Richard Perkins - Ridgedale Farm

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That's bcsamerica.com big thanks to BCS. Today's show is also brought to you by our good friends over at Growers and Company who have launched a brand new magazine specifically for small scale growers. This is a twice a year publication with articles and photography centering on the culture of small scale farming. In this first issue, which you can buy right now at Growers Co, there are several really awesome farmer profiles, some great essays. It is a really cool publication and I am excited to be a part of it. For the uninitiated, Growers & Co. Is the brainchild of Jean Martin Fortier, the market gardener who is working to create a tool and apparel company with a focus on small scale farming. They have a lot of great clothing over there and I'm pretty into, well, basically all of it. It's practical, it's well made. I wish it wasn't almost winter because I want to keep wearing my straw hat. Maybe I will. Anyway, since I've known jm, he has been working on this idea for Growers and Company and it is so cool to see nearly a decade of work come to fruition. Learn more at Growers Co. All right, let's jam. Hey oil farmer Jesse here. Welcome to the no Till Market garden podcast episode seven, season three. Got Mr. Richard Perkins of Rich Dale Farm back on the podcast to talk about a lot of stuff. He has had a rather busy year. He was suffering from some burnout last year and had planned to take the season off almost entirely and go visit a bunch of farmers all over Europe. But then the earth was kind of hit with this massive pandemic which kind of canceled those plans and everybody's plans. So we talk about that. We talk about the interviews he's done with many of the farmers for Farm Like a Hero, which has been super cool. If you haven't checked that out, it's@farmlikeahero.com we talk about how Richard and his wife bought a new farm and what the deal is with that, like what the goals are and we get into some good gardening. No dig nerdy details before we get going. Stop subscribe to this podcast. Thank you. If you would like to support our work, you can also go over to patreon.com no Till Growers. For as little as $2 a month, you can kick in help keep this thing going. But don't worry, the show is free, will always be free. But if you like it, you appreciate it, kick us a couple bucks and that would be rad. Okay, enough for me. Let's get into this amazing follow up conversation with Richard Perkins of Ridgedale.

Permacult. Richard Perkins, welcome back to the.

Podcast. Hey, Jesse. Yeah. Good to speak to you.

Again. And good to speak with you. I, you know, we have a lot to talk about, but I think we should start, or I should start at least by saying congrats on the new.

Farm. Yeah, thank you so much. It's been a super exciting little journey. I've actually been spending a lot of time with my son this summer over on the west coast of Sweden. And it's been a dream of mine since I was a little kid actually to have a coastal property. And I talked about it a bit on, on YouTube. It's, it's something that when we set out the goals for Ridgedale, we had a list of about 50 objectives in our land searches. We were looking for property all over Sweden at that point. And this place, Ridgedale, fit every single one of those points except for one which was proximity to the sea. And I let it slide because we got this beautiful lake just about 800 meters away from the farm where we go for barbecues and swimming and relaxing. And it's got a beautiful sandy beach. So I felt, ah, I can let that one slip. But as time has gone on, I really have missed that coastal setting and it's something I always wanted in my life. So yeah, I decided to check out a few properties this summer as we were regularly going for weekends down there. And my son is super interested in little creatures, insects and aquatic creatures, and he's just loving going to the sea to forage and look for new specimens. And so I started checking out properties and it's more expensive over on the west coast, but it's a very beautiful, dramatic landscape and I've always wanted to have some kind of remote farm. I haven't fully clarified what we're going to do there exactly, but it's a bit of an investment property, but it has scope for running a farm remotely or possibly stationing one of our intern students.

There. How far, did you say how far that is from your current.

Farm? It's a bit of a way. It's two and a half hours drive from here, but it's the closest coast that we could actually get to from our farm. It's right up near the Norwegian border, so it's quite close to the northern tip of Denmark into Oslo and Norway. But it's a really beautiful part of the coast. It's a sort of favorite spot amongst Swedish people. It's really. Yeah, just beautiful. And it's such a different landscape to what we're used to here in Vamland. This is known as the sort of dark forests of Vanland. It's relatively very rural and it's quite cold here. It's got a lot more wilderness. You could say it's where the major wolf populations are in Sweden, where we are at Ridgedale. So it's quite a dramatic difference. Over on the west coast, for example, it doesn't really snow, it doesn't freeze in the winter, which is radically different to where we are in one of the coldest spots at this.

Latitude. Wow, that's fascinating. Well, you, you mentioned that it was kind of an investment property. Like, can you kind of describe some of the thinking.

There? Sure, yeah. Well, I've been, you know, it's something that I've been discussing a bit with other farmers this year. I've been interviewing a lot of farmers here in Europe and it, you know, it's such a common pattern, I feel for young folks getting into farming to spend three or four years, it seems, just married to the business, just putting in stupid work hours, like hundred, hundred plus hours a week, just putting your head down, getting things going. And, you know, I feel like running any small business looks like that, and especially small farming businesses, but certainly for myself as I've. I've put in silly hours for about five or six years and it's only this year that I managed to step back a little bit and just Reflect a bit on life and getting older. My partner turned 41 and I got a bit of exhaustion the last couple of years. I haven't been feeling 100% for the last two years because I've just done too much. It's not just running this diverse farm, it's been writing books and building up, you know, presence on social media and all that stuff around. That takes up all of what would have been my spare time, I guess. And so I went into a sort of mini burnout, you could say. And it's really this year that's given me time to reflect and, you know, think about getting older. And it's been interesting talking to other farmers about that because for me personally, I don't really believe in pension schemes and I just watched what happened in the uk. People lost huge amounts of money and it's such a fickle thing. It's not something that feels tangible or reliable. And I think, you know, perhaps we're a generation that are less invested in that. I guess what you could say was a traditional route in the past, certainly in my parents generation. And so I've been thinking I want to do to secure a future. Our strategy at Ridgedale has been to pay off debt aggressively. The first five years our business plan was to just get out of debt and, you know, have a base for self sustainability as well as a nice functioning business with amazing customers. And we achieved that. And I think for me, some of the surplus capital from running my other business with books and online trainings, all that sort of stuff, I've decided, you know, where to put that in a way that could create multiple benefits. And so I've been on a bit of a journey with that and, you know, I'm always going to be interested in land and farming and I can imagine for Johanna and I, there will be a time when we want to scale down a bit and be a bit less intensive with people and a bit less intensive production. And so I can foresee a time when I might just homestead, you know, the idea of raising enough food for a family, a couple of pigs and a few sheep and maybe a milking cow and a little vegetable garden for a family. It just feels like it makes me chuckle to think about, like it's so incredibly easy compared to running a farm in business. It just feels like it's not even work at that point. It's just fun, it's just doing what needs to be done. And so, yeah, I wanted a place that was very manageable. So it's not, I'd say this new farm is not particularly valuable as a farm. It's very valuable in its location. So it's a good rental property in the meantime. So my vision so far is to get it set up for Airbnb rentals in one of the best places possible for that kind of thing. There's two houses there already and there's permission to build a barn again, that could be multiple accommodations, for example. So I'd like to set up a rental thing so that I can be working our farm in the summer and then in the winter do it up for the next few years. So it gives me a project that's, you know, it's going to be interesting and fun for me. I've always done building and I like to renovate things and make them nice. And so, you know, I enjoy that. And I can see I can add a lot of value there. And so it feels good from an investment perspective and will have some benefits for us too. It'll be a place that we can take holidays and possibly retire to or, you know, scale down to. But the exciting part of that property was that the. It's kind of on the edge of a nature reserve. There's never going to be other houses or developments anywhere around it. And there's a piece of commune land like, like the commune the council own, and that's a 34 hectare piece of designated nature reserve. So it's a very low value, not a lot people could do ever to develop that. And therefore it's selling for like five times cheaper than land in Sweden does, let alone land on the coast. And so I'm talking with the commune at the moment about taking over the lease, because the farmer that has been leasing that land has just had cattle there at times of year, but he's not done a very good job and the council aren't very happy with him because he's letting it regrow into woody scrub. And so there's a possibility to rent it for free, basically. And if it's a possibility to buy in the future, it would be a very good investment for the property too. But that would then give us a 40 hectare farm with a kilometer and a half of beachfront on the west of Sweden. And a big part of that for me is that I've always dreamed to sail and to sail around the world. That's been just as strong a dream for me as farming and doing all this stuff. So I've been harboring dream since I was in my late teens. And it's just like farming really. It's always been a far off vision that never seems to get any closer. And I remember efforting to buy land and you know, just before buying Ridgedale, I still felt no closer to buying a farm than I have had since I was about 15 years old. And in the same way, I think sailing I relate to in the same. It's, you know, it's this idea that I know I'm gonna do and I'm a firm believer that, you know, life should be lived in the right order. And it's not something I want to put off till I'm in my old age. It's something I want to take my kids on in the same way that bringing up my children on the farm setting teaches them just immeasurable, tangible skills and observations and, you know, locks them into the ecosystem around them. I feel like sailing and looking after your own needs in that respect is kind of like an equal opposite. To be able to be fully self contained and know that you're able to look after yourself and navigate and those kind of things. And that's really my dream and vision for my children is to just impart really useful, tangible, transferable skills. And so it's a big. Yeah, it feels like it's the first time we're doing something fully for ourselves, actually. Like this farm has been set up. Ridgedale has been set up with the intention to benefit a huge amount of people along the way. And so we designed the farm specifically around what we could do to facilitate other people starting farming. And I feel like it's been very successful at that, but it's come at a cost. And I think some of that burnout I mentioned is the impact of having so many people and farming and hard physical work. That's no big deal. But dealing with people all the time is quite intense, especially when we don't have much private space here. And that's a choice we made, but we're choosing to sort of slowly step back from that as we get a bit older. This property represents both the financial investment to give us some future security, but also an investment in ourselves and honoring the fact that we need to take time out and have some privacy and those kind of things too.

Yeah. And I think one thing you mentioned in there kind of earlier on was this sort of idea of retirement or like, you know, homesteading, kind of settling down and having, you know, just a small flock and a small garden, those sorts of things, and not having to necessarily rely on the production. I think that that's not something we as growers Talk enough about. I don't know why. And I think partially in America we're always kind of stuck in this sort of American dream mindset where something's just going to come down the road and pay us a bunch of money and we're going to be fine. It's a curse. But yeah, we're never thinking enough about making sort of investments like that. And it sounds like in one of the videos I watched that you were thinking about even use maybe or even like you said, having somebody, a crew member from your current farm living there, maybe starting a small market garden there to sort of jumpstart their, their work. Using it like that has, has a lot of advantages too. Do you want to talk to that a little.

Bit? Yeah, totally. I mean, I'm, I'm super aware of the limitations for folks here in Europe for access to land. I mean, obviously not just in Europe, but here. It's, you know, I've spoken to people this summer where land prices around Europe range from $10,000 a hectare up to $250,000 a hectare. And it's just prohibitive for most people, you know, certainly with proximity to larger cities. I mean, some of the examples that we've been watching over in the States, from here in Europe are in proximity to major capital cities. Now if you travel around most of Europe and, and find land in those proximities, you're paying over 100k per hectare at least and up to 2, 250. And that's just obviously unattainable for anyone that wants to start out small farm. And so it's something I, Yeah, I wonder how to. I've thought a lot about how I could use my resource base to benefit others, but it, yeah, it doesn't feel like my property has to be part of that necessarily. And obviously this would only benefit a person individually or as a couple or something. But I think it's. Yeah, it follows along the same lines that I've always run my businesses through, which is to try and be of benefit to all in the process, to ecosystems, to people, you know, sharing resources and just open source and stuff. And I haven't really given it so much thought. It's all been a bit of a whirlwind, to be honest. And I don't get the keys till mid December, but I'm thinking to start the rental next year. And it's quite possible because there's already two houses that someone could move in and start up and that would give them a free place to live and quite Low risk strategy. It's got incredible potential for sales there and it's crying out for, for good food. Sweden is remarkable and I think I've said this to you before, Jesse, but it's incredible how poor the quality of the food is here in Sweden considering how affluent the country it is. And it's really been amazing to watch the Rico rings that I've also talked to you about in the past. The Facebook organized selling groups that we now sell 100% of our products through. Just watching those boom in the last two years. I mean there's 550 odd Rico rings in Scandinavia moving something like 150 million euros this year already. And whilst that's tiny, it's, you know, it's certainly not, it's not nothing. And it's in Finland where Ricoh came along. It now makes up 5% of all food consumption in Finland. I mean that is.

Remarkable.

Wow. Yeah. And that's just. Yeah, it's just boomed lately and I just feel like it's. Yeah, it's so it's such a good time to do this stuff all over the place. It's been what I've observed talking with people on this farm like a hero tour this summer is everyone is seeing 2 to 300% increase in sales this summer and it might dip again. We don't know what the future looks like and next year looks like but it certainly woken a lot of people up to local and integrity food and it's been amazing. So if I can facilitate someone to do that and you know, help manage that property for me. That sounds like an ideal arrangement, I.

Think. Yeah. I, so I want to do, I do want to talk about this farm like a hero project that you have going on. Can you take us a little bit back to maybe at the beginning of this year sort of what your plans were and then how Covid sort of changed.

That. So it's funny, we. We took last winter, we took our first family holiday in seven years. Then we went, you know, we went excessive on that. We went to Southeast Asia for a few months and it was just outbreaking at the time we were leaving Southeast Asia and so it was much more present in our minds and than people, you know, people in Europe weren't even aware of it I think when we were coming home. So everyone in Bangkok was masked up and it was quite surreal at that time. And it made us really consider what it would be like that this year to be able to have people at the farm to, you know, to get the team Together, but I'd made plans to take a year out and so we planned the production around me not being at the farm all year. And I set up what the Farm Like a Hero tour. So my objective was to drive 30,000 kilometers all around Europe, visiting all the people that have come through our farm over the years and have gone off to set up their own businesses and do like hour long YouTube videos, just documenting and sharing, you know, tools and techniques and strategies and business and just really trying to connect people and shine light on them. Because I noticed I did a few videos like that a couple of years ago. And what I noticed from that is it just brings a lot of attention to those people and they start to talk to each other and that those connections, I feel are really important. And the big impetus for me for the whole tour was that why are people looking at isolated cases over in the States or in Australia? It's like we have such diversity here in Europe and there are such incredible producers all over and. And I just had the feeling that people aren't networked here. You know, we're all looking over there somewhere but not talking to the people around us. And I just, you know, I've seen people doing incredible businesses, way better than my business that I've talked to over the summer. You know, just incredible efficiencies and just highly tuned to their marketplaces. And yeah, I really wanted to document that. So I set up this crazy routes. I used this trucking software that automatically using AI, works out your best routes and all stuff. And I planned this wonderful trip and it was going to take me end of April till end of October. So my plan was to be at Ridgedale for the first month to introduce the team to very specific parts of the farm that they need to manage. And then I had a main manager here that I would liaise with on Skype once a week and just, you know, make sure things are happening in a timely way, et cetera. And for me it was, you know, that it was kind of masquerading as a holiday that was like me having a year off. And I, I'm glad in the way Covid came because it even I ended up staying on the farm, but taking a back seat and running that tour digitally. And even then it was a pretty overwhelming task and I just don't know how I would have done it in reality. It would have been rocking up at some farm in Holland, filming all day, taking five, four, five hours of footage, trying to produce something an hour long, driving 10 hours and starting again. The next day, it wouldn't have been very restful at all. I mean, it would have been incredible and brought a lot of beautiful video and inspiration, but it. Yeah, it would have been exhausting. So I guess I'm blessed by the situation. And, yeah, I've been running that digitally. As someone. It's been amazing because it's just really normalized. So many things for people just to see that we're all in the same boat and some things are tough and some things suck and, oh, you have problems with this and problems with that, and. And yet there's all these people who are just throwing their passion and devotion to this pathway and finding ways to succeed and seeing the network develop between those people, it's just been amazing. It's driving on all kinds of ideas for future things. Like, I'd love to do physical meetups. I mean, it might not be possible with uncertainty, with COVID et cetera, but just trying to get people dialed into each other in a kind of attitude of collaboration and working together. Because I feel like there's. There's still so much competition in this world where, you know, politics is hidden under the surface. And I just feel like people are scared to talk about finances and numbers. They're scared to talk about problems they have. And there's, you know, this Instagram culture. Everything's perfect and only sharing successes and this kind of thing, and it's. It's really detrimental because I think a lot of people suffer in the silence because of it, and there's just no point. I think there's just massive potential for people to communicate in a very different way. And certainly for some of us in Europe, that's really had a big impact doing this tour, because suddenly people have a lot more access intimately, with people who are working on very similar enterprises to them and working with specific regulations for each different country, etc. So it's been a real pleasure and it's been amazing for me to be the one listening rather than the one rabbiting on all the time. So, yeah, I really enjoyed it, and it's been really humbling and being insightful. Yeah, I've just. I've seen. I've been blown away, Jesse, by some of the people you just would never hear of, and yet they're just mashing it and doing incredible numbers and incredibly successful. And, yeah, it's been.

Beautiful. Yeah, I think that's great. And obviously, like, I share that feeling of, like, being able to talk to growers and really dive into their systems. And some people that maybe yeah, don't even have any sort of social media that we've been able to find. And it's great. Like that's just, it's. It's great to bring them out in the open. And you've been doing that for me as well. I remember, gosh, several farm Oxton Organics is one I discovered through you, Hell Bauer, that, yeah, there's some great farms that you've brought. And I agree because people in Europe have been writing us for a long time. I'm really glad you did this, that you've been doing these, these talks because people have been writing us from Europe saying like, we need more European content and obviously we're only able to do so much. So it's really cool to see you doing that. I want to talk about you. You spoke for a second there about talking about failures and successes, sharing them both. So I'm curious, like in terms of this year on the farm, you have such a robust model farm model. I mean, you do a lot of different things there. Animals and meat and process or. Yeah, processing and vegetables and all of those things. Did you notice strengths or weaknesses kind of come out in this 2020 year? Was there anything that the kind of pandemic brought to light for good or.

Bad? Well, I firstly, I mean, the pandemic situation really didn't affect us here in any way. I mean, Sweden's obviously had a bit of a different approach than most countries, but where we live is pretty remote, so our lives were just not affected in any way. Nothing's been different for us this year at all. The only thing that was different is we kept our son at home when he would normally be at daycare. And so that changed Johanna and I schedule. We had to obviously adapt to full time caring for him. But other than that, we had no. Well, I guess the only difference is we suddenly had zero restaurant customers. But that wasn't really an issue for us. We just leveraged that towards the reco rings and we've been setting up another reco ring or two wrecker rings that are part of the same day's delivery as it were over last winter. And that really boomed this year. So that wasn't really an issue for us. And it's better for us to sell to private customers anyway because it's more lucrative. And the restaurants here are a bit of a pain. Like they've never actually been really good customers. Well, one or two have been good customers, but they a lot more needy and demanding compared to the sort of people that come and Meet us in car parks at 5 o' clock in the evening. So we've actually appreciated that. But things on the farm, I guess one of the biggest certainly relating to the market garden, one of the. Well, a few things have come up I could tell you about. The biggest thing that happened was that we neglected to put the, the row covers on the beds last winter. We normally take this non woven geotextile so it's like a, almost like a felt but very thin. And it's a landscape fabric. It's like you would use, you know, that nasty black woven plastic for like under wood mulch or whatever. But we use this non woven one to cover the beds in winter, to allow moisture to go through, to stop anything landing in the beds and just to sort of tuck up the soil microorganisms and it's. I don't know how important that has been, but I have documented on our channel. It's obvious to me that it's doing a lot of benefit because when the snow melts in the spring here, I can have snow just melting and still snow on top of those row covers and I can peel it back and there's just worms fully active in basically freezing ground. So I know that they're helping with bedding down the organisms. But what I noticed this year was we had hundreds of thousands of young spruce seedlings. Now we're right next to a spruce plantation and two years ago, 2018 we had an incredible drought and it was just 150 year record drought. We had 120 days without rain here. And typically we have rain very evenly distributed throughout the summer. And I think the trees had a stress response to that. And so there was just an unprecedented amount of seed this spring. But the trouble with spruce is it can be releasing its seeds in March and April time. And so with uncovered beds they would normally have been covered until May, June time. Ended up just taking on a massive load of seed. It was unreal. It was like a sea of little Christmas trees in every single bed. And so that's taken all year to sort of, I mean it's not a big deal in terms, it's not out competing any crops or anything like that. It would be a pain in something like a mescaline mix where you need to then sort it and it's not going to take over if we, you know, if you get rid of them, they're gone. It's not like an annual or perennial weed might be. And so we basically hold them over and used a tilfer on some of the beds as they were getting cleared at the end of the year, just to smash them up. And that should be fine. I'm not majorly concerned about it, but that was quite interesting because I think that would have. It was the only year we've not covered up our beds, and we covered them up this fall and I intend to cover them every year. Another thing related to those trees is where the garden joins the forest. We usually cut along the edge of the outside bed, just a spade depth to cut the roots, the surface feeding roots of those trees, because they can suck a lot of water. But what we saw this summer is very visible water depletion in those edge beds. And I'm guessing that those trees are just rooting much deeper than a spade step. So we have to figure out some way to basically, you know, take a bar or something and cut a couple of feet deep down the edge of those beds. It's not a big deal, but it's, you know, something to be aware of and it's something we thought we had covered, but we didn't. And the only other issue is this is the first year we've seen voles coming in to our beds and if you only cause damage in like two out of 200 beds, it's not a big deal. But the trouble with the voles here in Sweden, we've had quite a big problem with them with our tree crops, is that they haven't had a normal Swedish winter for several years in a row. So their population is just growing expensive exponentially. And it's a. It's a big deal because you can't really poison them. People always like to say, well, you can have a terrier or, you know, birds of prey will take them, but when you have an episodic outbreak, this nut working, I've actually got an American tool called a rodinator, and it's basically a mixing tap for oxygen and propane. And you pump it down the burrows and ignite it and it just explodes the whole tunnel network. And it's the benefit of that is it would kill any voles in there on with a sort of impact, but then it also collapses the tunnel. And that's critical with voles, because if you don't collapse the tunnel, another one just comes and lives in there straight away. Now, they are sexually active at something like 45 days. They can have like 15 pups several times a year. I mean, they're. They're crazy. And so whilst there was only a few showing up in the garden, it's the first time they have shown up in the garden. And that. That concerns me. It's not the sort of thing that you leave to see if it balances out. You have to deal with that because it's. It becomes a major problem. And the only other thing you can really do, I think, is keeping grass along the edges of the beds really short to minimize the chances of them running over into the beds. But if you have that problem, I really recommend people deal with it. And it's over in the States that you have these Rodonator, I think that's the brand name and there's other versions of it, but it's. Yeah, it's an effective tool. It definitely, you know, I'm confident that we've blown up all the voles that are in our.

Garden. Yeah. Wow. Wow. That's an interesting new problem. So I want to make sure that I have this winter bed thing, right, because I think it's kind of fascinating. Are you putting anything down on the beds before you put that felt fabric.

Down? Not necessarily. It depends very much on what's being grown there and whether it's. If we've been pulling out root crops or things like leeks, where you end up, you know, maybe pulling up soil to the surface, then we'll dress it again with compost just to not have any exposed soil to minimize any, you know, reemergence of any of the pastoral weeds. There's been some reemergence of buttercups and dandelions in a small proportion of beds near forest where that's been the case in previous years, where we pulled out, you know, large leaks that have rooted down into the clay below, and you end up just, you know, with lumps of soil back on the surface again. And then we never did anything about that. And we found that those beds started. We started seeing the pastoral weeds re. Emerge. So we made it the protocol that, you know, if there's any crops like that being pulled out last thing, then we'll top dress it and then cover it up for the winter. Something we're playing around with, just cutting and leaving and covering them up to see how they break down over the winter. And we actually, we have an overabundance of compost now. So we're. We're in the position now where the winter bedding from our chickens is. You know, it's enough to put 7, 8 centimeters on every bed. And so that's just a byproduct of having the hens. And it's a necessary cost and need for the Hens anyway. And so we're in a fortunate position where we can put as much material down on the beds as we like to now without buying it in addition. So we're down to buying in just potting mix, which I think I would prioritize just to keep bedding, to keep buying because it's just uniform and works well with things like paper pots where it's very finely sieved, etc. But yeah, just, I think just having that cover keeps microbiology working later into the year and starts again earlier in the year and for sure stops weed seed blowing in. And that's the sort of bane for the no dig ro, I guess is weed coming into the property as opposed to, you know, we don't have much weed pressure other than stuff blowing in and germinating on the.

Top. Right. Is there, do you have any thoughts on cover crops in that scenario? Is there a reason that you do that? You don't you. Or do you use cover crops or do you usually avoid.

Them? I, to be honest, I've always avoided any cover crop because, I mean, you would have the benefit of being able to lay it on the top and cover it up and let it down. But we're, we're putting compost on top so we don't have any lack of nutrient there. And we're leaving the roots of everything that we've harvested in the ground except for, you know, root crops or things like leaks or whatever. But for the majority of the beds, there's a whole root system decomposing all winter. And so we've got soil covered by compost, living roots dying in the ground covered then with geotextile is I can't see what benefit a cover crop will bring because bear in mind that cover crop can't get much purchase. I mean, we're only emptying the beds at the end of our production season and then it's getting so dark that nothing really grows anyway. And so there's not really any time for a cover crop to get established. And we don't want to sacrifice any of the growing season to put a cover crop in because our growing season is so short anyway. And so I think, you know, I think it translates to simplicity and efficiency where we don't have any major bed prep to do other than laying down material. And we do that on a bed by bed basis. So we're not planting everything out in the spring. We're working on a very specific bed plan where we're planning out on specific dates targeted to certain days of the week to fit around other farm jobs. And so it's no big deal, you know, opening up a bed at a time. So for me, I can't see the benefit of COVID crops in our circumstance and can see potential problems with that as.

Well. Right. No, it makes sense. I mean thinking about COVID crops on a small scale is always kind of a big question mark because you need to maximize that space. Um, but yeah, I mean your, your light dives really quickly and by the time it rebounds, you're pretty much ready to get back to planting. So having a crop there would.

Be. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Detrimental to your, to your crop plan. You mentioned paper pot and I know you did a lot of experiments with it last year. Can you catch us up on what your thoughts are, where it works, where it maybe doesn't for your.

System? Sure. I think it works generally fine for like certainly for the seeding in the start of the year. It's just joyful because we have such a short growing season. So for reference, we're planning stuff out end of May. A few things are seeded mid May and a few like, things like onions, spring onions can go earlier, but it's such a short condensed time to seed a lot of stuff that having that drop seeding system has just been really joyful. And because we also only have a very small propagation space that's heated because it can be -20, -25 at that time that we've gone vertical with stacking our seedlings up to the ceiling in a very small space that's easy to heat. And having the paper pot allows you to put, I mean each paper pot trays 264 seeds in that tray. So it's, it's way more condensed. However, the downside of it is there's such small paper chains that the volume of compost in there so you, you get less flexibility. So here the issue with that is that the weather is so fluctuating. I mean we have 110 days without frost. That can be plus or minus 30 days, which is, you know, 30% of the season is pretty significant. And that's the trouble with the Paperbot system is if you know things need, so you have to transplant things when they're ready. And we don't always have that benefit because of the climate here. So we took away the way we've dealt with that is that all the first seedlings go in the older, much larger cells that we used to always use. And that's something I think I would carry over because the first one was first starting to transplant. It's not the most intensive period for us and that comes later on the sort of June, July time. So that's when the paper pot planting really helps too, in terms of time management. And other things that I've stepped back from are things like Hackerrate. We've always been doing multi zone, so you get four to a cell. But late at the end of this year we started going back to individual seedings again because we were producing sort of elongated hacker eyes and they're just not as beautiful as golf ball hacker eye, for example. And it's way more efficient and time saving and we sell them for the same price, but we don't feel as good about them. And so there are some potential benefits that could, you know, you could look at from both sides. And so we've just taken a few crops off from the paper part. I would like to see them develop bigger cells. And I've also heard, I mean, they've been trialing the hemp papers and the last I heard they were dissolving before they were getting planted out. So that obviously needs to go back to the drawing board. But I would hope that they develop larger cells too. That would be a game changer. To be able to keep things in the cells for, you know, 25, 30 days would be really useful. But other than that, I think it's been working great. I mean, it's a, it's a really great tool. It's one I always caution people to because if you're buying the paper pot and the seeding system and trays specific for it and then the papers every year it adds up and it's a couple of thousand euros for, you know, getting all the gear. And I just think, you know, you've got to really be clear in your context if that's going to save you, if that's valuable for you, because basically all the other garden tools you need add up to the same cost themselves. So it's not one that I would recommend people must have, you know, in a way, like a greens harvester, if you're growing baby leaves, etc. I feel like you must have, you know, but it's. Yeah, yeah. I don't know what else to say other than it's love it. But it's something that I will always keep a very close eye on and it needs to be learned. There's a lot more nuances to it than most of the other tools we use. And so the person operating it needs to be highly observant and particularly when You've got drought spells which seem to be becoming more frequent here because you're putting in sprouted seedlings very shallow in, in a little cell that's wrapped, which means it's harder for it to absorb water from the surrounding environment anyway. So you just need to be really careful and monitor newly transplanted things with it, I.

Think. And are you leaving the paper in the soil or are you pulling.

That? We leave it in the soil till the bed is cropped and then we pull it out. And ideally you can pull it out in one long strand still and sometimes it's, you know, you're pulling out broken up parts of it, but we'll always pull it out. And I've actually put some. We developed some longer term compost heaps. So we have three main composting methods and one we developed at the start of the year is more static piles that are turned through just for like standard garden waste that in the past would have gone to pigs. We haven't had pigs at the farm for a couple of years now because we cut the forest and we want the trees to re establish to a point that they're kind of pig proof as far as that can be. But the. We basically have a lot more leafy green material going to compost heaps now. And so we developed a different style of compost to better use that. And we actually had, in about 414 months we produce 10 cubic meters in one block of really beautiful finished compost. And all the paper chains were still fully intact. And so, yeah, we've made an effort now to always collect those separately. And because they're nasty, it's like a bit like black plastic. It's like if you use it, you'll end up with bits of it blowing everywhere. And it's just. I hate that. I love our farm to be squeaky clean. When you drive in around the corner, I want this beautiful view. I don't want it's a paper chain blowing across the road and you know, so we're very meticulous with making sure we pick it all up. And yeah, there's not a lot you can do with it really other than throw it or burn.

It. Yeah, yeah, I've noticed that it, that we've put it some in a. We don't do a lot with paper plots but we've trialed it and I put them in some pretty, you know, active compost piles and notice that it doesn't. They don't break down super.

Fast.

No. So hopefully with the hemp chains, I mean, maybe that'll change a little bit if they can get that formula.

Down. Yeah, yeah, it sounds like they've still got work to do on.

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Richard. Okay, so I want to get into some questions that we've got from some Patreon members. We always let them, you know, ask a few questions when, when we've got guests coming on and we can sort of rapid fire these if you want, or you can go in as in depth as you want. All right, so Jody Miller is curious to know your thoughts on integrating grazing animals into your crop rotation. I know that you don't really do that, but she points to people like Gabe Brown and others who've done it on larger scales. Do you have any thoughts on that? Is there a reason that you specifically avoid having animals or what are your thoughts on.

That? I would say keep it to the large scale. You Know, like, it's okay. Brown's doing his field scale with minimal tillage perhaps, but it's. Yeah, they're not compatible. On an intensive market garden, any kind of livestock is going to totally kick out your permanent bed structure. And I just. I wouldn't integrate anything. I might run some ducks for insect control maybe, but not. Not chickens. I would use animals to prepare land, but once I've put in a permanent no dig set, never let any animals in.

Again. You've done a little bit of. How do I have this right? That you've done some. That you sometimes keep your chickens in the tunnels over the winter. Does that. Is that.

Right? Yes, we do that. So we have up to 1200 laying hens here. And so they're in groups of 400 in eggmobiles. So they come in for five months of the year because it's just Sweden and the. So we have a high tunnel for tomato production and the high tunnel typically we've had for cucumber production. And the bigger tunnel will take 800 hens, so two egg meals. So in the summer that's producing tomato, and then in the winter that's ripped out. I mean, we pull out our tomatoes by mid to end of October, and then the start to come in end of October, and so we will. It's built on a subsoil pad because we had. We're on sloping land, so to put up a tunnel, you need it to be flat horizontally for the structural integrity. So it's kind of a compacted earth pad. And then each year we just fill that and by the end, like with bedding, like to catch the high nitrogen manure from all those chickens. So we'll use peat moss, which we have access to locally. We have a peat swamp here, and we use sometimes straw, old silage mixed in there, too. And then we take that out with a front load in spring, and that gets put into windrows and turned a couple of times. And that is now basically making up all the compost that we put on our gardens. And we'll mix that with cow manure from the cows and sheep as well. And then we. It's kind of a bit wonky because then we have to bring back in some compost to remake these beds. The reason we take it out and bring it back in is that the only way to know when you've taken it out is the bucket on the machine is kind of sitting flat on that. It's almost like concrete subsoil pads. It's very easy to scrape everything Entirely. And it's kind of easier to do that and bring material back into form beds than it is to only take half of it out, for example. And so it's not the perfect growing space for tomatoes and there's not the perfect space for hens, but it's good enough for both. And the value of, I mean, we've got such a long winter here, the value of that space for the hens are kicking out, you know, €40,000 of eggs in that wintertime. So it's a pretty valuable space for them. But it's worth the slight compromise to both systems to have that integration. And so they're producing a lot of value in that space that would be empty for seven months, five months. So. And they're producing the compost for the whole garden as a byproduct. So there's ways to, you know, another way to say that is there's ways to integrate animals for sure, but I wouldn't put them in my garden for.

Sure. Yeah. So what, wait, while we're on the subject of tomatoes, what's your, what's your strategy with tomatoes? Do you do single row, double leader? What's your, what's your spacing in your.

Strategy? We've been doing single row just slightly shy of 20cm apart. So I don't know what that is in.

Inches. So that's like eight.

Inches. Almost eight inches. Yeah, it's pretty. So we'll do, we're growing only indeterminates and we'll grow them on a single row in the 75 centimeter bed and with a single lead. And that allows us to grow crops that we'll get in a salad crop on every bed before the tomatoes even go in, because we typically can't put them out till my birthday, like end of May. And so we get a crop in there beforehand, typically. And then we can still grow a row of salad on each side of the tomatoes, often twice before they sort of get out shaded. And then it gets a bit too dark in there that you can't really grow good salad, even if you're pruning high, you know, up to waist height on the tomato. But then we cut the tops off the plants in mid August, so it's a really short season. I mean, I actually think tomato is a low value crop here in Sweden unless you're heating your tunnel. And for us, it's absolutely not worth heating a tunnel. Like propane, I guess over always is much cheaper, but propane is very expensive here. It's double the price of Where I grew up in the uk and there's no point doing that to grow tomatoes in my mind. And then you're competing with the industrial units that have got, you know, Dutch style glass houses and it's just not economic. So yeah, we do that and it, that works well. But we, we're fortunate and unfortunate, I guess, in that our season's so short that we never end up lowering our plants. So it's set up for a lower and lean kind of system. But by the end of the season, the plants are maximum two and a half meters tall. So we never get to leaning them because it's just too short. The growing season. It's been working well for us. But I've had some mysterious thing happen this year. I've had, every year I've been growing this tomato variety called Idli and it's my favorite tomato variety. It's incredible. It has trusses of little yellow cherry, sort of plum tomato shape yellow cherry tomatoes. And it has trusses of 80 or 90 odd fruit and it'll have six, seven trusses like that. There's videos on our YouTube channel. It's just incredible. But this year I bought idli from the same company. It's a real seed company in the UK and this year I don't know what they were, but Italy, they were like a red plum tomato with this horrible texture and just like mushy in your mouth. And I, I spoke about it on YouTube and then a couple of people wrote in and said they'd bought Italy and had the same. So someone has duped us along the way. But I hope that that gets sold and I'd love to hear if anyone knows another name for it, if it's marketed under a different name somewhere else. Because I really missed having that variety this.

Year. Oh, that's unfortunate. Does that give you any thoughts about saving your own seed on that particular one or like sort of seed resiliency? I think about that sometimes when, when I get something that's off type or, or something goes, you know, oftentimes I'll get really excited about a variety and, and they'll discontinue it and then I'll, you know, hit myself for not saving the seed on it, I.

Guess. Yeah, I guess it should. But it, I generally just generally too busy to think about that because we don't have, we're. It's time pressure, you know, like when the tomato, we need to leave the tomatoes in as long as we can, but then we need to get them out when it's right for the birds because their value is much more important in terms of eggs over the winter, but also in terms of animal welfare. So we don't have the luxury of flexibility in that decision making with the setup that we have. And it's, you know, we're often ripening a huge amount of tomatoes indoors every year because it's. The season's just too short. So I don't know how well we could even save seed anyway with certain crops. But I guess, yeah, maybe I'm being a little bit lazy in some way. But I. It's something I don't, I don't think growers should be doing. You know, I really want to see more people setting up dedicated market gardening seed saving operations in every, you know, in every county, in every country. It's, you know, it wouldn't take a lot to promote someone's business to get all the market growers to. If they could produce the right things at the right time in the right quantity. And that's what I would like to see in the future is, you know, hundreds more seed producers who are dedicated seed producers not growing for.

Market. I'm like torn between this. I just. There's going to be somebody on the podcast before you're on. It's actually this upcoming Monday, Nancy Cost and Matthew Cost, and she's from Bolivia and she talked about how she was really blown away when she got to the States that there was no sort that there is a separation between growing food and saving seed in her native Bolivia. That's not a thing like of course you save your seed. So I'm torn between that idea and then also the idea of having somebody who really focuses in on that and is, you know, extremely good at saving high quality seed and that's basically what they do. And then you kind of pay them for that.

Expertise. It comes down to economics. Right. I would love to hear more from people that are established in that business in western countries because it certainly my own travels through, you know, let's say developing countries. It's the same people save their own seeds and often have to because most of the seeds in developing countries are terminator varieties that are, you know, often chemically dependent. They will only grow well with ag chemicals and they can't save seed from them. So it forces people to do that. But yeah, I would like to see the economics that in a western setting, well established because there's a reason why people aren't doing that also, I.

Think. Okay, I want to get to some of these other questions. If we still have a few minutes because I think they're good. And one of them actually speaks to a little bit of what you were talking about earlier. It's kind of a two part question. So the first is, you know, this is from Matthew Clifford and he says he's seen some criticism of the deep compost mulch system, sort of the no dig system for its sort of heavy reliance on outside inputs, specifically compost. He's interested what your thoughts are on that. And then kind of the second part is a discussion on sourcing in Europe, especially municipal composts, concerns over microplastics and quality. He's from Europe, so I think that it's specifically talks to what he's going.

Through. Yeah, well they're big questions, aren't they? But the first part of that about farms relying on outside inputs. I mean farms always rely on outside inputs. You know, that's the nature of the beast. And I've got nothing against that. I'm much more interested in interdependence, like local interdependence. I don't want to produce grain, but I'll happily buy the grain next door to feed my chickens. I don't want to produce it. I have no intention of that. I'm very happy to import that nutrient to restore my nutrient and water cycle in my pasture. And the results have been unbelievable. Mainly due to poultry. And we built 25cm of active rooting depth and sub and soil in a few short years of key lime plowing and plant grazing and mainly I think poultry and importing all the nutrient through those poultry. And am I unhappy about that? No, I'm over the moon about that. And I saw the results. I documented the results on our YouTube channel. When we had a drought in 2018, all the neighbors were in yellow fields. In June, people were selling off half their herds of animals for slaughter because the slaughteries were getting booked out and people knew they wouldn't have winter feed. And we had Timothy and Coxford and all these beautiful past grasses in full photosynthesis up to my shoulders when everyone else had stunted grasses 20, 30 centimeters tall, gone yellow. And I shown that on our channel. It's amazing. And so am I happy to import a bit of nutrient. Yes. While people are willing to sell it. Look, I think there's going to be a time in our lives when people won't sell you compost, straw, hay, silage, anything that's walked out their front gate, as it were. So if they are willing to sell it now and you need to restore Your farm, I'm certainly down with that, you know, and so I think there's an illusion that you can have a closed farm. No, you can't. You know what other veg growers do if they're not doing no dig they till. Okay, so you're just importing, you know, fossilized dinosaurs essentially. You know, that's not input free. It doesn't look like a lot of inputs because it's in the petrol can. There's a lot more inputs in that than there is in my pile of 50 cubic meters of compost, you know, especially when it's made out of peat moss in my little peat swamp down the road. What could be more sustainable than that? You know, people, I feel people don't ask enough questions. It's, you know, there's a big connotation in the growing movement that peat is bad, it's unsustainable, but it's like. Hang on, hang on. Compared to what? And how is it sourced now? Of course, massive deep cut, clear cut peat production, it's not very sustainable, know that. But we actually have peat swamps all over the place. Like I have a peat swamp as part of my farm. So you know, it's a few hundred meters by fifteen meters wide and probably six, seven, eight meters deep. That's enough for this farm forever, you know, and there's no better material for bedding an animal on. It's antiseptic, it's 40 times more absorbent than wood shavings, you know, this perfect material. And then what's the alternative? Oh, straw. Well, straw is produced by debt fueled soil degrading annual grain production, you know, to produce the food that second rate. So I just think this picture is much more complex and much bigger. So am I bringing in lots of inputs? No, I'm, I'm a mixed farmer. So I need some bedding in my winter environment for my animals. And so I'm using the choice material, which for the animals is peat moss. And it happens to be the choice material for making compost to grow vegetables and chicken manure and cow manure mixed together with that make the absolute best compost I can think of. So am I relying on massive inputs? No, not really. I'd say if you did a true cost audit, I would say our farm represents very low inputs. I mean we use a very small amount of petrol and diesel on this farm. We're running a quad bike, an ATV every day to do a bunch of work. But we use less fuel than, you know, any farm that produces as much produce as I do that I know about. And so what are your options? You're either importing animal nutrients from somewhere else, probably from an industrial production that doesn't look anything like our farm, or, or you bringing in fossil fuels in the way of fertilizers, oil, etc. So there is no such thing as a totally closed loop production farm. High output farms need high inputs. That's the way it is. But we can certainly be sensible in the choices we make, and we can minimize and localize those inputs and outputs as far as we can. But we got to be pragmatic. I mean, pragmatic to the point that, you know, we're, we're using computers, we're using the Internet. Think about the satellite and space rocket industry. Think about the oil that goes into powering the Internet. You know, we're not going to suddenly stop using that, you know, and that uses a huge amount of resources. So we don't need to be fundamentalists in our thinking. That's not helpful or beneficial to anyone. But we do have to have good compost. I think, and it's worth pointing out again and again and again that we're only using a lot of compost in the beginning, typically. So we run beds that are 10 meters long, 75 centimeters wide, so about 7 and a half square meters per bed. And so that in the beginning we'll put like, you know, up to 10 centimeters of compost down on top of that. That's a lot of material in the first year. But these days we put usually most years, 150, 200 liters per bed. It's not so much. And we produce more than we need on our small farm. And we're, you know, pretty small farm, so there's plenty of opportunity to close the loops as far as is sensibly possible. Now, in terms of sourcing compost, it's a very complex question. I've been speaking to growers all around Europe this year. It's a mixed bag. Like a lot of people are using municipal compost made out of garden waste and finding it perfect. And a lot of people I've spoken to are having big problems with it. So generally with those things, you want them well sieved to get rid of plastic, woody lumps and all those things. You pay more for the sieving, but it's worth it because you're getting what you pay for, as it were. If you can't get it sieved, you need to sieve it yourself. If you want a finer material or secondary compost it, you know, further. And mostly that kind of compost is going to vary. If you think about how they make. Municipal compost is made out of whatever materials are being thrown away seasonally. So it's going to vary in every single batch they make. So you need to be very clear that you're getting an up to date nutrient analysis of that specific batch. I would recommend going and inspecting it, smelling it, tasting it, you know, getting a sense of what you're buying first. In some countries it's free, in other countries it's expensive and it's, you know, it just varies across Europe massively it seems. But typically it needs balancing with something like chicken manure and to bring up the nutrient too. If you can get like I think still, if you're going to pay for compost, then buy. Compost has got heart. And in farming, when you say land has heart, it means it's had animals and animal manures. Cow manure being the best. Cow manure, chicken manure and something like peat moss make up really hearty compost. It drives the soil food web, you know. So I always prefer to use animal manures and particularly cow manures. If you can buy that as a compost material, then I would avoid municipal compost altogether. So I don't use any municipal compost. I use only cow, chicken manure and peat moss. And then I use our compost that we make, which is straw and peat moss mixed with our cow and chicken manure. So I basically making what we used to buy in the beginning and then we make compost in bays. We make maybe 25 cubic meters a year Additionally, and that's just garden scraps. And every time we have so they're about 10 square meter bays. And each time we put in 20 centimeters of green material, we'll cover it up with old silage, old hay to nearly as deep. Then we'll put another layer of green, we'll pile that up till it's about a meter deep and then we'll turn that twice over the next 12, 14 months. And that makes beautiful friable compost. And so that's our only inputs. It's all coming from our farm. Although we are buying some peat moss in because we don't have peat. It's more economic for us than to cut our own peat moss. We do cut some, but not enough for the production of hens that we.

Have. Right, that's great. I also think in terms of the, you know, off farm inputs kind of question, I think that sometimes we think about farms as Too small. Like just the, we think of the, the land that we own as the entire farm instead of thinking like into the greater community of supporting other farmers who can, who maybe specialize in something like seed saving or like compost making or something else and bringing that on into our farms because it's all one giant landmass. So thinking a little bit more broadly about our land use. Okay, so another question. Yvonne Thompson kind of wants to know your thoughts on low growing perennial cover crops, like creeping time or that sort of thing in the market garden. Like, do you know of any farms that are doing that? Or what are your sort of thoughts on? I know it's not something you do, but like having a cover crop that is constantly growing in a bed and then planting into.

That. Well, I think, you know, we touched on this earlier. It's something I avoid just for efficiency sake. And I have no feeling that it would bring me benefit in our short growing season because we're trying to maximize the crops we're growing in that time. And for me, when you have, you know, focus on soil life and you've covered that soil with healthy compost, with dense planted vegetables, leaving their roots in the ground when you've harvested them, taking utmost care to not compact that land, not leave any soil exposed, I just don't see why you would need a cover crop because the land is covered, is protected, is armored, and it's alive and thriving. And so I don't need to do anymore. I, you know, that feels like an optimal state to maintain it in. I don't see any reason why you couldn't. If you selected the correct types of COVID crops, it will just limit your bed use because you will obviously not be able to use a direct seeder very easily into that. I guess people are coming up with innovations for crimping and for seeding in the brashy material like that. You know, of course it's possible and I don't see any reason why not to do it in, in beds that will be used for certain crops. I just, I'm wondering why do it? You know, it, it takes away some of the flexibility of growing annuals and yeah, I would like to see more people doing it. I don't, I've never done it, so I don't, I can't speak from my experience. I just know why I'm not doing that. And I think we've got our garden processes down to a very efficient set of processes that anything that interferes with that is, it's not even on the table anymore because I can't see that it can bring more benefits than the problems it would create. All the inefficiencies it would create, for example. But I can see in certain other circumstances how it could be very useful. So I'm not against the idea. I just. I wouldn't want to do that in my.

Gun. This one may be a good one to end on. So John McCafferty writes that he, you know, he's been farming for a few years and before completely embracing. This was before completely embracing no till he says he found it kind of difficult to accept that it could actually work in his context. And it was kind of a mental block for him. But it sounds like he's sold on it. Now, I'm curious or he's curious if there have been those moments for you where you're maybe skeptical about a certain farming idea but that you made the leap and it was kind of ultimately.

Rewarding. Well, I've always been like experimental. I'm happy to try anything, but I'm. When I found things, I feel like as time goes on and visiting a lot of other farms, I'm very aware of time and motion studies and economy and that's been a large focus of my educational work. So whenever I'm looking at different systems, I'm analyzing it from a whole slew of criteria to decide whether I would experiment with it. But I'm also bear in mind I'm a very small farm, so I'm not doing any tillage crops, field scale crops, etc. So one or I can tell you one thing that I'm excited to trial next year is seeding grain straight into my pasture with any tillage or seed drill. Just broadcasting because I. One of the most fascinating things, I mean this touches on no till growing. It's just grain production, I guess. But it's fascinating for me is one of the best talks I've listened to in the last few years was an English grain grower in the UK who has gone around collecting heirloom grains from all the old thatched historic buildings around the uk. And he's got hundreds and hundreds of varieties of grains, you know, wheats and barleys and so the 5, 600 years old and massive genetic diversity. So this is not like what. Yeah, air quotes, ancient wheats like Kamut or Einkorn or, you know. Yeah, some of the, you know, these don't. Some of the ones that people will be aware of don't represent the really broad genetic diversity that what he's been finding does. Now, these are very fast growing annual grains that grow up to 6, 7, 8, 3ft tall. And so what he found, he, he's been growing these out in different parts of the uk, including Prince Charles's organic farms, anywhere that he can get access to land. And he's finding that he gets about half the yield of a modern organic grain producer. But he can grow every year after year after year after year, whereas most grain producers are only growing one, three or four years because they're growing like a potato crop or putting it back to grass in between. So in, in a set time period, he's actually got higher yield than any organic growth. And he told a story about his harvesting his crop and his old combine harvester, but really old rickety one. And grain was just falling out the back of the thing. So grain was falling out onto pasture that hadn't been tilled or prepared in any way. It was just pasture. And he noticed that it sprouted in the spring and overtook the grass so fast because it was already 2 or 3 foot tall by the time the grasses started growing. So it didn't need any tillage to grow. And these are grains that are, you know, they're massive, they're rooting really deep. So they've got much better quality grains, much higher gluten that the bakers and the brewers love it. And it's drought resistant because it's rooting a couple of meters deep and you get like 60, 80 tillers per plant. Like massive plants are fully photosynthesizing and massive genetic diversity. So you get very low diseases. So that's something that excites me a lot and I wish I had. I'm trying to get him to interview for YouTube because I was blown away by his presentation, but it's quite tough to get hold of him and haven't managed to do it yet. But it's something that I want to experiment with in our pastures here is like how to grow grain in a radically different way in our climates. So that's something that I still have, you know, pertain to your question. That's something that I'm like, I don't know, is that crazy? I, you know, it just seems, but it, but I'm aware of my own, you know, why don't more people do no digging, market growing? Well, it's just because we've had it bashed into us that you have to dig. You know, that's what nearly every vegetable grower on the planet thinks. And it's very hard to bust out of that. And in the same way I can see my own thought process with grain production. It's like there's no way they'll outcompete our pasture grasses. But yeah, that's something that I don't know. But I'm going to try and I hope to try next year. Actually. I have two varieties that I can work with, but I'm hoping to get a whole bunch more because I think that genetic diversity is key too. And just on a side note to wrap up that topic is, you know, we've bred our grains to become very, very short stemmed because that carbon material is just seen as a waste product now primarily because our soils have been damaged that they cannot synthesize that carbon back into the soil. That is the microlife is dead. But it's that long stem carbon that is what kept those soils healthy when they were put back into those farms. And so, yeah, there's a lot to be said for old varieties of very long stemmed grains and I'm excited to test that and I'll document. I have no idea if it'll be complete failure or not, but I'm excited to.

Try. Well, I appreciate that you're going to document that because that sounds awesome. I've always felt like I would love to have our pastures do more. Like I'd like to get some garden material out of the pastures somehow. So that's. That's super cool. I look forward to seeing how that goes. Richard Perkins, thank you so much for your.

Time. Yeah, pleasure. Pleasure to speak to Jesse. Thanks for your work too. Really appreciate.

That. All right, if you enjoyed that episode, make sure to follow Richard and Ridgedale Permaculture at all the places. We will hook it up with links in the show notes. Subscribe to this podcast wherever you are getting it and leave a review. This week, however, all reviews must review the tiny discussion that Richard and I have after these credits on living pathways. Nothing else. Definitely, definitely not the theme music. Huge thanks to Jackson Roulette and Josh Satin who constitute the no Till growers team. Thanks to Willie Breeding for writing our theme music. Thanks to Hannah Crabtree, my wife, for being amazing and watching the kids so I can record this. And thank you all for listening. We'll see you next week.

Bye. I like the wood chips. We don't. That's another thing that's part of it is that with access, with better road access, I'm hopeful that I can get more people to bring me wood chips and leaves because they just won't come back here. We've had One truck come back and they were. They kind of made it clear they were never coming back. Just because of our.

Road.

Yeah. So that's part of it too, is just being able to maybe use more molts. We're also going to. We're also experimenting more with living pathways. We had a really good season with some living pathways and I was very excited about.

That. I. Yeah, that could. We should have talked about that because that could be so sweet. Like one thing they do over here, I'm not sure if you have it there. It's like chamomile pathways and you buy it. I mean you can buy it pre grown in kind of like these. I don't know how to describe them, but you can buy it like people buy it put out as garden pathways. You can just buy blocks and they send it in the truck and you put them out almost like laying flagstones or something. It's.

Expensive. Like a sod. Like they do like sod here. Yeah, like those sod rolls, if you know what I'm talking.

About. Yeah, exactly. It's all. It's 100 chamomile. So when you tread on it, it kind of makes the plant more vigorous, but it also releases smell. So you have. Oh, it looks incredible, man. But it's expanded on a market garden scale, it would be super.

Expensive. Yeah.

Right. You could probably grow it yourself as well. Right.