kept organ meat. But we have 75 people coming booked on for lunch for the open day. Usually a couple hundred people come for the open day, which is on Saturday. And so we're going to smoke a load of birds to do lunches with. But great job from the team. They were running it about 25 times slower on the pass through poultry course. But obviously there's a lot of education talking Going on today, they really excelled. Three times slower than how we typically run. And we were swapping around every 40 birds, so people tried different rolls. So that's pretty impressive. And we did a really good job. It's a great job all around and really nice to get, you know, that flavor of the workflow going of how you operate a space like this efficiently and hygienically and to regulation, but also in a way where the workflow really makes sense. Great to see Gracie learning too. She's, you know, she's naturally not so squeamish and really enjoys handling fish and handling the birds and does a really good job. It's great to see.

Since you came and made the video here, I get a lot of people getting in touch, you know, wanting to learn about the no dig approach, thinking that, you know, putting a mulch down is going to fix their farm, you know, and it's not that simple. You know, really what the changes here, the really important changes we've made have really been about the management, you know, the process we've been through on your course. You know, right now, holistic context has kind of allowed us to make more kind of radical decisions easier. So when it comes to like choosing what to grow, which is really the most important, the main reason we've been able to scale our economy whilst downscaling the size of our gardens has been that we've just stopped growing a lot of the stuff that's not been making us any money.

So I've just been back in, sweeping down the excess water after rinsing everything down and I'm filling up the scrap. So this is a clean scalder that we only use for hot water, for wash downs as well as for packing. Now you can see videos last year where I explained the entire slaughter procedure in detail and then another video I think the day later looking at the entire package procedure. So we're full of birds in here and we're going to pack down tomorrow along with one of the biggest veg harvest for the week. And we've got a huge amount of veg going out with a new RICO ring starting in Arvica. Now, Carla put in a lot of hours last year selling at a market on our Vika and we did that to build up the momentum to start a RICO ring, but we've just been too busy that Johanna basically was asked to basically set that up this year and we said we just don't have time, but we would love it to happen if someone else can set it up and it seems to have naturally fallen on the time we would go there anyway, so that's perfect. So we'll be going to Karlstad on Wednesdays, Sunny and Torsby and Avika on Thursdays at the Rico's there, where we have customers from restaurants and private customers. Anyway, so a bunch more sales. It's mid July now and sales really peak up and continue keep growing until the end of July and then they sort of hit that peak level for the next few months. That's exciting. So here in the high tunnel, cucumbers are low, but we've been taking out a lot of very nice cucumbers. Growing remains up on the side now. So the plants are low but the yield's been high and we wanted that. We didn't want big plants with late yields. We wanted them now when we were short on other crops. Got all the cherries coming in now. See we're fairly high pruned. If we look through here and we've got lettuce replacements. This is motta stone that we had some old seed of. One of my favorite lettuces. See all the fungi that come up here. The no dig setup. But this is a green and speckled leaf, sometimes goes on the flashy trout. It's one of our favourites. More green, crisp all the way along here. Potentially there's at any point there's two and a half thousand euros of lettuce sitting underneath these tomatoes. So it's very lucrative this year for us growing the way we do. And then here we've got idli. And just if you remember from last year, idli is a rambunctious tomato. Look at these trusses off these little plants. Italy can. It's a little yellow sweet Tomato. Up to 80 flowers per truss and up to 8 trusses. Just look down this row. It's my favorite tomato. It's a crazy tomato. These are tiny plants, but they've started to have fruit already in the lower branches. You see some first fruit sitting here down here, some of our bigger tomatoes. This is more tomatoes setting in here. But yeah, this is going to be fun later in the year. Italy is just a top performer and if you're not, there's ID li Idli. Just the last few plants on this row. Things are looking good in here. It's once a week, just pruning and making sure the strings are tight. But that's all we do. I mean, just look at the fruit clusters on these things. Unbelievable. Definitely a high performance tomato that I'll be growing every year. I think Delicious fruits last year, just the amount of blossom, the plants look yellow. It's crazy. So things going okay? Not so much time being put into here, but certainly by doubling up on salads this year, we're really able to get much more value out of this tunnel, which is fantastic. So cows and sheep have come up into front field clover. May is not looking impressed. She was kind of happy where she was. We got turkeys down the bottom of the field and we've brought them in here. This is a field that got plugged in winter when I was away in Germany and the ground thawed up. They were bale grazing in here. So we've kept eggmobiles out this year. And we're running through after the turkeys, essentially, which are there. And then we'll be going up to the forest paddocks that we've been fitting the fencings on. Running through there a bit before coming behind the broilers in top field. Sheep are pretty similar. They've come down a bit, but they're still quite timid. But very happy with the cows. And that's working well. We might even run the turkeys in with them for a little while in this field just to see how that works. Just for an experiment. We don't normally have turkeys on our farm, so we couldn't normally try that. But it might be something we do in the next days. These are the water lines and field hoses. 100 meters of gas hose that runs to all the different animals. And these quick releases. This is just municipal clips, you see. Just squeeze that anywhere we go. We've got water on the main line that can easily reach anywhere in our fields. And that combined with good fencing and solar energizers means animal moving is a breeze. So here in frontfield, this is Timothy up to my chin and Coxford as well. The same height. It's gone over, but we want them grazing tall with different age distribution between the plants. Now, these are the same species we see up at our neighbor's land. We'll go and take a peek up there. Same species, just totally different expression. When we look down in this land, it's just a different story. And we've compared these fields at different times. But yeah, we are dealing with the same species. Very different water and nutrient cycle. Where the neighbours have very little armor. We've got, look how thick this mat is that we can leave on the ground. That's what holds moisture. That's our carbon bank. We're super happy trampling that down. Lot of pears Starting to form up. This is Siberian pea tree as a nitrogen fixer. And then we've got all of our wonderful black currants coming in. These are the size of one of my fingernails and I've got big fingers. Just look at these things all the way along. Fertilized by pastured poultry. We've got a thousand of these bushes on our fields turning into red currants over here. Beautiful. Lots of processing to do in this next period. Turkeys are here. Just a few turkeys this year. They have grown fairly big. Couple of small females, a little bit stunted in my mind. Some of the females are obviously bigger. The males will start lifting their tails up and going in the mornings. We've decided to grow them on. We want to offer these to smoked chickens. It's much better to do bigger birds that don't dry out. And so I think we're gonna not process these with this group of interns and leave them on. We've always processed our birds about six and a half, seven kilos to get a maximum five kilo dress bird, because that's what fits with modern consumer ovens. But yeah, most people don't have the luxury of a huge range like we have. But. But in a way, turkeys can be, you know, so much bigger with a male tomorrow being, you know, 20 kilos, 16, 20, 24 kilos. So we might go on some big birds this year. Well, you can see the ponds filled back in with that bit of rain. And this stream on the downside here just dried up, but it's flowing again. The trout are happy. Just been stomping through the grass and got to prune up these trees soon, which is something we'll get around to in the next days. You can just see the eggmobiles coming in down from the very top bit of nutfield. Coming down between the nuts now. And we've left here this morning. You can see seed heads bitten off many of the plants, some standing, some trampled, some eaten. And that's the way we like it when you really get down in here. As I've shown before, a lot of wind breaking for the insects. And ground is harmoned and covered and animals are well fed. That's a good result and what we're aiming for at this time of year. So our planning is working very well. So comparison with the neighbor's lamb. Same species in here, very different concentration and expression. We've been up here quite a few times in the past in videos, but that's the difference the parrot chicken makes. I've Talked about this on other videos and I don't know if I showed it or not, so I'm going to do it again anyway. But this is land cut at the same time as our land over here. Very different tree assemblies, very different ground covers. This is what's left after the logging, and this was left at the same time as ours. And you see pretty much rowan, the odd birch, and it's about 3 meters tall. Some elder coming in, but very few grasses and lots of brash. So let's see what pigs and ruminants do. So just over the road, different management. You see, our trees are. Well, they must be five, six meters tall. And we've got species you don't see over there. Lots of oaks, lots of poplar, and everything's much more stable. And the ground has got a lot more light to it. You'll notice all the lower trees you can see much further through the paddock is another oak here. But the sheep and cows have been depositing their gut flora and fauna in here. A lot more willows and other things. Things are just in a much stronger state of growth and we've got all the grazing underneath. We'll be coming back up here with the cows and sheep soon. But pigs disturbing this once a year, fully digging over. This was dug over last year and you see it comes back very differently. The only dead branches are branches I've thrown in there that I trimmed out the way of the fence. All of that material has disappeared. We'll go and have a look in here. It's becoming quite a magical spot in here. And as I said, the sheeps and cows prune the trees lower, which lets a bit more light in and we get these glades. Now the pigs will have dug up some of the younger trees and just makes these beautiful little clearings. Now we've got this little parasitic plant that eats the roots of grasses. But I'm not so worried about that. That'll be out succeeded at some point. And really we should have come in here and weakened it earlier. But it's fine by me. It's going really nicely in here. We've got natural pine and some spruce coming back. But it's really nice to see the different species. A lot of These pasture species, St. John's wort and dandelions and clover. All the white clover with bumblebees on. These are species that have been brought up here through management as well as some natural dispersion. Here he is. Some wild strawberries here. Really sweet. Hello, Sam. So that's Birds and the birds are coming through, looking beautiful, very healthy. And we're gonna have two slaughters next week because we've got a farm open day and we've got pretty busy time catering for that. So nice to see the lush regrowth where we've been through with layers. Now. Cows will be. They won't be back here for quite some while now and roller pen has been doing great. Birds a lot more active in a pen like this. We've been exploring all kinds of models and implications for different ways of raising poultry over the weekend, which is always inspiring and fun. So finally, right over in the distance on the neighbour's land, our winter feed has been cut and it should get bale tomorrow. And it's taken a while. Everyone's busy at this time of year and it's a little bit late, to be honest, but that'll do. And we've had a lot to manage this year. Some of the walnuts over strawberries doing great. These are ones we started from seed very recently, like three years ago now. So things doing great here. So really ramping up in production here this time of year. And we've got a lot of veg going out this week. Big harvest days. On three separate days now we started the new Rico that I mentioned. I won't be in this week's harvest because I'm going to be managing the packing of poultry. The gardens are looking much better still. Some patchy areas, but we've managed to correct a lot of beds and looking very clean. Some beautiful carrots coming out this week. These are some of our sausages from the pigs from the end of last year, called forest sausages. We've been doing a few different recipes, but they are incredible and we've been eating a lot because it's a really easy thing to cook quickly. But we're selling these in packs of four. It's a good size for people and they do really good. So wonderful product from the forest. I thought some of you might be interested in this. This is my latest addition to the mobile fishing fleet. And not content with just having a new sailboat, which is a bit of a hassle to get down the water quickly, I decided to invest in this as a totally portable kayak for. For taking in the truck whenever I'm out on adventures, as well as being such a lightweight thing that I can just take down the lake very quickly on my own. It weighs about 25 kilos. I can pick it up with one hand over my head and it looks incredibly flimsy it's just pvc, but the design is incredible. Just all these pieces click in and they also click out and this folds down into a backpack. Basically. It's pretty amazing thing. And you're obviously kneeling on these pads on the water. So very nice design, very impressed with it. I'm looking forward to getting this out this evening after a long day to go fishing. So that's it for today folks. I'm standing in front of the two trees that I've used in the example videos before. This is the first tree ever planted at the farm and this is a tree, same tree planted a couple of months later, same size, just healed in, but in a properly dug hole, which makes all the difference. Just look at the stem growth and the above ground growth of these two trees. They've been pruned heavily so this one would be triple the size by now. Very big difference just from digging the holes, right? Dig your holes deep enough. That's the moral of the story. Thanks so much for watching folks. Just a quick set of updates from today's busy times as we change over some of the team and enter the very last week for the interns. So big change over time now at the farm, which I'm super excited for and season's really beginning and ramping up now, so look forward to sharing as much as I can of that with you over the next period and we'll see you in a video soon. Thanks for your likes and shares and comments, etc. See you very soon.