Regenerative Agriculture (presentation by author of Regenerative Agriculture)

So I had a really long day yesterday driving towards the south of Sweden, where I was talking at a hackathon for food. So there's a bunch of people coming together to look at ways for entrepreneurs to get involved in the local food scene, to bring integrity food to people. So today's video is just a bit of that presentation. What I want to share with you today is my work in designing and installing regenerative agriculture, which I'll tell you more about. But really, for me, if we're talking about innovation in the food sector, for me, it has to begin from the farmer upwards, because the farmers are producing the food that allow us to even sit here right now and talk about food. And a lot is changing in the world of farming. The skill set needed to be a skillful farmer today is extremely different to a generation ago. And what I want to share with you is our approach to designing and installing farms and looking at a bit at how it runs, the core components involved in that, a bit of the business side of it, because farming has always been, or in most of us in this room probably relate to farming. As you know, it's work to be shunned. Someone over there does it. It's not seen as a glamorous thing anymore. Farming used to be the most noble profession on the planet and it has now the highest suicide rate of any profession on the planet. So one of my objectives is putting the nobility back into rural stewardship. There's very few young people in Sweden moving out to the countryside and starting farming businesses, but we can make Stockholm livings, living out in the middle of nowhere. And most people don't know that. Most farmers in Sweden are over the age of 60, like in most developed European countries, America, et cetera. And they tell their sons and daughters not to go into farming because they damaged the soil, they destroyed the habitat. Their business is rubbish. Why would they want to go into farming? Hey, go to the city, get a real job. Hang on, hang on. Ooh. You know, in one generation, we're losing this massive rural skill base. And I'm growing up in a generation of people, people who mostly don't have tangible skills, couldn't run a farm. And that's really saddening. So I've dedicated my life to teaching people how to rebuild soil, rebuild ecosystems, produce very good business while making very good quality food, food you can't buy in shops. So I want to take you along on that journey. It's a multifaceted journey and show you this sort of entrepreneurial spirit that's going on in farming. Bare soil is human's biggest problem. And even in organic, biodynamic, shamanic farming, it's still acceptable to have bare soil. It's totally unacceptable by default. What I would define as regenerative agriculture. And by regenerative I mean going a step beyond sustainable organic productions. I heard some people talking just now like, hey, there's big problems with organics. Organic bare soil, oil based, debt based agriculture is no real step on from any industrial agriculture. We need to regenerate soil, put nutrition back in the soil, feed an increasing population on less and less land. So we've got to go way beyond sustainable. That's not good enough. My work is revolved around designing many properties around the world. I've worked on over 100 farm sort of property developments in all the different major climate zones, ranging from a few hectares to hundreds of hectares and industrial scale developments with a lot of money flying through them. And the pattern language behind all of my design work is similar. So I'm sharing with you the sort of pattern how I approach my work. But when I'm talking about regenerative agriculture, it must by default be building soil. If it's not building soil, it's degenerating. Doesn't matter if you call it organic or whatever, it's not building topsoil. History shows this. The last 400 years, every culture that damaged its topsoil has now disappeared. And we're able to move soil faster and quicker than ever before. In fact, humans now every single year move more topsoil around through agriculture than the last ice age. So when you really step back and think about that, humans have become a geological event on planet Earth. That's amazing because we eat about 450 kilos of food a year and it takes 10 tons of soil to produce that food. That's not going anywhere. That's going downhill. In the last three years, I've owned our little farm in Vamland. I'm from the UK originally, but in the last three years we've been farming. We've built 25cm of topsoil. There's no other farm in Vamland that can tell you that. Probably not in Sweden or the rest of Scandinavia to do that. We manage our farm holistically. We have a triple bottom line. It must be ecologically regenerative. If we're not able to build soil, that farm cannot go on into the future. It's got to be profitable for the farmer. I need to get paid a wage. Why should I get paid Less than you filling in some crazy form in the city. In Stockholm I should be earning really good wage because I'm producing true value that nourishes people, nourishes communities. And it must be beneficial to the consumer. Obviously. It must benefit people's health. It must be good value for money or they won't come back and be my customers again. So these are the three legs of the stool, the society, the economy and the ecology that I'm managing for. That's what all farmers are managing for. Most farmers, you know, farmers traditionally are not very good people people. They're not very good business people, you know. What do they teach at ag school? Well, I went to ag school. They taught about machine maintenance and they taught about chemical application rates. That's not farming, you know. I've consulted with Nuffield scholars and very prestigious conventional farmers who know nothing about soil life, soil, food web. How can you know nothing about the very thing that you depend on for your livelihood? This is what Ag school is churning out. It's not good enough. It's just frankly not good enough. We need to mimic ecosystem processes whether we're producing beef. How do herbivores range in nature? I want to produce tree crops. Well, how do trees function? How does soil function in a forest ecosystem? If I want to grow vegetables, how can I grow vegetables without leaving the soil open and bare? Because nature doesn't do that ever. Unless there's a fire or flood or someone with a chainsaw and then it covers it up really quickly. So how do I copy these patterns of nature and apply them to producing epic food whilst building soil and making it? You know, our soil is our bottom line. If you can't build soil, you can't make a profitable farm. If you can build soil, you're probably making a profitable farm. So that's at the basis of that for me. We got to move towards more and more local inputs and outputs. But that's not how modern farming is going. It's going bigger and bigger farms, more and more oil, capital, infrastructure, investments. And that's how modern accounting and business and banks work. It looks good if you produce that much milk per cow, but it costs that much to do that. But simple childhood arithmetic says if I only produce that much and it only cost me that much to do it, it's way more profitable. So we're going the complete opposite way. In the swimming against that tide of looking at how small, how human based, how intensive can we manage ecosystem processes? And it's working out very well. We're not into. Sorry. So, yes, moving to the next point. We need less oil, less money, less technological and infrastructure inputs. Most old farmers can't get out of farming because all of their money is locked up in fixed infrastructure. Young people that want to farm have no money, no land, so they can't get into farming. Old people can't get out of farming. Boom. No one's in farming anymore. Let's just import everything from Africa, Central America, wherever it is that we rely on. Sweden obviously imports nearly all of its food if we want to get smart as farmers. So this is like the entrepreneurial bit that's making farms profitable is I need direct relationships with my customers because this is the basis of food security. If my customers can look at me in the eye, trust that my products are better than anything they can buy in the shop, I have to do something to really piss them off, to break that connection of trust. They're always going to come and buy my eggs because they're the best eggs they can buy. You can't buy better eggs than this. And I'm willing to show you around my farm and you'll see why they're the best eggs. This is the basis of food security, which means we are now certified by our customers, which means we don't need organic certification, we don't need anyone's certification. We've got real certification of paying customers who want our goods. And so, yes, this is that triple bottom line I talked about. So I'm going to move swiftly through. There's a lot of slides I want to get through because I want to just give you a really broad overview of a lot of things that go into my work and let them soak in. Some of them will be more or less relevant for some of you. It depends how interested in food production and food, you know, from the production end your interest lies. But I want to share how my work looks and goes. So I use in my design work and consultancy work with other producers. I work with permaculture design, which is kind of an umbrella term for conscious, intelligent agricultural design mixed in with livelihoods that are socially just based on managing whole systems. So we study whole systems and how this ecosystem element affects this one and how we work with the whole planetary system we're working within. And we're trying to basically understand how nature works and copy it. If I want to keep dairy cows, I need to know how savanna systems and the massive herds of bison used to run around with predators, because that's how nature evolved grasses with cows. So I Need to know that if I want to graze animals correctly. So permaculture design gives us an ethics based sort of design approach to property development. And then we work a lot with holistic management. It's the work of Alan Savory. Most people have come across. Are you guys familiar with Alan Savery's work with holistic management? So most people come across it through his TED talk looking at grazing management, grazing of livestock. Because humans have created vast areas of bare soil all over the ground. About 60% of the Earth's surface is desert or desertifying through people's misunderstanding of how animals and grasses evolve together. And so they're doing a lot of work in dry land regions of the world. But it's the same thing here. Most of Sweden or most of Europe, when you go driving around the countryside, you see animals in a field of overgrazed grass and a degeneration that here in Sweden leads to pastures that turn back to moss and compaction and bare ground. And then farmers spend their days fighting symptoms, not cold problems. We need to understand ecosystem processes. So Alan Savory's dedicated his life to understanding grassland ecology. It's very powerful stuff. I highly recommend you look into it. But his biggest piece was his decision making matrix. Because we've never had a decision making framework in human history that automatically accounts for complexity. We tend to work in reactive management. All the businesses, most entrepreneurial folks can get their heads outside of this reactive management mindset. But when we're working with society, economy, ecology, these are all complex things. That means they evolve in ways we can't predict. And humans are very bad at making decisions in the face of complexity. So for the first time, farmers now have a way of managing holistically. It's adapted for military planning. People that need to make very effective decisions in very adverse conditions. That's been a big part of my work. And I'm just flying through these that you can go and look them up if you're interested. Because I know some of you have probably no interest in cows and some of you are very fascinated by cows. One of the biggest influences to me in my work has been Keyline's own, which is the work of PA Yeomans, who is an Australian who developed the world's first integrated land planning system back in the 1950s that no one ever heard of. Most farmers around the world have never heard of him. Most city planners have never heard of them. And it's a great shame that they hadn't because he was designing passively running cities that cleaned their own waste within the city boundaries. And every unit within the city had gravity fed water running without oil or electricity 70 years ago, and made a huge farm in Australia demonstrating these things that's still there today, running without anyone managing it. So he gave us this funny way to pattern our farm landscapes to optimize energy efficiency based on what's called the scale of permanence. So this was the first ordering framework for how to design landscapes. Whether you're designing a farm or a city plan. And no city planner. You know, city planners today love to impose Greco Roman straight line grids everywhere, make rivers flow the wrong way and back to front because it fits their weird schooling. They're not following nature's patterns. So everything we're doing, everything I'm going to show you today, is about trying to understand nature's patterns and applying them very poignantly to our production system. Yeoman's also developed a very interesting rigid tine plough for building topsoil from below. Everything about what I'm sharing with you today is about building topsoil. Doesn't matter if we're producing pigs, vegetables, tree crops, we need to build topsoil or we're going that way, not that way. So he developed a very special tool which we've been using to build our topsoil radically. But this is the order of the slides. I'm going to introduce our farm and my work with. Because really it's climate that sets the scene of the species and plants. I know one of your challenges is eating food year round from Sweden. Well, that means going back to being potato eaters and preserving and pickling everything. If you want to look at it in a frank way. Right, that's what people ate here. Lots of animal goods, loads of fat, butter. Da. Proper food. But climate dictates what we eat. That's a big one. How do you get consumers to change their habits in a globalized food market? That's a lot of work to educate people. It's too easy to get tomatoes in February now. And that will dictate how I as a farmer choose my species. So I have a little cow that produces half the milk of the milk farm's big cow. But that big milk farm cow needs twice as much food in a heated barn all winter. So when you do the mathematics and economics of that, it doesn't look so good. The shape of the land totally dictates how water flows in the landscape. Water flows in a very precise relationship to the shape of the land everywhere on earth. And Water is a limiting factor for all agricultural production. Our bodies are 70% water. So are plants and animals that we farm. And already around the world, land prices are entirely dictated by the ability to catch and store potable water. More wars will be fought over the water supply than have ever been fought over oil supply. You could bet your last barrel of oil on that. It's too fundamental a resource for us. And so we need to understand and optimize the design of our landscapes for water, because that's exactly proportional to how functional a piece of land is. And Yeoman's put forth that when you know where to optimize how to utilize water in a landscape, it told you where to place roads, where to place trees to protect those expensive systems, where to put buildings and then how to subdivide land into house and garden plots or paddocks for cows to graze or whatever it was. So he gave us this whole way of designing landscapes based on how permanent something is, where you put all of your attention on the most permanent features, the shape of the land. You can't change that. But notice how soil is at the bottom. Soil is extremely easy to damage, but it's also incredibly easy to build if you follow nature's patterns. And I'll show you how we've been doing that. So I'm going to brush through these. It might be a bit heady for some. It's looking at maps and things. But what we do when we design properties is we start to understand mapping. And that tells us how water flows through landscapes. Water flows in an S shaped curve through landscapes, off ridges to valleys. And we use this along with mapping. This is our farm. It's a 10 hectare parcel in VAM land. We need this topographic map so that we can optimize the layout of our farm multi generationally. We're designing for 500 years. I'm planting trees that live a thousand years. So I've got to have a little plan going on when I do that. And so this is the order that I go through design. So I'll tell you a bit about our farm. It's a very small farm, 10 hectares. It's one of the most productive per square meter farms in Europe. And we only just got started. We're going to double productions over the next years. And it's based around pasture and perennial crops. Perennial crops being trees, shrubs that live for many years. You don't need to till soil to grow them. Right. And those things don't pay back. If I plant apple trees, don't get any money back for a while, do I? So I need to cash flow. This is the hardest part for a farmer. And all your little entrepreneurial business models need to think about that. Farmers have trouble with cash flow. It's very easy to make money, but it's very hard to balance cash flow throughout the year because you've got to put all this money out in the spring. Sometimes you don't get any money back to the autumn. And if it was a bad year, not good. Most farmers here, like most of the countries in modernized world, rely on subsidies. The quickest way to change farming would be to get rid of subsidies. And then people would have to make very responsible decisions for their livelihood, for their land, for their kids, whatever. That's another topic. But that's my take on it. So we designed this little farm that wouldn't even be called a farm in Swedish terms. But this produces a lot of revenue on a very small space because we can manage it intensively. This is the farm when we moved in. This is the sort of boundary up here. And it's just been monocultural wheat farmed for decades. It now has one of the most productive market gardens outside of America. And it's got a lot of production going on per square meter. It produces four full salaries in a six month growing season. So we have two main responsibilities. One is to totally regenerate our soil and landscape and the other is to facilitate more young people getting started in an entrepreneurial way of farming. Because I don't have any faith that sons and daughters of farmers going to ag school are the future of farming. I got lots of faith in people coming new to farming who aren't boxed into a conditioned way of seeing things and who are starting out smart. And a lot of our students that come and learn with us go off and start in a really smart way that a 20 year old something is off producing ridiculous yields compared to modern ag standards. So there's two parts to our work. One is to farm and the other is to get other people to farm. And so all of the models that I'll show you through our main enterprises, they're all aimed to be low cost startups. Hey, 20,000 Euros. How about you invest that in rented land over here, pay that off in the first year and make 30 grand profit. You up for that in six months? Six months off. You up for that? That sounds alright, doesn't it? That's the models we're working with, because that's what young entrepreneurial farmers need. You can't invest for 10 year payback or, you know, most people don't have the money to do that. The world is changing and farming is changing big time. First thing we do in that scale of permanence is look at water systems. We use this keyline plow. You can look up keyline plows and what they do. It basically explodes the ground underneath the ground without disturbing the top. We never want to disturb the top of the soil. Nature doesn't do that. It's the skin. Your skin keeps you healthy, nature's skin keeps it healthy. But underneath the ground that's had tractors driven over it, it's all hard and compacted. Plants can't grow through that. So we blow it up. Plants grow deep. We do it on a really weird pattern that I haven't got time to explain, but it basically makes water do something it never did in geological history and evens out the water throughout the whole landscape. Humans love to fight symptoms and never address the main causes. Bashing themselves on the head with a hammer and take an aspirin rather than stopping, hitting themselves on the head with a hammer. Standard thing. Look at medicine, look at economy, all of it. Agriculture is the same. We fight symptoms. And so typical response here is let's drain the land and get rid of all this excess water. Hang on, let's take a step back with humility and say this land evolved with exactly this much precipitation. Now, either we damaged the land or we cut down the vegetation that was there. We need to start getting more humble and approaching our farms by not killing the things that want to live and not trying to grow things that want to die. That would be a good way to approach farming. And so we do this funny pattern with this machine and we plant things on this pattern too. It's very energy efficient because we suddenly go around landscapes, not up and down them. Lots of farmers plow up and down hills nowadays and the rain takes all the soil down to the bottom of the field. And then they complain that they've lost nutrients. And that's mainly because it's comfortable to sit in a tractor up and down a hill rather than around the landscape. But that's a very simple engine made. It's very. It's incredible. Now, from an outside perspective, it's amazing that this is still happening in 2017. So what this thing does is cuts through the ground. You can see it moving through here if it lets me. You see, it leaves very, very minimal disturbance. You don't really know I did it. But underneath the ground it went and it allowed the Plants to root properly. And when a plant can express its physiology downwards, it expresses its physiology upwards. That is, I have three times the grass growing now and my topsoil when I moved into the farm is 14, 15 centimeters deep, is now 44 centimeters deep and the root mass is solid. That's in three six month seasons, right? So no excuses, you can do this anywhere on the planet. If you can do it in Vamland, you can do it anywhere. It's just a subsoiler which you find in every country all over the world. It's just like the best version of it. It's very well built and it has a very minimal disturbance in the ground and a massive explosive force. So that's the sort of patterning we do this on, this weird pattern that you'll see when I show you how we plant trees. And then we build ponds for irrigating our market garden. GCL liner. It's made of clay in bentonite, clay in geotextiles. It swells up when it gets wet. And six months later we have an established habitat that is capable of supplying our market gardens with adequate water. But to make that water even more functional, we put fish in it and ducks in it and they put their fertility in it and then we pump that fertility on. And because it's on a south facing slope, we may as well use that light to grow a vineyard crop on these arles, these alder trees, because that's just cool. No. Why not? But to be able to do the effective management of livestock, what we see in nature is animals move all the time. That's how they keep hygienic. Or they had things chasing them that were trying to eat them, so they would stay in groups. And that means they shit and urinate all over their food supply, which means they have to keep moving. And that allowed grasses to recover, which meant soil got built. Because anything going up that way has got something going down that way. So to move them animals, we suddenly have to get water to them wherever they go. But nowadays we have plastic piping and we have water pipes around the edges of our field and gas pipe, which is really thin, it's like a hose pipe in your garden, but much thinner, so it doesn't take up much space. Suddenly, with a couple of hundred dollars invested, I can take water anywhere on my farm instantly, which means I don't have to carry things around. Which farming has got, you know, either you got machines or people carrying things from A to B a lot of the time. So this is very helpful way to deal with water. Then the next layer of our design is tree crops, perennial crops. There are many types of tree plantings in systems, and I won't go through them all. But one thing we got to understand that you might just make out on this graph is like, this part of this graph, this is fungi. Sorry, this is bacteria, and this is fungi. And this is where an old forest system is. It's full of fungi. Very few bacteria. But our grasses and our vegetables, they all grow in bacterial soil. So most people go and stick an apple tree in the middle of their lawn and it will survive, but that's not thriving. Surviving ain't thriving. Tree systems need fungal environments. So most of our work planting trees is about preparing the ground and making it like a forest again. So we use that keyline plough to dig a meter deep hole without digging the hole. That's nice. And then we prepare the ground and we're doing this on that funny keyline pattern that makes water spread out evenly across the whole landscape. So we don't get wet bits and dry bits. We get equally adequate water everywhere. It's optimization for every layer of permanence, as it were. So this was the fourth day I moved on to the farm and we just set up a load of stuff. We don't hang around because we have such a short growing season here. You can see this thing going in. And we're establishing tree crops like apples, pears, plums and cherries and loads of bush fruit, cane fruits. We're also doing weird experiments. This is chestnuts. I'm breeding chestnuts from the hardiest research stations on the planet, because no one else is. Because, look, this is called a nut field in our farm. And it's the savanna planting Savannahs are where 100 million bison were running around North America. Hundred million bison. Can you even understand how many bison that is? We see little fields of wildebeest with 4 or 5,000 wildebeest on the TV and we're like, Whoa. But 100 million. That's what made grasslands rich. When Europeans went to North America, they would tie knots in the grasses above their horses. That's how big the grasses were. And those topsoils that supported those grasses were nine meters deep. And now those topsoils are that deep and all of that carbon. Because what happens when soil is bare? Carbon in the soil reacts with oxygen in the atmosphere, flies off as carbon dioxide. Farming puts more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than burning fossil fuels. And most people don't even know that. Grasses are very important to the future cows, other herbivores that are designed to eat them, are extremely important. But the most diverse, rich habitats on Earth were savannas, open savannas, wide space trees with grasses underneath. And in our climate, I can cover 30% of the ground with these nut trees. And I don't lose any of my grass. So why not? And then I can grow these nuts, these chestnuts. I might have to plant 10,000, but one day I'm going to find a chestnut castagna that will grow in Sweden. And this is not a nut crop, it's a grain crop. It's low in oil and fat. It's a starch. It's just like wheat. Think how much oil and the industry behind that goes into growing wheat, which requires bare topsoil and eroded land just to grow your staple grain supply. If people had bred this for 10,000 years, instead we'd have chestnuts that big. It stores over winter. And this is the same for every different climate zone around the world. We have perennial crops that do the same, but nobody's been breeding them. But this one. I can store every window, make it into flour, make pancakes. Very nice. And if I don't, if I can't be bothered to go and pick them all up at the end of the year, I send in my pigs and they will pick them up and I'll eat the pigs. This is some of the best food on Earth. Iberian pork, finished on the Iberian Peninsula on acorns. That's €400 a kilo. That food, that's real food. That's nutrient dense, storable food. So some weirdos like me need to go around planting hardy nuts, that governments will never support this work. Agricultural universities surely won't. And so we planted a lot of trees over our pasture and they take up very little room. And they will Someday bring in €40,000 of annual revenue that customers coming to the farm will pick for us. We won't have to do the work ourselves. This is the keyline plow being used to plant even more nut trees. And what's beautiful about this key line patterning is that everything is parallel. So I'm following the landscape shape and optimizing water flows and building topsoil. But I'm doing it in a very logical farming way, because it doesn't matter, you know, here's my little chicken pens. But they all fit in the gaps. Doesn't matter if I'm cutting hay, as long as I leave room to turn around. Perfect. They're not in a way at all. It's all parallel. Everything's logical. It works. Most farmers won't plant trees in their fields or in between their vegetables because they say they get in the way. Not in the way. And now I'm utilizing two layers of soil, two layers of aerial height. Yeah. I'm getting nutrients pumped right down from here back onto here. Very nice. Why aren't we doing this in every field? This is one thing that's transitioning into mainstream ag is agroforestry quicker than anything else. Because it's not too weird. One of my mentors, Joel Salatin, who runs an incredible meat farm in America, says a nice thing of, hey, you can be a Buddhist or you can be nudist, but you can't be a nudist Buddhist. It's too weird. And it's like that. It's like, hey, some of the things I'm showing you are too far out for modern farmers. They just can't get their head around it because it's not what they've been taught. But planting trees is something people can relate to. This is what a lot of Sweden looks like now. This is not forestry. This is vertical desert. It's got a diversity of one. It's rubbish. It's good for making toilet paper and rubbish building timber. But what happens when you bring pigs back into their natural environment is they dig it over. And what happens when pigs are the climatic trigger of a forest ecosystem? And when the pigs go through and then they are removed, that is, eaten, the forest can recover. And what I notice in my land is all the trees coming back are incredible timbers. Oak. Ooh, that's quite nice timber, isn't it, Ash? Oh, very nice timber. Rowan. Oh, that's a very nice furniture timber. Tilia, lime, you know. So why are people going to such extreme lengths to plant things, clear things, cut things, trash the water cycle, just to cut this pretty rubbish timber, which in my short life has got worse and worse and worse. More and more knots, you know, kiln dried as quick as you can. This isn't forestry. This isn't how nature does it. You could look at different models of forestry. Lubeck model, German model is very interesting. And there's all these wonderful byproducts that come out of woody agriculture, you understand? These are perennial crops. I don't need to plant them ever again. I didn't seed any of these trees. They grow themselves. But in the meantime, I'm drawing pork, beef and sheep out of here too, which is way more profitable. And I've still got forestry. And I didn't have to do any work. And look. Who's that? This is a Jean pain compost. This is totally wood and water based compost. Build this 30 to 50 cubic meters, big wax and water pipe in there. This thing gets to 65 degrees Celsius and it stays there for 18 months. You can heat a house and a greenhouse with this and it's made of wood. And at the end you get farm scale compost as a waste product. This is a regenerative technology. Anything that gives you useful stuff as it's waste. Pretty good. We can grow things to make mushrooms. As an edible, medicinal or high protein source, we can use biomass to create wonderful gasification technologies. This is the first turnkey version. Sweden used to rule away with wood gasification in second world war. But this is from all power labs in the US. You fill it with wood chip, it burns for 14 hours, computer controlled. Its waste product is biochar and heat. That is you could heat a greenhouse and chuck the waste in the soil. And it provides 20 kilowatts of electricity. Very nice. So I want to move on. Are you okay following this pace? Yeah, because I've got a lot to get through and I want to look at some of our primary enterprises and talk about numbers, figures, how it works. So a big thing we're doing as a cash flow enterprise is pastured meat chickens. They're very profitable on a small scale. You make your own basic infrastructure and they move around daily onto fresh grass. When you move a chicken daily onto fresh grass, it eats way more green stuff. When it eats way more green stuff, it's getting vitamins and minerals. You can't buy chicken like that in a shop. There's two organic chicken suppliers in Sweden. Ours blows theirs out the window for sure. They're raising them in an industrial model. They can't get the same access to nutrition that ours do. And this is very nice for our ground too because what the chickens do, they poop a lot, loads. And so it looks like, can you see where they've been? But what happens is two weeks later where they've been, it goes and it grows a lot. And that's been a major part of our grass growing. So here you see meat birds raised in small groups move daily, move twice daily when they get bigger. And these are egg laying hens that have a bigger run. There's lots more of them in there. And then to get the value out of the meat, like thinking entrepreneurially, I need to be able to extract the value from these birds. I've Raised. So I built my own slaughtering. Now I don't speak Swedish yet and I had a German and a Portuguese guy with me. We just built a slottery. We looked at the regulations. They don't make any sense. They're written for industrial productions. So no one can help you with how to do this. You have to be a little bit entrepreneurial and go for it. But then that paves the way for the next person to come along and do that. I could tell you very easily how to do this for yourself. We bought a €200 cabin that wasn't useful for anyone else and we decked it out and we made one of Europe's cheapest approved slaughteries. It's very nice. This allows us to process 5 to 10,000 birds on farm. We make 15 to €20 profit per bird. 10,000 birds is the limit in Sweden. It's classed as zero farming. That would make us €120,000 of profit in six months onto three and a half hectares. Not very much input daily. We started our own currency when we first produced birds, so we would sell them up front like a CSA model. We've been selling everything up front because cash flow is hard to manage. So, hey, do you want to buy chicken off me? It's not ready for eight weeks. But you can buy this voucher and then pay the difference when you know the exact weight later. Which means I know how many I need to produce. And this is why poultry is such a good enterprise, is I can scale it up and down instantly. Can't do that with vegetables, can't do that with grains, can't do that with anything except chickens. I can turn around in seven, eight weeks. That's why I don't want to be organic certified. I only give them organic feeds. But organic chicken has to be 80 something days old. Who is someone sitting in Brussels writing forms who has no experience raising chicken to tell me how old a chicken has to be before it's one bad day? That's got no relationship to the breed of chicken. It's just a random arbitrary number. That chicken had a better life than any other chicken in Sweden. So it's up to me when I want to slaughter that. And that's the beauty of flexible management. By not being certified anything. It's customer certified. Hey, come and look at my slaughtering. You can watch me slaughter chickens and see how your food is made. You know, if you want to eat it. Right? And so we make very nice chickens. And we started with turkeys. They're very profitable enterprise. But harder to sell because there's no market yet. So a lot of people have come to us because we're a permaculture project and said, oh, but these, you know, this is meat and chickens. Is this sustainable? But you've got to be realistic. You know, you can't affect the food movement if you're not producing food. Really, you know, farmers have the biggest impact in the food movement. Innovative farmers can totally transform it radically. But you've got to have your foot in the door if you want to play that game, because that's how it works. So we didn't come along just producing 1,000 pastured geese that don't need any grain inputs because nobody eats well down here. They eat more geese. But in most of Sweden there's no market for geese. But look, this is an enterprise that we started up with €24,000. Currently it turns over €90,000 at 60%. That's really high numbers for agricultural enterprise. It takes 940 hours over six months on just two hectares. You won't find that at ag school, any ag school on this planet. I can guarantee you that for us in our farm we could scale that to 10,000 birds still being classed as not farming. Whoever wrote that rule has not stood in front of 10,000 chickens. That would give us €120,000 of profit on three and a half hectares in six months. You can start this on rented land. You don't need to own a farm to do this. You can do it behind someone's beef herd and improve their land for them. This is the beauty of the models we're choosing. They're designed for you to pick it up, go and do it 50km away. We sell all our products currently within 50km because we want you to go pick it up, do it over there. So we do similar with our egg mobiles. These are home built structures. They cost about €1500. They home 400 birds each and they follow four days precisely behind our cows. Usually because that's when the maggots, that is the fly larvae are at their peak and they're just about to hatch and go off and annoy the cows which then farmer fighting symptoms goes and injects drugs into cow. But they are high omega 3 and 6 food for chicken. Chicken spends all day two left feet, two right feet, peck, peck, peck, peck, peck. That's what they want to do, they want to find insects. A chicken is a meat eating bird. It wants insect protein. And what we noticed from our, you know, we spent the first year Crawling around in cow pats. And after 60 hours, all of the dung beetles, which are very beneficial, they carry the manure down in the ground. They've all gone after 60 hours. So there's this perfect time to bring these animals in and think about it. Right. You've all seen probably a picture of a water buffalo in Bali. Yeah. What's on the back of that water buffalo as a bird. What color is that bird? Like a little stalk. What color is it? White. There's a white bird on the back of that thing. Birds follow herbivores in nature. That's nature's pattern. They are sanitizing our pasture. We don't get pest disease problems. We just don't do pest disease problems. They come from running bad models. If you're getting disease and illness, you're doing something wrong. Nature doesn't do disease and illness. It's extremely rare in pristine habitats. It's not rare in our culture because we do some weird things, eat weird things, etc. But nature doesn't do illness. It's a rare occurrence to turn something back into useful nutrients when it does happen. But look, this is all farm ready stuff. Here's an old trailer off block it for €100. Bam, bam, bam. Scrap wood for my local sawmill that are throwing it away. And we've got some movable infrastructure that I can take anywhere. I could leave my farm. I could scale up my farm by renting my neighbor's land and I can just move everything so I don't have any capital locked up. I bought my farm for less than €100,000. I turn over several times every single season in six months. It's crazy to lock your money up in non movable infrastructure in these days. But we don't need to because farming is changing. We swap stuff for chickens. When you got chickens, you got currency. This cost us three chickens. It's an insulated box. It's now an official egg packery. It cost us less than €200. Now we've got an official egg packery and we can move it. And here's a simple piece of infrastructure that we can house these chickens in nice conditions in the winter. They can eat through all the weed seeds and fertilize it. And then we can take thousands of euros of tomatoes out there in the summer. And look, this one costs very little to set up. €7,500 to make these two things to get the egg packery together. Currently it's turning over €80,000 at 55%. Now that's not as profitable as boilers. But their ecosystem services are really much better. I would have them if they only produce €5,000, because they turn grassland into thriving habitat again, that's the amount that comes out as profit. So they're really high figures for certain businesses on the planet. In certain industries that would be normal. But in farming that's really quite, very high. You don't see that in like, I've got people at the farm right now who are at ag school and they are trained to write business plans that lose money and then they probably get a tick and send off on it. That's just bad business. Whatever way you look at it, you don't want to lose money. You want to be able to start up with very little money and get on with it. This takes 700 hours. It's 12 months. It's all year round. On a couple of hectares in our farm, we have three and a half hectares of pasture. That's what I didn't say. Most of our farm is in the forest, so only a small bit of its pasture. In our context, on three and a half hectares you could do something. 1600 birds, that's €90,000 profit. It doesn't take a lot of time, but it is seven days a week. You don't get a day off. You can't say, oh, I'm not getting up today. But it doesn't take more than half an hour in the morning to do it. Then we have our market gardens. These are different to most gardens that you see because we just put down compost straight on the lawn that had been lawn for decades and off we went. And they're very beautiful. They're some of the cleanest market gardens I've ever seen anywhere. There's no weeds, there's very little work to do. Our soil is deepening and building because nature's digging it and doing it for us. We don't till the ground, nature doesn't till ground. We just got to find ways of growing veg without tilling ground. I've seen some of the most well known organic vegetable producers in Scandinavia and we produce 40 times more vegetables per square meter in them. And the result of that is because it's working on tractor based systems which have to plant carrots at the same spacing. We plant 12 rows of carrots in that wide, so we don't have bare ground, so we don't have to weed bare ground. So we don't get demotivated because we don't spend hours and hours weeding, you know, very different Using things intensively and keeping them tidy and clean and aesthetic to work in. Because we all want that too, right? So this is called no dig. Stands to reason, no. And we've been selling in shares and at markets. And again, we started this super low cost in our front room of our house. But everything in our garden is standardized. You see, all of our beds are exactly the same size. They're the same length, same width. That's because all the best market gardening tools coming out of America from people like Elliot Coleman, who have been pushing forward small scale regenerative farming. And all the best tools are that wide. So you make your beds that wide and you jump on board or you get left behind. And we make them the same length because then crop planning is the same. All of our infrastructural things like row covers and all these things are the same. So everything is always the same. Which makes planning a garden which is complex, easy. We use simple hand tools, a broad fork which is kind of like a hand powered key line plant. It decompacts under the ground without breaking the surface. And then we use a rake that's the same width as the bed. And then we roll that to get a little bit of surface compaction. You see, it's got these rings that mark the bed so we know how far apart to transplant it. And then we've got snazzy little seeders. This is a six row seeder so we can plant 12 rows of baby carrots in 15 seconds. Very nice. And then we have simple, nice battery drill powered tools for harvesting. And all these tools that have been coming about in the five last five, ten years, game changers. Taking all of the ball ache, as it were, out of growing vegetables. I grew up as a market gardener. That's what I went to ag school for. And I left it years ago because it was rubbish money, really hard work I got out of there. But now I got excited again because these tools make it very efficient and doable and it makes the money doable. This is now where we start the seeds. Because my partner wasn't very happy about turning the living room into a jungle. So we took some bulletproof windows from the Stockholm police station and we built this lean to sunken in greenhouse to reduce the energy needs for starting in the summer. And that allows us to grow microgreens all winter. And microgreens are possibly one of the most profitable per square meter things you could possibly do, other than having a very good tree nursery, I believe. And they can be done all winter, you know, we just, in this one, we just take the wood stove and it pumps a bit of hot air into this and we can grow these all winter. And restaurants love that stuff. Lots of nice vegetables. Here's that battery powered harvester you see for salad mixes. Harvesting at walking speed, not sitting on your knees going. And this was a higher start up cost than would need to be if we had a water supply, because we had to build that pond and that was about €7,8000 to put in a pump and a big water system. But if you had municipal water supply, it would be very little invested. So that pays for like tunnels. We've got a massive tunnel we're putting up right now. All of this wood chip and all of the row covers. Some of this is very long term investments. But that's turning over a lot of. It's about €40 per square meter, which is 40 times more than the best organic growers I've seen, you know, field scale growers here. And I think we can get that up to €75 per square meter in our tiny little five months without frost growing season, if we're lucky, you know. So we're just starting with this stuff, but as a wrapper. The contextual bit for me is that you're talking about stories, how to communicate with customers. We're in the business of whole menu farming. We're farming for our own needs first and then producing for a surplus. I think I demonstrated that you can build soil whilst producing good business. You need to do it smart and you need to present it cleverly. But we're not just farming to make money. We're farming to have a quality of life. You couldn't buy that you can't get anywhere else. So talking about stories, this is a typical meal we eat. Everything here came from less than 150 meters away outside my back door. This is cheese made from a cow milked in the pasture without any restraint, aged in the cellar under my house with butter made from the same mountain cow who can live outdoors in the winter. Because it's a hardy breed, it doesn't need to be indoors in the heated barn on homemade bread from the last Sredmuhl miller in Sweden, who's not Swedish. Made on the farm. These are our pastured eggs with lamb ham we've made on the farm with duck liver pate from our pond and pastured broiler and leek soup and homemade pickles. I mean, this is food you can't go out and buy. Restaurants can't even supply that. This has all come from my back garden. And this is why we're doing it right? This is why we're farming. We want to eat real food, so we eat real good. And that's the name of the game. And then I wanted to just chuck in a few other slides as we wrap up about doing this on a shoestring budget. This has all been done with less money than most people spend buying a house in this country. It's been done on an ultra low budget and we've done that by supplementing with wild foods this time of year in Sweden. It's. It's pointless farming when you have stuff running around the forest jumping at you. We have some of the best salmon fishing around us and we've harvested a lot of Sweden's waste. Like everything we've built has been free because we have a timber yard that doesn't have people, it has machines. And so when they knock over an industrial pallet of wood, they can't pick it up because they don't have fingers. They have a machine with a massive grabber. So we go and pick it up. I calculated driving from my house to fill this trailer, dropping it off again, was the equivalent of getting paid 2 million euros a year. So it's like, why farm this week? Let's go pick up wood. And we've built infrastructure that can have people in it. We've built barns for a few hundred euros. We've built the slaughtery, we've built all of our animal stuff. We've built tree houses that we could rent out for two nights and it would be more profitable than cutting all of that 90 year old forest down on a per meter square basis. We're not going to. It's going to be my office. We've built infrastructure for housing people, washing people. This was a wagon we swapped for another four chickens and turned into a beautiful sauna for people visiting the farm. But you know, that's the benefit of living in a rich country. People throw away awesome stuff like building this. This was like a 1400 Euro investment to have a winterproof heated greenhouse space. Beautiful. So just to sum up here, this is an idea that I haven't developed, but I can give you the idea of it. What I want you to see that in the realm of agricultural production, in what I'm telling you about as regenerative agriculture, something I see with my work, educating sort of young entrepreneurial folk that I hope will take the reins of this stuff, and many are, is that there are certain things you can do depending on how Much access to land. You have how much land you got, but you don't even need land. Some of you are interested in urban production. I think you've had talks from urban producers here. But look, microscope microgreens, that little lean to greenhouse on my house that can make an annual Stockholm salary in a little space like that. It's just whether you want to do it, you know, I'm going to write a little pamphlet of like, hey, if you've got two hectares of land, these are the things you can do. This is how much it costs to get going. This is what you should expect out. This is how much time you need to put in, you know, because people don't get the pattern language of this. I want to do pastured beef. Well then you need loads of land and you need lots of cows or it's not so profitable, you know. But if you only have a tiny bit of land. Oh, and I put this one here because a lot of people are getting into market gardening now without understanding it's a massive amount of work. It's much more profitable to do things that don't take as much time. So what we do at our farm is keep very detailed time and motion studies. So I know exactly how long it should take to turn over this bed and plant a new crop or how long it should take to move the turkeys and get back to the place so that I know what these things are about. Which one's more profitable? Well, that's a factor of time as well as incomes and inputs, etc. So this is a piece I'm working on and I'm going to write a whole booklet about it because it's a complex one. But I'm looking to formulate recipes to help people get into this because as I said, I don't believe the future lies in traditional farming families. I think it lies in the hands of entrepreneurs. We don't need thousand hectare farm outside the city, we need 110 hectare farms outside the city. We can outproduce industrial farming 50 times over on quality, quantity per square meter, freshness, locality. You can't compete. But we need loads more people farming, that's for sure. I'm going to just leave it there. I wrote a book. You can find out technical things if you're interested in that. It's a book written for people who are into the technical aspects of this. You can't actually buy it yet because there's a whole new shipment of them coming next week. But that's on our farm website and we have a growing YouTube channel and Facebook page where you can find out what's going on. I document what goes on throughout the farm life.