Real Food, Healthy Soils & Happy Farmers! Regenerative Agriculture

Once you bring species onto a habitat, you create ecological niches. If I bring one species to my farm, I create the ecological niches for seven other species to live there. And I've been bringing lots of things here, like many species of livestock and birds. And so I've created this ecological island that's worth landing on. And what you start to see is like my bird song population is out the window. A guy was on the training this year and he burst into tears the first night he was camping at the farm because he lived 40 minutes away and there's no songbirds. And my place is like, it's kind of annoying now, it's so noisy you can't sleep. But we've also got three nesting pairs of predator birds, like raptors that have moved back onto the farm. Like the horse, what's it, the sea eagle and two pairs of buzzards have moved on to a 10 hectare farm. They're not eating my chickens and things, they're eating all the other creatures that are moving in because of the habitat I create. And this is next level thinking is we will start to judge the success of our land management by how plump our predator species are. But that's level five, don't worry about that for now. But the pattern here, what we're trying to, is trying to illustrate. We're making patterns that fall off contour to make water do something extraordinary. And we're using this special tool. This is a subsoiler that you find in the back of barns all over the world. But this is like the Rolls Royce version that was developed by PA Yeomans over the last 60, 70 years. And it's a very curious tool. It's a non inversion rigid tine plow. So it doesn't, it's not like a plow that turns soil over and puts subsoil on top of topsoil. Now it's all dead soil. That's not good because when you plow the soil, you create compaction. You make soil walk out your front gate, you make oxygen in the atmosphere bond with carbon, fly off with CO2. This is all like multiple problems of tilling soil. This is not, I don't count this as tillage because what I'm doing is pulling this under the ground to explode the compacted subsoil because it's been farmed badly for so many generations here. And the only difference between topsoil and subsoil is life, air and water. So this thing smashes up that subsoil and that lets air and water in. And then plants can root and they put sugar. That's life. Life, air, water. Now we're growing our topsoil from below really fast. Yeomans, back in 1950, was building 30cm of topsoil out of schist, which is like broken up parent rock. It's not even any soil at all. And he was phoning like agronomists and saying, hey, you should come check this out. He was in a very dry landscape outside Sydney, like half a meter of rain, dry summers. He was like, you should come and see. I'm building soil out of this rock. And they're like, no, impossible. Takes a thousand years to make this much soil. He was like, yeah, but come. No. And in the end, they started to listen to him because he was reforesting dry land ridges. So the ridges is where the landscape's driest because all the water's going into valleys, but the ridges make up 70% of the landscape. So nearly all the land he had is very dry. But in the end, he could reforest his ridges without irrigation. And then people started listening because it's like, hang on, no one can make trees survive even in irrigation. So what's he doing? But this tool is very interesting. This is called a wombat point, and it's got a very small profile touching the soil, but it's got this massive explosive impact. It's kind of mimicking the spherical tunneling of the Australian marsupial, the wombat. So it's doing an underground service for us, but we do it on this funny pattern, which is why you see these weird shapes in my fields. It's called a keyline plough, but it's just a subsoiler. And you find them everywhere. They're 100 years old. Often they were like springtime with a wheel pulled by a hawks. But it's the pattern that we use it on that you can only do with really good mapping, which now we can do. You know, with my little drone, I can go to sub Saharan Africa and map 400 hectares in a couple of hours. Would have cost $20,000 10 years ago. Now it costs nothing. So the whole design process has become very democratized because we don't need experts. This is what it looks like going through the ground. It's not mashing up my soil in two months. You wouldn't know I've been there. It's just my grass is twice as high and it's making water do a lot more work. And then I'm bringing a lot of mixed species animals at high density. Because when Europeans went to North Africa, you read about the landed gentry, they could tie the grasses in knots above the saddles of their horses and they would shoot 3000 Gazelle in the weekend for pleasure. But think about that. If I can fire a shotgun, you're going to scarf up pretty quick, right? If I can shoot 3,000 animals in a weekend, that gives you a sense of the sheer density of animals on that landsc. And it's those animals that made grasslands work 9 meter deep topsoils across North America and Africa that are now desertified and well intended. But ignorant people want to start planting trees across the Sahara because what could possibly go wrong with that? It was never a forest, it was a grassland with wide spaced trees and masses of animals. Because animals and grasses evolved together. They are the same thing. They can't be without each other. And so we're mimicking this because most of the landscape that we work with is primarily grassland for livestock production. When Europeans went to North America, it was estimated there were 60 to 100 million bison running around and 9 meter deep topsoils. And we have tree hugging societies, some of you are probably bloody part of them. But we don't have any grass hugging societies, do we? But did you know that grass plants, big perennial bunch grasses can live a thousand years and they sequester so much more carbon and you can harvest them many times every year. But it's not very sexy because trees are grand and architectural and we feel humbled by them. But if you really understand grasses, then our relationship to grasses is mostly lawns that we cut and. But grasslands are one of the only reasons we developed a large brain and are a pretty potent species on this planet. So we brought all these mixed species at high density and we've really transformed our fields. We're copying nature, right? Because what do animals do in nature? They move all the time because they've been evolving with pack hunting predators. So we don't. It's not very efficient to farm predators. So we use electric fences and fire electrons down wires as a proxy for wolves or mountain lions or whatever it is. And when animals are in a bunch and they move all the time, they don't need drugs because they're really healthy and hygienic because they don't live in their own fecal matter. And then we get very nutrient dense food appropriate for humans. We do that by moving water around, very simple low cost techniques like I spent more, I spent less, sorry, buying my farm and building up this business than most people in this country spend on buying a house. Everything's done super low tech, but done copying nature. This is what it looked like across our fields when we moved there. And we've done that in the first few years by using that funny plow. But more importantly using all these animals to make a living and make much better quality food than you can find in store whilst getting paid. Well, we've done this with trees over the top too. Most farms could benefit from more trees. And we're actually living in a country that had, I think, one of the last examples of sustainable agriculture in Europe. And this was practiced up until not that long ago. But as the population density became larger here, it was the Finnish people that brought this to the sort of hinterlands. And you can still see remnants of their settlements still, which is pretty fascinating if you're interested in agriculture. But they would come along and cut forest and then go through this rotational cropping system and then put the land back to forestry for a generation, let's say. And they were able to sustain their population on their land base, which we don't do today by any stretch of the imagination. I think this is the last example of sustainable agriculture in Europe actually. So I'm very interested in that. The reason I'm interested in this, this is agroforestry, like bringing trees into farms. And we work with two main systems like agro, sorry, silver arable, which is putting trees over our arable crops, and silver pasture, putting trees into our pasture because they create all these beautiful benefits, they pass nutrients around the system, they take nutrients from very different spectrum in the soil, they create shelter, they create habitat, they do all these little ecosystem processes for us. And we have some of the best studies in the world come from European long running studies of agroforestry systems where you have what's called a land equivalent ratio of up to 150%. That means if I had one hectare of forest and one hectare of wheat, if I put them together, I get one and a half times the production just by integrating. And when you start integrating that with water systems, animal systems, then you start creating the sort of abundance that this planet has always had. So we're doing that on this funny key line pattern and we're putting in tree beds. This is the first week I moved to the farm and we're using that tool to start this soil building process and then bringing lots of animals in. But up above the pasture there's 30 or €40,000 of fruit and nut and berry crops that don't Take up any space at all. And they're providing all of this ecosystem services to us as well. And we like that. One thing we don't like is Swedish forestry. This is not forestry. This is vertical desert. This is like barely useful for toilet paper. The quality of timber in my short life has gone down very noticeably. But this is not forestry. People talk about the Swedish forest. This is not forestry. It's got a diversity of one. That's not what a forest is. It's very susceptible to problems. And when we have forest fires, we have to fly Canadians in because no one here has experience in fighting forest fires. And now we get bark beetles. And that industry is falling apart. It's a mafia business here. They're leaning on the government making policies. And we don't like it. But what we do like is cutting it down, bringing in ecosystem triggers. Everything in nature is governed by patchy intervenant disturbances. Think about your life. Think about when you maybe had a near death experience or a health scare, or your mum or your best friend or your lover died or got sick or something. Pretty intense thing happening in your life. That's a patchy, intermittent disturbance. That's the sort of thing that makes you reevaluate your life, maybe change a few habits, maybe move house, maybe get in a relationship, out of a relationship. That's a patchy, intermittent disturbance. Nature is governed by these. What governs the forest system here? Wild boar. Wild boar come in and they have a massive impact, but then they don't come back for a long time. And that starts a little process. Same with 60 million bison. We talk about million, this $400 million. We have no idea what is a million. If I count to a million, what is a million? That's 12 days and nights. Then we talk about billions. How long does it take to count to a billion? It's like 34 years. And we throw these numbers around like we know what we're talking about. 60 million bison. Can you imagine how wide that herd is running? How you know is that 150km long? Can you hear it from 100km away? Can you imagine the impact they have on the ground? And that kinetic energy is also important, as well as grazing and turning that into manure and urine. When you have kinetic energy on the ground, it stimulates the soil life and makes processes happen. And yet we have social media memes where meat production bad, vegetable production good. It's like, okay, that's true of modern conventional industrial agriculture, I agree. But it's 180 degrees wrong for real farming. Nothing more sustainable than turning sunlight to grass to flourish. And I'm a vegetable grower professionally, and I can tell you it's the most input intensive of all farm industries. I'm not saying any more than that. I'm just saying we need to understand what we know and what we don't know. So what I do is I cut down this horrible monocultural toilet roll place and I bring in these piggies. And what do piggies do? They do patchy, intermittent disturbances, but it's time controlled. I control the time that they're in a place to manage their impact. What they do is they dig everything over and then succession happens. Succession is the pattern of change in ecological communities over time. And it follows the same pattern language all over the world. It happens with different species at different speeds, and that's the way it is. But when you run pigs through a forest system like this, more diversity of tree species germinate than were there before. I've got 100 oak trees per hectare growing now. I didn't plant them. My neighbors don't have any because they haven't had this intermittent disturbance. My pastures must be full of acorns too, by logic. But they're not stimulated to germinate because an oak tree is a late forest successional tree. It needs every other step of succession to have taken place, to give it the chemical trigger to say, your turn. And everything in life is like this. So we're using animals to express their natural physiology. What does a pig want to do? It's got a plough on its face to dig all day. So in the industry, they raise them on concrete floor and it's bad for their feet and they're living in their own feces. And of course they need a drug industry just to keep them alive. It's like being in a medieval village, right? But if you let a pig express its pigginess, it drives an ecosystem process forward. And then what we do is we allow that land to rest and then we bring our cows and sheep, they bring their gut flora and fauna from the pasture and deposit in the forest. And a year later, this has now got pasture species growing in what was just pine needles and blueberries. And I've got this amazing example at my farm because the neighbor cut his at the same time. And I filmed it on YouTube for years when they used to make videos. Our trees are four times the height. We've got three times more species in that same land and we're making loads more money from the livestock. In the meantime, While the trees grow, because forestry is terrible. It makes $0.01 per square meter per year. I make hundreds of times that and I need to if I want to get a paycheck, right. So it only works on mass scale and mass clear cutting, but we don't like that. So we're using animals as a trigger to drive things. But to do all this lovely stuff, we have to make money to pay all of our investments off as well as get paid. So we've chosen three main enterprises and I'm just going to run through those. The first is our market gardens and I've always came into farming through vegetable production, but I. Yeah, that's the most intensive and the one that should be the most limited in size. I'm interested in small, intensive production. We're 40 times more productive here than the famous sort of organic growers. Like we have Torfork nearby, because they're working with a machine that can only plant carrots this far apart. I can put 12 rows of baby carrots in the bed like this. I can put six rows of main crops. So when you work with tractors, you need bare soil and you need to work with the size of the machinery. But when we work by hand, we can be super intensive and make things smaller and do them better ecologically. So as I get older, I'm always thinking, like, what don't you need to do? How little can you do? Like, you can feed a hundred families of vegetables from that space. So we do vegetables and we do microgreens and we're growing in compost primarily. So we're copying nature, we're copying how a forest floor builds soil. We're not tilling the soil ever. And I'll show you some of the tools we use to do that. The only reason I have a market garden now is because. Because the tools that have come around in the last decade, because I came into farming through vegetable production and I worked my butt off as a teenager and young man getting paid like €5 an hour doing such hard manual work. And it's the advent of these new tools, particularly in the last 10 years, that made it kind of fun again. Tools that can, like 20x your time. This is fun. So then I decided I would. But we do things a little bit different here. We put this wood chip down in our pathways because this is really heavy clay. So we're basically starting a garden on top of pasture, but really compacted, heavy clay pasture. Every spring there's standing water this deep on there. So I use wood chip as a way to Like, I've made raised beds with compost, right. And then I've filled those gaps with wood chips. So it's all level because some of the tools I need require everything to be level. But it also soaks up all the moisture. So I farm in crops. Like, it's never muddy, it's never messy. It also has the benefit of keeping weeds down. Like, we don't spend much time weeding here. And it's aesthetically beautiful, which is a happy corollary because it's the first thing you see coming into the farm. And it's like, well, if my garden's this beautiful, then I obviously have the best beef. It translates to the customer's mind. There's a lot of care taken here and that's very obvious to people coming to the farm. But there's a nice missing link here. It's like this is the king straferia mushroom, there's two mushrooms. I've been on this little hunt for finding things that can turn spruce trees into food, because that sounds fun. So you have this phoenix oyster and you have king's tropharia and they can turn spruce into high density protein. That's nice. Spruce. Norwegian spruce, the tree that you see everywhere in Sweden, Gran like the only tree you see outside. But this turns it into food. So I'm putting like 50 cubic meters of this stuff down every five years as a pathway. But I can produce six tons of mushrooms worth €50 a kilo in that time too. That's fun. Here we are building a water system, because when you grow vegetables, the amount of water you put down is proportional to your yield. Like, you can have a little garden out here and stick a zucchini in there and you'll get zucchinis. But if I water my zucchini scientifically, I'll get five, six times the amount in the same time you get. And I'm trying to get paychecks, so I need to know about these things. Right. So you must have a waters to play because we want 4cm of water a week for average vegetable crop. So it's always important to build this before you actually put the garden in. And I want to show you this because this is this fantastic material that I've used in different parts of the world called geosynthetic clay liner. So what it is is it's bentonite clay and it's sandwiched between two geotextiles, like a felt and like a woven landscape fabric. And they needle punch it together. So it's like a roll of material. And then when it's getting wet, it's swelling up eight times its thickness and it's making just a clay seal. So you can now come along and you see, I can join it together by just putting some bentonite clay in between seals together. I can stick a pipe through it. I just cut with a knife, stick a pipe through it, put a bit of powder bentonite around, seals up. I can stick a metal bar through it, it'll seal up. So it's beautiful. It costs the same as pond plastic and it's called GCL Geosynthetic Clay Liner. Or it could be on the brand name, like in Europe. It's often sold under benton mat. Bentonite clay. Bentonite is a very interesting thing. Those of you that may be fasting a lot. We consume bentonite clay as it rips heavy metals out your bloodstream. And elephants, macaws, baboons, they all travel very long distances to go and find it in nature because it's such an absorptive cleansing material. But it's fantastic for building ponds. So here we're keying it into the banks, because to make this work, you have to put topsoil back on about 30 centimeters. But the shear forces of that soil pulling that material down the bank, you have to key it in in a special way. So you have to know a little bit about geoengineering, but not so much. And this is the sort of things we train, like young farmers from around the world in, like how to do all these things to go off and do them. But the beauty of this is that because it's got topsoil back in it, it's a living system and you can plant it. And this is like just six weeks later. We've got fish and ducks and we've got fertile living, healthy, oxygenated water to irrigate our market garden. So this is in most countries in the world, if you divert a stream, as long as it goes back to the stream, you're allowed to build water bodies without planning permission. And so this is actually filled by a stream down several meters below this, because it has a really long pipe going to a point in the stream that's higher up, obviously. And then we pump that onto the garden stair. This is how I start. All my vegetable starts on the back door of my house, because I'm alone on the farm at this time of year when we're doing the spring starts and I'm using this tiny space to keep it. I want it about 18 degrees in my nursery and it could be minus 30 outside. So I choose a small space that I can grow vertically because it's easier to keep that place heated. And then we use very cool tools. So this is like a human powered key lime plow. This is a board fork, Right. It's not the same as digging your soil over. When I use this, I put it every like 20 centimeters along the bed and I just step backwards a little bit and it's aerating the soil. People say they dig their soil to aerate it, but that's not true. They oxidize it. Too much oxygen. What happens when you have too much oxygen? Oxygen in the atmosphere bonds with carbon in the soil. CO2 also. Nearly every single plant pathogen is responding to oxidation because most death happens above the soil surface. So it's a highly refined mechanism. So farmers actually create all their own problems, all of them. Right. You can only stop them at the beginning. So we don't want till. But you've probably heard of Charles Dowding. He's a famous no dig person. But he's always picking bones with me because he's like, well, he's got a brand to uphold, right? But it's like he says that this is tilling, and I'm saying, no, this is not tilling. We are not damaging the soil. We are actually empowering the soil. We're going from something damaged back to something good. And after three or four years, you don't need this because you can just drop it in the ground and it doesn't do anything anymore. So it's a transition tool, just like the key lime flower. I use it three times over a few years and then I'm done with it. It's a mechanical trigger, you could say, to help us with dealing with the damaged lands that we're inheriting. Everything's built around 30 inch beds or 75 centimeter beds. Why? Because Elliot Coleman developed all the special tools we use for this width beds. It's the maximum you can reach without hyperextension. And if you read all the permaculture books from the old days, they all taught people to make beds 1.2 meters wide. But you're doing this job thousands of times for years. You cannot be dealing with hyperextension in your back. So this is the maximum size for ergonomics and for stepping over things. And I don't have any friends that have beds wider than that. This is. But all these tools are built for this. This rake is 75 cm wide. If you have a garden rake that's half as wide, that means you take twice as long. That means I finish at lunchtime, you finish at dinner. We use these bed rollers for marking rows so you have equidistant spacing, because then really efficient weeding tools fit all the time. And we use really special cedars. This is an American cedar. It's called a six row cedar. You can see it's got little pulleys and it's driven by ground contact. And it puts seeds very precisely at whatever spacing we change the settings for. So we can grow 12 precision rows of, like baby salad leaf, where you're planting like a seed, every centimeter, 12 rows of that. You can do that at walking speed like this. In the old days, you had to, like. So these are the things that make it fun again, you know, and these are all standard things. This is a Jang. It's a very good Korean cedar. This is from farmers friends in America. This is a greens harvester. You can see it working here. So this thing, you stick a battery drill in and you can harvest 20 times faster than you could by hand. We use it for microgreen harvesting as well. But these are the sorts of things that make the very repetitive, monotonous job of growing vegetables fun. Say again? A little tractor. Don't know what your tractor looks like, but quite different from mine. This is an old Japanese tool. It's 50 years old. The paper pot transplanter. This is little paper chains at different spacings. And it has a special seeder that makes seeding really fast. And then we walk along at walking speed transplanting these plants. It was developed in 1950, I think, for sugar cane and spring onion production, but it's fantastic. And it has this special drop seeder you can see here. So you pull out the paper chains and then you have a drop seeder that is lining up with all those holes. It takes one minute and ten seconds to precision sow 256 cells, and then it takes about one and a half minutes to transplant all them. So it's like, this is fun again. Like, it's taking the toil out of these jobs that are otherwise lots of fun. Simple ergonomic tools, little things. Here's like, this is the Japanese pruning scissors. So you don't put down your scissors while it, like, we have a big hot house with a thousand tomato plants and another one with 600 cucumbers every week you're in there wrapping the plants and pruning off the suckers. It's like if you put down your tool and then do this job and then pick up your tool. You've got to do that thousands of times every week. Say this thing halves the time just by not having to put anything down. And it's those little things that add up to, I have time to have a social life and a relationship and a holiday. Or I'm a farmer and I work 196 hours a week. That's a really bad environment for life really, isn't it? I always think people must have been very close to starvation very regularly here in history, because, you know, it's pretty harsh, isn't it, really? I mean, I can see why the Vikings left. These are little caterpillar tunnels that I worked with a company in the UK to design. I can't take credit for the invention of them, but I improved the original invention and got them made in Europe so that we don't have to ship plastic and metal tubes from America. This is like much cheaper way of having a tunnel than a permanent tunnel. And you can move them in like this 40 meter one. I can move it in two hours with one person that's never done it before and I can move it around with a crop plan. So it's super low cost season extension in this climate. But these are the sorts of standardized things we use. But everything standardized. All beds are the same length, all beds are the same width. Every time we plant lettuce, it's this many lettuces at this spacing. So we just make everything standardized to cut the work down to the absolute minimum possible. We're doing this very organically. We use basically insect netting as our pest prevention, and that's primarily in this climate. Flea beetle and cabbage butterflies. We do use Bacillus thuringiensis, like a bacteria that's used for eating caterpillars sometimes. It's like an organic pest control. And what else do we do? We use diatomaceous earth. Do you know that one? It looks like talcum powder, but it's fossilized diatoms, which are like microscopic sea creatures. And for you it feels like very soft powder. But for an arthropod. An arthropod is a thing with a shiny exoskeleton. It's like razor blades and it cuts them up and they dehydrate to death. And we love that because they're like flea beetles that are eating our fat choice and stuff. So we like that. Then we have a simple wash pack station. So everything's about workflows. We have loads of routines and loads of protocols on the farm because we're doing same thing over and over. Got to be quite efficient because it would be easy to. You know, a farm is a place you can just throw endless amounts of money in and time in and not necessarily get anything out of it. So we have dialed in our processes and that's why our farms become quite well known is we're really good at dialing in them things and then wrenching them up and making them super productive. So this is where like a market gardener spends 40% of their time in post harvest. So you come in and you have these wash benches that don't splash back at you. And we try and avoid washing anything we don't have to. And that's one of the benefits of the no dig setup is everything's very clean. We don't get soil bouncing up on stuff. So we try and avoid washing stuff. And we got this process to get everything in the chiller as quick as we can. Because vegetable storage is very key. Everyone knows with meats and things you must chill them down very fast. They must be kept very specific temperatures. Actually same with vegetables, same with cooking vegetables too. There's optimum temperatures for cooking every different vegetable and for storing it. And so we study these things so that we can transfer that quality and shelf life to our customers. So we've always been selling subscriptions and pre sales. We sell everything up front. We pre sell our vegetables like a kind of csa. We sell subscriptions to our eggs. We pre sold chickens. I was, I made a farm currency and got on national TV talking about bringing down the agricultural system. And we sold loads of chickens the first year. And we tried to always do that from the beginning because it's really important to try and get the sort of customers you want. People that will fund you up front for something you haven't even shown that you can do yet. That's the best type of customer you can have. But you need that money up front because I turned up in Sweden with 200,000 crowns and so I had to get a little bit, you know, I had to hustle a lot to make this happen. I'm a good hustler actually. So this is like all in all that market garden which has got two big tunnels too, that's like 24,000 Euros. Something very interesting about what I'm showing you here is all these things can be done on rented land. They can be done on someone else's farm. They can be done at low cost. You can chuck €20,000 in and a bit hard graft and you can get a Salary out the other end. And that's fun. If you go to ag school, they'll teach you to make business plans where you are in debt for 20 years and then you might survive if you take subsidies afters. But that's sheerly business, right? There's nothing good about that. So we've become an ag school for people that realize ag school is not very functional. Those of you that live in further south climates, you can do much better than we can here because you've got almost double the growing season. Like England, Germany, these kind of places. Because of the shoulder seasons we have like winter, two weeks later it's summer and then two weeks later it's winter again. And we don't really have spring and autumn in the same way as you do further south. Then we have eggmobils. This is one of my favorite enterprise. And when you like eggs are fantastic gateway product. When you have good eggs, it's very easy to sell anything else to people because they come back for eggs all the time. And my eggs, you can't buy an egg in the store anywhere close to the quality of the eggs we have. Like they're disgusting, they're anemic, they're not tasty, they're not comparable things. The thing is consumers care, but they only care a little bit. It's like, oh, free range green egg box. That sounds nice, turn brain off. But if you look at free range eggs, that's not good for chickens, not good for soil, not good for your health, not good for farming even. Because if you go on Google Earth and some of these tools we have and look at that, you'll see a house that never moves, surrounded by mud and a green field where there's no birds. They all just sit near the house where they're safe and they get rid of all the vegetation so there's nothing green for them to eat, which is their vitamins and minerals. And there's no insects to eat because they've nothing to support them. So it's only good for marketing, it's not good for chicken, it's not good for egg quality. We move these birds every single morning and they take 25, 30% of their diet from the pasture. And we do insect and invertebrate studies to see what they are. Because chickens are omnivores, they're meant to eat insect protein. Well, they need to eat it. So I developed this model for housing mobile birds that people have been copying all over the world now because it's kind of fun and it looks cute. And I've been telling them, you don't need to copy this. It's built very specifically for the reasons I have. Like you should build one that fits the reason you have. But people like standardized solutions. I understand that, but there are no standardized solutions in farming. These are the nest boxes where the eggs roll away. Because in Europe you can't clean eggs like in America you must wash eggs with chlorine. But that's not very good for eggs because then you wash away the protective coding that keeps an egg safe. Like I've eaten eggs at 9, 10 months old, they're totally fine in my cell. They have a 28 day shelf life normally. But we move them around. They have these electric fences. That's to protect them from predators. So we have these raptors that live in the trees looking down on them. They've never taken our birds. And I think it's because there's a density. There's 350 birds in this fence. And so I think that's quite scary for an aerial predator because if you dive bomb other creatures for a living, if you damage your wing, you die. So if there were five chickens running around the backyard, definitely those predators would take them just like most people that have backyard hens here. But because there's a density, it makes them safe. And so I try, when they first come to the farm, they've been like raised in a warm barn because they have to be warm as chicks. Then they come out and they've never seen grass before and they've never seen an Englishman. And so I train them with a drone and I'll fly the drone out really fast and that makes them look up. Because chickens have two different focal lengths. The eye that's closest to the shell when it's in its egg develops long sightedness. So if you say like the chickens all look that way because they're looking far away. And when they're looking for food down here, they look the other way because that eye more focused. So I'm training them with my drone to look up and see predators. So now if you like ever see any aerial footage in videos or social media things I put you never see any birds. We're not inviting like we have an open farm gate policy, but on our terms. Right, people. I'm very rude when people turn up to the farm uninvited because I'm busier than they are. I'm a farmer. And this kind of place attracts a lot of interest because it's interesting but it's, I'm very Very, very firm that people are not welcome unless we are saying they're welcome. So we have open days where we show people around all day and tell them everything they want to know and show them how things work, but it's on our terms. That's what I mean by open farm gate. It's very different to most farms that have a sign on the gate saying danger Farm, Keep out. So we want people to see and be connected to these things because that's missing in all of society now. And it's those interactions where kid has this little moment that stays with them for life and it changes the way they eat and think about the environment around them. And we started with buying clothes. So one of the big troubles with farming is like how to supply. But this is something like. I don't know the context for a lot of you, but I know in the context of the eco village network, I've been to quite a few of the different, larger eco villages around the world and I've even done the. What do you call that training Ed. I did Ed in Bangkok actually, at the ashram there. That was funny. Yeah. There's so much scope for like this kind of thing within the ecobalism movement. I think of like good livelihood, supplying localized, resilient food systems.