Richard Perkins | The Art Of The Small Mixed Regenerative Farm

Farming used to be the most noble profession on earth and it's now got the highest suicide rate of any profession i've always thought like okay how to put nobility back into rural stewardship how do i get some kid from stockholm to think it's cool to come out here in the middle of nowhere and do this and work really hard people are starved for connection and rootedness to a place and i think that's also the future that i can see for food businesses it's like connection to place i feel like i learn more than any university could ever teach i have to be a physicist a chemist a biologist an electrician everything i don't have to be expert at anything i have to be competent at a lot of stuff and i love that there's this constant drive to innovate and and i sort of started sitting back more in life feeling we don't need more solutions it's like we already have solutions i've lost my interest in staying on the edge of all the new things that come because it's like we know how to grow vegetables it's not rocket science to grow vegetables it's not rocket science to raise beef just get on with it and let's eat nice food and i guess yeah just getting old and grumpy farmers days now.

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By subscribing to the channel hey everyone.

Welcome back to the podcast today we have a really special guest and it's.

Our first time doing a conference that's like a vio conference because our guest is from sweden and some of the listeners obviously know who he is we had a first stink at this stink.

Stint first yeah take at this first.

Take of this and then it broke.

Down but we had a really good conversation richard last week and this week we're we're cons we're continuing it so richard perkin is our guest and we're really excited to have you on the podcast richard.

Great great to be here thanks j thanks chris we dressed alike.

For you today so kind of a.

Canadian tuxedo situation a little bit is there a swedish tuxedo there should be shall i open this up yeah let's shoot all right so richard i've heard you say before that chefs and people in the health and fitness industry are the loudest voices to the public in regards to our food and the food system and how we eat and that if we want to change food these are actually the people that we need to get on board and i thought this was a really huge idea because in my own past i was in the fitness industry and i was when i transitioned into the world of farming i was it's quite shocking how much people whose entire lives revolve around health and wellness and good eating don't think a moment about farms or farming or how any food is grown you know it's all about superfoods and supplements and we've talked about that before but it's so clear when i heard you say that it was like oh yes of course that is one hundred percent i think a huge way to go forward so can you talk to that a bit why that is present in your mind and how you see that in.

Your work sure yeah i guess that comes off the back of spending my entire adult life speaking to people about farming and getting you know when we run farm tours here we get old ladies in their eighties crawling in the pasture looking through cow patties at the dung beetle and talking about the life cycle of a cow patty which they've probably never done before in their life and i think it's important that us as farmers particularly those of us that are good communicators to tell stories i mean it's stories that change the world and i've been doing that all my life but i think where it's come from for me is just seeing through some conversations i've had with very famous chefs who maybe have followings of ten twenty million people on instagram it's like you know even those of us that are very well known in the farming world it's still extremely niche and you've got people who are on you know everybody's kitchen shelves in their books or in their tv sets or whatever that can speak in a much more simple direct way to the average person because something i've also noticed through marketing farm produce is people care but they only care so much or they may be a better way to say is they only have a limited window for interest and attention span of the sort of technical geeky things that we get really inspired by you know i've just seen how for example our pastured eggs marketed and when i go to a store here in sweden you know there's one other brand of organic mass produced eggs here and if you go on their website you will see well an even better example is the meat chickens that we produce because there's one other organic chicken producer in sweden on a they're on a commercial scale but when you go on their website there's a picture of a hen with the grass waving the sun going down is not even the type of chicken they raise for meat it's like it's totally bonkers and they would never show you the production facilities whereas i show people in our slaughtering facilities like everywhere we're very transparent as a way of direct consumer relations relating and trust building and what i noticed is when i moved to sweden here there's this thing about local here people aren't so interested in organic although that's growing all the time but they're really interested in local so the local industrial pig farm is good because it's local it's just an industrial pig farm there's nothing particularly interesting about it and i noticed that in the way sort of people seem to relate to food here it's like if the egg box is green and it's got a nice picture of happy chicken on the front then consumer turns brain off and carries on so i just see that there's quite a limited window to sort of engage with people whereas if you're sitting around the dinner table talking with the family around food or watching a cooking show or you know like getting together to cook a meal together that's where the attention span is i think and i just see that some of the chefs that you know i've talked to have such huge followings and their passion is really in the sort of food experience more than you know all of the steps behind it and even some of those chefs who are interested in production they still only get it a little bit and i've noticed this like in the some of the bigger global podcasts with you know regenerative agriculture has become forefront in many of the bigger global platforms but it's like people don't quite get it they're scratching the surface of something but they you know it's there's a big gap between those of us that really geek out on the sort of nuts and bolts of ecological thinking and the way that interfaces with the public so i really felt like yeah chefs and fitness industry that's where we could make the biggest impact because i've always been a storyteller and that's part of my work with education and writing and things like that but we don't need to be everything i mean you know there's we need other people at different places in society supporting that whole network of things i think i guess that's really what led to the purchase of the restaurant in our village here it's like wanting to start collaborations where we bring you know people in who can tell that food story and connect it directly to the farm and ecology and i've had some different thoughts as we start that up about directions we'll take with that to be able to reach a totally different audience we'll.

We'Ll get to that because that was that was the the one the main reason why i wanted to have you on the podcast because you know you started a restaurant and it's kind of like really in the footsteps of what we're doing so this is really exciting but just for the listeners that perhaps don't know so much about you and the work that you've been doing in the last what ten ten fifteen plus years i've known about you and i've known you for seven years we met we reminded ourselves that we met in germany a while ago you want to just like talk about ridgedale farm where it is what it does what's kind of like you know how do people know about you and what what are.

You about sure well i guess i had been working for over a decade before i came to ridgedale it's a small farm in sweden i started out my journey in commercial vegetable production at eighteen i went to agricultural college the uk and that really essentially i learned traditional organic horticulture and it didn't it left me with more questions and answers and it felt like this is the same syllabus that has been taught for probably four decades so that stimulated me to go looking for interesting farms around the world and particularly in agroforestry and livestock production and i kind of worked in my early twenties in vegetable productions in the organic sector in the uk working extremely hard for very low pay and i kind of felt my farming journey is not going to include vegetables beyond for home consumption in the future because there's easier ways to make a living you actually jam a big reason why we actually started up commercial veg production again and you know the work you've put forth and the tools that have come around in more recent years have made that worth considering again for someone like myself but i landed so i worked all over the world with farm and land planning and settled in sweden kind of by accident really but sweden is an unusual country in europe it's still affordable to buy land here which is not the case in most of europe it's like the big issues for people in the european context which is similar to probably your situation too is young people don't have money all the farms and land is locked up in older farmers debt essentially so they can't get out of the game and young people can't get in and that's yeah it's a major problem and so when i arrived in sweden i was coming here for two weeks just to run a training to help an old friend and looked around at the farm i was teaching on outside stockholm and it's like you can buy a farm of thirty forty acres for the price of a garage that you park your car in in the uk so i just happened to stay around and i felt like it didn't really matter to me where i landed because i had a global audience and i knew people would be coming to the farm and i wanted to set up a farm that had two distinct functions one be a profitable farm that regenerated the landscape and the ecosystem and made us a good living and equally as important i wanted to create a learning platform for a new generation of farmers where they could learn well essentially all the things i had to travel around learning in different places all in the same hub and so our farm is a traditional diverse mix farm sort of like you would read in das agricultura two and a half thousand years ago it's primarily based on pasture and livestock with agroforestry and small amounts of annuals so we've been producing pastured eggs and pastured meat chickens and turkeys and no dig market garden vegetables as our three primary enterprises and set up a business plan to build the farm and pay off all our debts and mortgage in the first five years on the side of that we've been running pastured beef and mutton and lamb as well as forest raised pigs and now the agroforestry system start coming in there's a lot of perennial crops coming up above the pasture and yeah it's been a super productive farm for a very small farm we're only about thirteen hectares that's thirty two acres which wouldn't even be considered a farm in most of the western world but it's amazing what you can produce in a very small area and we're in pretty similar climate zones to yourselves we're quite far north we're fifty nine degrees north which i guess is up near white horse over in yukon or somewhere.

Like that super it's like arctic yeah.

We'Re sub boreal i mean it's it's an extreme place to start a farm we have one hundred fifteen days without frost give or take thirty days either way it's pretty rough but it's i like it it's kind of reminds me of the tropics where we go from winter to summer with very quick transition spring and autumn are very short and it's kind of summer for a few weeks and then it's winter most of the time which is probably a bit similar to where you are there so that's what we've been up to and then we do a lot of work educating young people into we've been running very intensive long term trainings and providing a springboard for people going off to set up similar sort of operations mix farms all over the world but particularly in europe and more and more in scandinavia now which is fantastic was education.

And kind of getting the public involved and particularly i guess youtube because i think you you do have quite a following via youtube as far as i know was that part of the original intention of starting the farm when you started or did it kind of come along with it.

It'S a little bit intention i guess i was quite early on youtube and i haven't been really working with that the last years but i kept it as a kind of vlog for me yeah and things change so fast when you start you know orchestrating multiple species at high density through an ecosystem so i wanted to document my my journey for myself i've got an incredible backlog of about fifty terabyte hard drives of photos and videos of every single day of the last ten years here i'll probably never look at it again but it's there as a record if i want to and it's it's magical to have that to look back at things and also to see i obviously documented my children growing up and that's been very beautiful but i've really enjoyed that journey because i've treated it kind of selfishly i've always been very i've had a healthy relationship with social media where i it's like hey i've got lots of information to share but it's on my terms i'm not playing a youtube game and i'm not gonna put much of my time to this it's like you have to go through it if you want to find the information i'm not gonna make five best ways to grow radish just i.

Don'T you're not doing the jm thing.

Well maybe you got a whole team to help you but i've been you know rocking out these things on my own in my spare time and it's that's kind of the the rules i set up for myself really early it's like this is not gonna eat into my time i'm not gonna set up a camera on a tripod and it's like i'm just taking my phone out while i'm doing this and then it doesn't take up any of my time and then i'm willing to do that and i know it's benefited thousands of people to do like that and so that's been yeah it's been healthy yeah.

I knew that we would get along you and i richard when when we met in germany that was the year that i was really running fqt farm my training farm and i was as you know i had apprentice with me for two years so solid bonds with people and really into the the aspiration of really being a mentor to to these folks and when i met you what sticks stuck out is that you had your group of all these interns or you know apprentice that had been to your farm probably was around fifteen of them you guys were all in circle and then you know everyone was going over where they're at what they were doing and i remember that very clearly everyone held you in so high esteem you like it was important that you guys connected that time together and i was like okay this this guy for me is the real deal and and you gained so much respect for me when i saw that because i do think that that's what's all this is all about you know this work that we're doing as educator and communicators but ultimately it's not just information it's creating these relationships it's being present for others it's mentoring it's learning teaching you.

Know yeah thanks for that memory i remember you took a beautiful photo actually then that was when we were in kiel at the workshop we gave that yeah that was very nice and what was very special about that moment was actually that was because a lot of people had showed up because you were coming obviously also but it was actually different people from five different years at the farm so i had circled them up so that i could introduce them to each other as a network and some of those there's one farm in germany that was set up entirely by three different years of employees and interns from this farm and that's still going strong it's really nice so that's always been really important to me is you know like you have the same experience when you're working with people for a year or two years sometimes people have come here three four years five years and you really know that person well enough that you know they would work really well with that person that you met the year before or and so i've always tried to set people up in those relationships and quite a lot of farms in europe have been set up in that way where i've put people together as a sort of startup team and that's really special and it's that's led to a bit more like wanting to we had a big reunion last summer and it's something i want to start doing now we have the restaurant venue we have a bit more space and rooms to host people but to do a bit more of that networking to have people specifically speaking the same language like everyone that's been through my trainings has a similar sort of exposure to pattern languages that we can speak in a much clearer direct way about any particular topic and so it's yeah i'm really trying to leverage those possibilities because it's really powerful and i think it's you'll have the same experience i'm sure it's like one of the big problems for people is that the farming life is kind of isolated and even if you are well networked it's like people tend to be far away and it's quite hard to get away to like actually physically meet up and be in the same space but it's it's important to share you know what's going well but to also share difficulties and i noticed over the years there's always cycles that people go through in the startup phase or in the having kids phase or you know this we need that support from each other and i think doing that in person when people have a shared sort of pattern language of how they think about different parts of farm life it's it's really powerful so it's really nice i must.

Say a reunion of farm crew members is such a great idea particularly because for anyone that's especially if you're the the host farmer if you're it's your farm and you're hosting people sometimes those bonds can get so tight that it's at one point during the season it's hard to believe that person's gonna leave you're like wait what isn't this aren't we gonna be working together aren't you part of the team now but you're you're just here for the season i don't know if you've all had that experience but i sure have so i.

Like that idea oh we definitely get that you know because we're like i don't know people that are familiar with my farm you've maybe seen drone footage or whatever but people live in my back garden and we're it's pretty intense i mean the first years when we bootstrapped the farm it's like we used our house kitchen as the commercial kitchen so we couldn't even come into our commercial kitchen in the beginning because that was against the regulations we had to come in the back door and i couldn't get through to my office until after the cook had left the day there was a bit of a nightmare but but we all live very close and i think that's i guess it's quite an exposed life you know we're working outdoors physically in all weathers and it's it puts people way out of their comfort zone and it's we're living in very close quarters we wash together we eat together like we have sauna in sweden so every day the sauna is on and that's where a lot of collaborations and ideas and trauma sessions happen whatever it is you know there's a lot of bonding in a very small space in a very outdoor lifestyle so it makes incredibly strong bonds i mean people have married that met here people have divorced people have started businesses.

Together yeah yeah and tedious hand labor with another person is great grounds for deep conversation a lot of the time which is maybe something that people don't quite think about with this kind of work is you know you're on the other side of a row harvesting green beans with someone man oh man can you get into a chat and dive.

Deep just through that process my favorite part richard and chris when when i was because i'm not running fqt farm anymore i haven't been for the last two seasons my favorite part of that journey that was seven years was being in the trenches with the team like hardcore days hardcore week like going through the ups and downs the traumas not pushing people but the farm in itself was pushing was pushing everyone in one direction and just being present in those times it was just like man you really get to know people and i love that part of being just like the i don't want to say the older brother but kind of like the the person that's been through it a lot like i know what july is and what august is and i've i've been through these you know cycles so many times that i'm comfortable in them now and passing down that kind of learning of yeah it's uncomfortable but you know it'll change it's okay just stick to it don't think about it too much we don't need to talk about this for millions of years let's just do the work and anyway that's that kind of reminds me of yeah farming is pretty crazy but it just brings people together it's it's so unique so.

Unique definitely i think there's i mean it's there's something very healthy about just getting lost in using your body and moving and that's what we're evolved to do you know i think so many people there's definitely when i see people that have sort of come from the city who are dreaming of this life that come to trainings for example it's very it's very clear who's gonna have to struggle to make it and who's got it in them it's you know it's most people are not used to moving their bodies at all nowadays and just functional strength and endurance is it's really missing for a lot of people so i like to get people to test themselves like i'm a stickler for time and motion studies and some of my favorite times on the farm jobs that aren't particularly fun like slaughtering chickens it's not fun to do that but what is really fun is that we've designed that setup in a way that it makes it's like a wash pack station it's just a workflow and when everyone is performing so first it takes people time to just learn their one little role and then when they master that then they start to learn to look both sides of them to be able to balance their work with the people either side and then when everyone is just performing that's my favorite moment it's like you you're doing this incredible job and you could not do it faster or better and it's like that's the i love those moments and i love trying to lift the team in those sort of jobs so that they get the lived experience of i know i can do this and that's what gives them the confidence to go away and start their own business if they okay this is what's involved in raising pastured poultry and if you can do it eighty percent as fast then you can design your business to do eighty percent of that and you know you can do that and you you're not left guessing it's it leaves people with a really empowered confidence of like i know i can handle this richard the.

Best place that you will find these flows is in the kitchen of a restaurant.

I hope i don't find myself in the kitchen of a restaurant you.

Wanna you wanna poke the yeah well.

I wanted to i was about to say we've teased your farm and that side of you and we're gonna return to it because i think we're gonna geek out why not right we're all i think we're all nerds for that here and so are the listeners but let's yeah let's come back to the present and the restaurant and could you give us the origin story of this restaurant especially in those terms that we mentioned in the beginning which is that i think you're viewing it a bit as a way to get a louder voice in trying to change food and how people eat and see farming and all that so yeah could you give us the the origin story of your restaurant and tell us the name sure.

Well it's called siligorden which means herring farm sil is herring in swedish and sweden anyone that's been to sweden will have possibly tried or heard of this heavily fermented herring that you open a can of it and it explodes a bit and some people love it and it makes a lot of people want to retch and be sick sounds delicious it's full of proteins it tastes fantastic it smells disgusting yeah which is you know many traditional fermented foods are kind of like that i guess but it means herring farm it's got a long history but i just go back a step because it part of my intention is to create a platform and voice for wider you know chefs and other people connected to food that's part of it but part of it is also to create cultural experiences because we live really in the middle of nowhere and having grown up in the uk the culture is very different we're about twenty five times less populated here so there isn't really much going on and i was thinking like my daughter's at the age where she's she's fourteen turning fifteen she's going to be leaving to high school and leaving home it's the same age i left home and i can remember that burning feeling of like just wanting to get out you know and so i'm just turning this i thought i had turned this off um so she's about to leave home and i was just reflecting on like what would i need to stay wanting living in the countryside like what would inspire me if i was her age and so and it's for my own sake too it's like wanting more cultural meetings in a way that most people now if you wanted to a concert you would have to go all the way to stockholm or to oslo it's several hours travel and people here are quite used to like someone living around where we live would happily drive for an hour to go to a restaurant because there are no restaurants within that distance so yeah it's not just about wanting to have a platform i'm actually wanting to sort of hide in the background a bit more because a lot of people maybe think of me extrovertedly because of my media presence or whatever but actually i'm mostly introverted and i like to be out in the field doing work and thinking and not necessarily talking i can do well as an extrovert on stage if i have to talk but i prefer and spend most of my time actually quietly tucked away and my whole thing with this restaurant is to be in the background like i just grow the food that i already do anyway and the chef can maybe take center stage so that's a yeah i just wanted to clarify that because it's i i'm as i get older i'm trying to hide a bit more i guess jm you probably maybe have that.

Feeling it's because i have a feeling like i'm meaning my what's what's the word of like the same person yeah.

You'Re like doppelgangers but not visually more through what your your life path is.

Yeah i'm the same like i can be a really good speaker and i could tell a good you know story and but i like to be by myself as much as i can maybe.

We can come back to this because i think this topic of phases is something we could share some experience on for certainly for younger viewers because i see like i see this cycle every year and see little trends appearing in it so that'd be interesting to revisit.

Yeah and the restaurant because i'm a little a little bit ahead of you because that's when we opened the old mill here that was exactly that it wasn't to create more voices it was just a creative space a cultural space where people come together well you know i was really geeking out chris and you know this about winter farming and growing year round and so built a greenhouse here and then people then come and they visit the winter greenhouse they see these greens that are growing and then we're we're serving them inside the restaurant and we have a whole team dedicated to that so it's really amazing and it does serve the purpose of creating that internal dna link like people come here and they eat locally and they have a good time and it's it's ingrained into the experience and so i totally get your vision and and i do feel that that's a great way to connect people to farming through the through the restaurant experience.

Celebration yeah.

Exactly yeah instead of just kind of guffing it through their truth like here everything's local but we don't we don't obsess over that it's just like good food good experience good people good wine and and then we can go there or not richard it's it's your it's your call but what i found is that it's a great way to create that connection but it's an expensive way to do it.

Well let me tell you a little bit about the restaurant before i worry about the future of my economy but i wanted to tell you a little bit about it because it's a very special place and it's got a relatively long history it was set up about one hundred twenty years ago by a famous artist and it was this is interesting it was actually a bath house and people would come from all over sweden to bathe there because the water was renowned for its health giving properties but it was actually radioactive which at the time was considered really healthy so that's interesting but what's nice about the restaurant is the family had some prominent artists within it and it's really old beautiful nordic style buildings it's got a dance hall it's got a restaurant with six meter high ceilings like twenty feet ceilings painted and muraled all over by the original artists one hundred years ago and all of the tables and chairs were made by their family and are painted one hundred years ago so it's it's steeped in history it's not a listed building like a protected building but it's protected by people in that it means a lot to a lot of people so we have to be very careful what we do but i remember when we started the farm we would go up there and have fika which is like swedish coffee break you have different types of pastries and cakes and coffee and what's called fika here so we would go there sometimes and just eat because we were putting up fences and you know working so hard and maybe we put them out of business because in those days it was coffee and cake for a set price and you could cut your own bit of cake so we would just come up there a hungry crew.

Of growers coming in to eat free cake.

But then it sat in well eight nine years ago they asked us if we wanted to do something with the place because they had the family still own it after all those generations but they have another place the same that's even more fancy further away and they focus on running that so they asked if we wanted to do something and we were too busy with the farm at that time and then a lady from stockholm ran it for a couple of years and then it sat empty for a couple of years so i actually approached them a couple of years ago and spoke to them about it and then i was actually i was considering a very different life change i was going to move towards stockholm because of these cultural things that are missing here and that you know my kids are old enough to move now and then i revisited the idea of the property again and heard from the family that they'd only had one potentially interested person that was a german guy that wanted to smash it all down build a load of houses and just flog them on and they were like definitely not it was like no one was going to buy it so i put it in a bid for half the asking price and they accepted so then i was like okay then we're doing it and i didn't really have the money to do it i had to borrow substantially i had to borrow quite substantially off a very kind intern who had spare cash to put a deposit on it and then i've had to borrow heavily from the bank to fund it i mean technically i can't afford to run this restaurant but i love the place it's got so much potential and it's a very special place it's got i don't know if you've seen photos but it's it's in my village but it's about seven kilometers from the farm here but it is a farm itself and historically it was always farmed and that food would go to the restaurant and it's on the lake called freakin which is a very big very deep lake that has salmon and trout and the burbot which is like a freshwater cod species don't know if you get them over there but it's very unusual sweden's full of lakes we have over three hundred thousand lakes but they're mostly shallow lakes and you don't get very interesting fish but the big lakes and the deep lakes are very interesting and this is a very very long deep lake that it's on this it's sloping south down to that lake and what's nice is that we're kind of bringing back the place to life paying respect to its history by bringing the farm back there too so we're actually moving half of our farm over there so that people can dine immersed in that setting and originally i think the restaurant they used to serve yeah the fish from the restaurant and i think animals from the land but it's i can't find any written record of that if if that's the aim is.

If people want to see it do they what what do they google to see the farm to see the restaurant.

It'S silly restaurant silly gordon but if they find my instagram they can find it through that near your youtube videos building instagram for it and you did.

A nice tour of it on youtube i i saw that yes i might.

Have done yeah yeah i did a little tour when we were just finalizing.

The papers jam do you care to speak a bit to the parallels of you know seven kilometers from your home yeah same thing here a historic building that it's very precious to the community it's the same thing here keeping that history and respecting the people that have a connection to it from the past so it's not just you know obliterated to nothing recognizable all these things are happening here too i think you should.

Tell yeah the old mill is eighteen forty nine so it's an old building and we have all the exposed beams here where we're where we're sitting and you know it's the same thing richard like we were you know this is seven minutes from my home farm and this is like one of the last english speaking town in the province of quebec so stanbridge east it's by the river and it had for i don't know what reason it had like two acres of open feel in the back of the inn two acres in the middle of a town by the river is a lot of grass to cut for nothing and for all these years i was cycling here and i was looking at these fields i'm like my god this could be a really nice farm to table restaurant and you know going every year passing through it and i'm like oh my god and then eventually it was for sale for three four five years it just wasn't picking up nobody wanted to open a restaurant in the middle of nowhere and you know just like you did i i had the calling for it i just saw the need to create culture around food and around a place of history it's a beautiful place here and i took my heart to it and and now you're doing the same and you know i think that that's really what you know the easy way is not the better way and so if the heart is calling that's that's that's that's where you need to go i think.

You have the same entrepreneurial disease of that i have yeah i think i.

Don'T have it anymore i talked to you last time about that that's like i think there's a point in time where you're like okay i just took a lot out of me but i'm proud of what we've accomplished we're will be in the michelin guide it's going to be it's going to be news in the next two weeks and so that's something that i would never thought that would be even possible but but i like what you're saying and i understand this this place of heritage of beauty of of land because it you know the restaurant you're talking about seems to be like in a very very precious place and and to bring people there around local food around farming this is really what the future of cooking is and and all the chefs that are not doing that like in my opinion they're totally not into what's what's next like this is what's next yeah.

I think it i mean this is in vogue in some ways but it's like by whatever metric you stack it up by it's it's always going to be viable to do things locally and seasonally like it makes sense whatever's going on globally and i think that there's something nice around bringing back the this old special place with you know like we're using modern approaches and modern sort of tools but still doing something that's deemed quite old school you know it's not big tractors on thousand hectare fields it would be deemed quite old fashioned in some ways but it's like we're bringing a new face to that i think and i think what speaks the most to people from my experience running this farm here is just to see people working land with care and attention it moves people here because it's not that far out of the generational memory like here we have a very traditional way of cutting hay it's very labor intensive i wouldn't ever consider doing it you know economically it makes no sense but it's when they cut the norwegian spruce which is what ninety percent of all trees in sweden are it's not really forests that people talk about the swedish forest it's monocultural spruce plantations but they take the very tops of the trees and they put them in the ground and then they put bars across and they cut the grass with a side and lay it over the racks and it's a way of making hay even when it's raining and all the kids would have come and slept under the bottom one in the summer and you can imagine all of the community would come together and put long tables in the field and eat together and you know massive load of work to prep for the winter and we did that in the it was either the first or second year of running the farm we did that because everyone still had the old poles from thirty forty years ago it only left the community about thirty years ago which is not very long ago considering how most farming has changed in europe and people were walking up to come and have a look at what we're doing because it was like ah my father did that or my grandfather did that and it really touched people and i think that's been my experience when people come to the farm and see us tending the vegetable garden or tending the animals they you know it's a very visually and aromatically pleasing farm so it touches people and it really they immediately know ah this is a lot of work and care going on here and i think if we touch these old special places with that and we keep and preserve those places you can't help to move people and it's that place has got that feeling it's like anyone that goes there it's like ah this place is so special it's it's i don't know what it is in the pattern language i don't know if you remember christopher alexander their old books about pattern language in architecture but some buildings just have that feeling i guess feng shui speaks to that too but it's it's got a whole load of that you walk into that place and it's it's magic and it touches people and i think what better way to celebrate that than bringing the best quality food and and events i mean that's that is got to be the future i think let's.

Talk more about that cultural element of creating culture where you live because that's saying that we're both mega passionate about and talk about constantly on on this podcast because where we live it's a really there's a really strong culture around local farming there's tons of local farms and there's quite a few i mean i i guess i could say tons of small businesses that have popped up in just the last five ten years all in kind of circling that small farm sphere and and then i think i've heard you say before you want farmers to be the center of communities again and what you just said about the old fashioned method of making hay and i read a lot of old literature about farming and so much of the way of life of the past was communal farming it was people coming together around the harvest because everyone depended on each other for it and i think to create a space where things like that can live on amongst the modern context is so important on many levels both preserving heritage but also just again having a cultural place that puts farmers at the center can maybe the two of you can speak a bit to that because it seems like that's probably the fundamental driving force of your project and can you tell me one.

Thing i would say i mean like something that struck me for the last fifteen years is like farming used to be the most noble profession on earth and it's now got the highest suicide rate of any profession and i've always thought like okay how to put nobility back into rural stewardship how do i get some kid from stockholm to think it's cool to come out here in the middle of nowhere and do this and work really hard and the only way i felt originally when we were setting the farm up it's like this has got to be an economic transaction it's like you've got a i got to show you i can earn what you earn in stockholm sitting in some office all day for being out planting trees and communicating with animals and you know growing beautiful vegetables and if i can show you i make the same as you for doing this and being totally in command of my time and having all the wonderful perks of all my food supply right outside my door and make it fun and communal based then that's what's going to speak to those young people particularly because it's quite a hard sell i mean especially in sweden the benefits here the social system is such that you get quite well paid for not doing anything it's quite a hard sell for for swedes but the first few years there weren't many swedes coming here because everything we were doing was quite new i think sweden's maybe i used to say it's like twenty years behind like when i arrived here there were no csas whereas in the uk they've been going like decades you know so it's a little slow energy but that's changed a lot but now i think my feelings evolved more to what you were just saying chris around actually like people are starved for connection and rootedness to a place and and i think especially since COVID i know that's probably been a bit different here because like covid didn't affect sweden that much because people are kind of self isolating anyway in sweden like it didn't actually change a lot it just made all our businesses go a lot better because people were interested in local food a lot more but that's the bit i'm more yearning for is like and i and i see that in the younger people i'm mentoring it's like they're rejecting some of the things that i was brought up in and they want that meaning and they want to be physically fit and they want to be in shape and you know they have quite different values from when i was growing up in the sort of alternative world i guess and so yeah i think meaning and connection and rootedness to place is something that people are really longing for and i think that also happens to be the future that i can see for food businesses it's like connection to place it's like food tourism is going to be all about that in the future i think so it's kind of also connected to that topic and i don't know what your thoughts are jm around that can i.

Just say one thing yeah i was gonna say it's do you feel like we've everything you're saying makes me think it a lot of it's that we've hit a critical mass of homogenization in not only culture but also just a critical mass of virtual lifestyle via social media where i'm pretty sure i've heard recently that the youngest generations are hyper aware of social media being really bad for them in general whereas like ten years ago i think a lot of young people would have resisted that idea and be like don't tell me it's bad it's fine and then now more young people are like oh yeah yeah i'm getting away from it the same way i've heard young people are apparently not drinking alcohol as much as they want to because it's kind of in vogue to avoid it for health which is just really interesting would you see that that it's like a because we've hit this point of so much homogenization of culture people are just feeling deep down this starvation for actual relation to place because their entire day is on that screen being connected to the rest of the world and they start to feel a bit of a i don't know what the feeling is like a existential crisis maybe that yeah you're so.

So connected yet so disconnected yeah yeah.

Connection to place but also connection to each other yeah it's like people live their whole lives often not communicating with the people right around them and i think when we set up little learning experiences or cultural experiences it's you know people are hungry for that i think they starved for it i think yeah.

I can tell you know to answer your question chris i can i can tell you that the restaurant is doing that people come here and they they know that it was a nice story that's why they're here you know they hear the story and they come once they're here though wow you know they are having a moment and they're living through something and it's it's never going to be like when we're on the floor farm and you know doing a staff meal and hanging out together that's that's the ultimate but it's kind of like a little peek into it and i do feel that creating a space where people come and hang out celebrating something it's just very powerful and and we have a few of these around here in in stanford east we talk you know about the restaurant here but in frillsburg we have we have wednesday night farmer night that's that's really epic by the way chris now we're showing the hockey games it's the hockey playoff and the our team is in the.

Playoffs so you're showing them here at.

The old mill no at the at.

The oh yes good wednesday tomorrow is farmer wednesday and there's a game is.

A great way to connect.

But that's i think yeah the like authentic experiences and you can't really get more authentic in terms of restaurant than being right in the middle of the farm or being very much connected to a farm.

Directly and were you inspired by by magnus i forget his last name the guy in sweden the chef famous chef magnus nielsen yeah magnus nielsen he had everyone coming down middle of nowhere is.

It was it more nowhere than the.

Middle of nowhere so was it was.

It was it is he is he.

Was he further out than you are much further north much further and people would come like rave i'm level with.

Stockholm here so i'm like still in the populated part of the country yeah but he's very yeah lovely guy and very he's i would say he's one of these mega famous chefs who's genuinely interested in production there's a lot of famous chefs who are kind of into it but they don't really explore it on any deeper level and i think he really does he's very engaged with farming he actually bought a farm now and has moved further south to set up a bnb i believe doing more normal food he's trying to get away from the fancier yeah he wants to.

He'S doing the reverse of you he's.

Buying a farm yeah yeah but it's a common thing i think i think it's so common to see chefs who transition over to be growers and to see farmers starting to want to be more in touch with the actual food bit of it i think that's i've seen that a lot in the last four or five years yeah matty madison.

Similar he had the farm or connection.

With the farm do you know eric schultz from steadfast farm in arizona yeah.

I don't know him well but i know exactly who you mean he's a.

Good friend of mine he just opened a restaurant also really yeah so you.

Know something's in the air something's in the air that's good could you back to that idea of getting young people to see farming as an option for them and think oh that's cool i want that you know especially beyond it's one thing to have the romantic idea but to people of a certain age even that often isn't quite there for them and like you said maybe it's economic could you give us an example sales pitch to that young person to say hey farming is an option for.

You i don't know if i could give you a sales pitch or just.

A pitch to them to why it could be an option i'm just wondering what that would sound like it's a.

Story i would weave to them over the season you know it's a long slow because that's got to be quite precisely dose to their context i think yeah but i guess like for me what's enthralling about it is i get to like joel salatin's words are really echoing in my mind of like we get to conduct a symphony on this pasture so i i'm not i'm mostly farming things other than vegetables we farm a lot of vegetables but we farm a lot of animals and they make up a bigger part of the farm finances but i get to walk out my back door and it's like you know we're always busy and farmers are busier than most other people but i still get to direct my time even if i'm busy and i get to see the direct consequence of my actions every day i get to eat food better than any restaurant could supply you know i have food meters not food miles it's we have beef pork vegetables everything i eat i don't eat many carbs so i have my entire diet stored in the freezers and fridges and fields right outside my back door so i take it for granted you know when we typically go out to eat we're like yeah that was better at home oh yeah it's always.

That reminds me of a story i shared once on the podcast of at this point in my life i unless i the restaurant is one in which i have some connection to the owners in some way or someone i'm with is connected to them i'm just kind of at a loss for it like it it could be great tasting but i just don't really care i'm like yeah emil was all right this happens when i've been to a restaurant in montreal and other people are saying oh it's amazing and i'm just like eh but then i come home and i go to the restaurant of my friend and they're serving farm food from my friends and i just it fills the full the full body not just one particular you.

Know leak we're going off what your question was but like one thing we have a rule at our farm like i'm i'm quite i've explored a lot around dietary things and i don't want to get too into that now but like one thing we definitely ban from our farm is like seed oils like absolutely not allowed on this farm won't be allowed in our restaurant and it's like little things like that that you know you can't really trust most restaurants nowadays they're doing everything to cut corners and it's like i do not want to eat seed oil ever i don't want it and i know that we they're gonna like we're not gonna cut those kind of corners like because we don't need to and there's a value system that's i think bigger businesses often just they have to lose that because they can't make it work it's like that's where the passion piece comes in i guess but just to round up your question i think it's about making a decent living working with your skills and learning a lot of skills i feel like i learn more than any university could ever teach it's like i have to be a physicist a chemist a biologist an electrician a plumber an accountant a marketer everything i don't have to be expert at anything i have to be competent at a lot of stuff and i love that and that's something i you know i was brought up in school as a perfectionist and perfectionism is the death of creativity you cannot be creative if you're a perfectionist and i spend a lot of my early adulthood smashing that out of my brain and that's what i think we need is loads more competent generalists and i really value that my creative process is met entirely in this lifestyle you know i'm designing things and building weird structures for holding chickens or i've just built a stage at the restaurant and out of round timbers and you know i'm building saunas and converting barns and it's totally stimulating creatively and so i can't think of a life where you learn more and are in control of all of your inputs and outputs for life it's like we have a fuel we have our you know firewood we have our food we can basically manage our needs and that feels very you feel very secure when you have your food supply in your control you know richard hundreds of other people's food supply.

You just talked about not not going there and if if if that's if you say jm you know i'd rather not talk about that but does your channel talked about some of the changes that you've made in your i think diet or your personal health over the last few years sometimes you you talked a little bit because because i do feel that you know you know we had some some folks on the podcast here give us one why very wise quote at one point like farmers they exploit themselves and and i think that that's very true you know we're so hard on ourselves and i do feel also in the community there's a big need to hear about leaders like us and others that have gone through hard times and struggles and i i've come to realize that people want to hear that because it it makes the connection between those that have sometimes the mics and some that don't but we all go through hardships and and so i don't know i don't know if that's a place where you want to go.

Or not but what specifically but i.

I think i've heard you talked about.

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Select regions yeah i can say a little about that i i mean i've always studied anthropology i used to sit in on my friend's university lectures and just sit on courses that i found interesting i never went to a bricks and mortar university i went to gaia university and did a master's in ecosocial design and communication whatever that means but i used to sit through different friends and partners studies just out of interest and i've always read very widely in anthropology and i'm interested in well i'm interested in how we function best mentally physically and i've also noticed i used to be a high competing athlete but that was a long time ago and i noticed that i eat very little compared to people i see that i am very comfy running on much less calorie intake i've spent a lot of time fasting in the past and i've also tried out different diets for at least three to six months so that i really understand what's going on in me and i've thought about this like from my own body and experience inside of myself but also anthropologically because one thing i've got an issue with is the amount of grain consumption that makes up most of the world's food supply we we definitely never used to eat that much grain in a longer term perspective i'm talking and i think our history our knowledge of history of farming is skewed by our misunderstandings of archaeology and those fields you know so far we think farming is eleven thousand years old based on the oldest granaries found in torah in southern jordan but i would put my i would bet my farm that farming is many times older than that that's a whole nother topic but what's interesting is that nearly all the vegetables we eat today didn't exist two or three thousand years ago so we obviously didn't evolve eating them so what did we evolve eating well if we look at hunter gatherer tribes that still live in the carrying capacity of the land today they don't come back to the village to celebrate finding avocado they celebrate when they shoot the wild pig it is fat and calories and so i've explored a lot with a very animal focused diet where you take a lot of your nutrient and calories from fat and so i eat mainly animal fat meat some eggs some cheese some vegetables and i try and avoid grains i notice i eat way more vegetables if i'm growing them like if i am walking out in my garden i'll eat just like this if someone's like prepared a salad i'm not so interested like if i walk in the supermarket the vegetables in the supermarket do not they don't vibrate at me like attractive food in my garden i eat loads more and i prefer eating like that than i do a prepared salad but i am a little strange and that's fine but it's just interesting because you know there's a whole piece around plants like you know phytonutrients and toxins in plants that you don't you know like simple things like ninety eight percent of animal species are edible ninety eight percent of plants are poisonous that's interesting so i don't know this will be controversial i'm sure to some of your listeners and that's fine i'm everyone's got to go on their own journey with that but i i feel best and i eat least if i eat animal based and avoid and actually i think we wrote a farm cookbook about how to eat the sort of whole farm diet as well as preserving and foraging for wild foods which we do a lot of we have amazing mushrooms berries things here and i've always fished and hunted and i think easily and easier to think about with diet is rather than like what to eat specifically because i will flex that according to different things at different times of the year it's easier to think about what not to eat and that's like seed oil sugar and grains that haven't been fermented it's like if you cut the those things out you cut sixty percent of all cause mortality out straight away and that's almost undisputed it's like the correlation between seed oil especially over in america and all cause mortality is like an absolute correlation and you know i think especially the younger generation are like becoming more and more aware of these things much quicker and yeah so that's a bit where i'm at with that and i'm lucky i have you know tons of meat in the freezer at any time and i have all the vegetables i could ever need i've got all the wild foods you know we have you were talking about the superfood industry with the health and fitness industry i remember on the radio the other year they were like there's fifty i think it was fifty million tons of swedish blueberries that wouldn't get collected in the forests this year and they were trying to encourage people to go out and pick blueberries because we have such you know we have nearly nineteen hours of daylight in the summer so the riboflavins in the berries are extremely high in the nordic countries it's why a lot of pharmaceutical herbs are grown at this latitude and yes we have all these superfoods around us so i'm really interested to broaden this topic maybe i'm super interested in nutrient density and i think we need to eat far less if we eat nutrient dense things and i also noticed from my own experience that our hunger mechanism is triggered by fat not by carbs that's why when you watch people eating pasta or pizzas or whatever they don't get triggered to stop eating that's why people eat loads of carbs are usually overweight whereas if you eat animal fats as your primary metabolizing calories like think about bacon take a load of bacon and just eat bacon and at some point you're not hungry anymore and you know you're not hungry yeah that's your body saying i'm done i've got enough nutrients carbs don't do that vegetables don't do that that's you know our body has a mechanism with animal fats to do that and we've lost that in a couple of generations you know over in your part of the world everyone cooked with beef tallow and animal shortenings lard whatever not long ago like our grandparents would have only cooked like that and yeah i really like wanting to press that in like something we've always done on the farm is like taught our customers too like anatomically appropriate eating if you want to eat beef like seven out of ten meals is mince and two is stews and one is fine cuts it's like in sweden most people think a cow is made of filet it's like no it's a tiny bit of filet it's like two percent fillet and likewise things like animal fats you know it's like so unusual to you can't just go and buy lard to cook in very easily anymore but you can buy fifty types of sunflower oil and it's like that was developed for industrial machine lubrication not for food and i really want to push those things because i just see that like of all the things that affect health and well being diet's a pretty big one and if we're going to farm this beautiful food we should be looking at that whole package as well as educating customers around it.

Too chris do you feel that that's controversial or not at all i mean.

Depending on who you're talking to of course there's the more vegan minded side of the equation who definitely are gonna think rather opposite i suppose but i know it's quite popular right now the the idea of more animal based eating eating and a lot of people are thinking in that direction i don't know.

Nourishing tradition was a book that i read many many many years ago patty sally fallon let's say it's been a long time and she talks about these things and about fats and good fats and you know i don't think it's a question of believing it's a question of trying and you know i myself i've started to fast more more in the last few years and i see the benefit of that and i certainly and you know really on par with the idea of eliminating grains as much as possible from diet my only problem is i like beer and that's kind of like that's the one but and.

I like the thing too it's like if we really want to go sustainable yeah with these things it's like we should be drinking wines and things or ciders things from perennial crops right yeah yeah like think how much soil degradation goes into monocultural beer production it's like.

Yeah it's incred that for me it's the social aspect of going together and having a beer that's the part that i like i like connecting with others and then you know sometimes the beer is just like a it's an excuse to just hang out but besides that like for the record i think i'm i'm on board with pretty much everything that you've you've said i do believe the same thing so i think it's.

Not so controversial i think it's interesting just the stillness in the body that comes from not spending all your time digesting it's like i have this experience so often in my life of being full of emptiness and i watch like the people that come to the farm i eat such a little amount compared to some of the young boisterous guys and they eat a massive lunch and then they they want to sleep after lunch and they can't keep up and i've always eaten a little and i'm slim and nimble and i can just keep working hard and it's like power comes from nutrient density that's for sure and from fats for me and yeah it's in line with historically anthropologically it makes sense to me you know chris.

I don't want to hijack yeah go the the our moment with richard but there was one question that could be controversial that i wanted to ask you and we've had we've had on our podcast twice now the listeners probably i'm not sure if they would i've heard the second time that dave chapman came dave chapman from the real organic project came to the podcast and in both times that dave was here he's a he's a great guy he's a organic farming farming pioneer and you know he's very concerned about the word regenerative and how a lot of the influence that's pushing it is funded by you know cargyle monsanto you know nestle all these big brands that are turning to regenerative and it's it's very loosely defined it's not it's never regenerative organic and when he comes and he talks to us about this richard feels like you know we're playing into this trap where we're promoting something that you know higher forces are you know they're laughing their way to the bank because we're we're puppeteers in that way and obviously rigid ale farm is not that you know you guys are really regenerating an area but can you respond to that how do you feel about this is this off right you know tell me.

Well it brings up different things but i wrote a book called regenerative agriculture and i got to define what that means to me and i think within our alternative agricultural space that means very different things to different people but i think the one baseline principle that i think must be founded on it's like it must be soil building it must be carbon sequestration it must be leaving soil better condition than it was when you found it right so you know if you talk to holistic management graziers the answer is cows and it's like well no we're not all cow farmers it's like but i think i think you struggle to you know there's a whole trend now of regenerative gardening and it's like i think gardening is actually i don't know if you could call it regenerative really it's the most input intensive of any farm enterprise the most sustainable thing you can do on a farm is turn sunlight to grass to flesh there is no more sustainable thing than that and yet we live i've spent a lot of years pushing back on meat production bad vegetable production good the sort of memes that fly by on facebook bad groups in the past and it's like yeah that's true of modern industrial farming but it's one hundred and eighty degree incorrect of real farming it's like producing beef from pasture is the most sustainable thing you can do period and vegetable production turns out to be you know european vegetable production is based on industrial german broiler manure loads of oil loads of plastic and loads of slave labor essentially so it's like super input intensive so i would say it's questionable if vegetable production could actually be called regenerative that's you know i could debate it very strongly either way i think.

But do you feel that we could be manipulated about that word and you.

Know used by no i think the big ag has hijacked those words but i think i don't know if i'm that interested in you know i guess a new term will come up at some point like i remember this at groundswell where i did the keynote a couple of years ago and they've invited monsanto syngenta into that festival because they specifically didn't want to be you know an obscure clique they wanted to involve everyone and i understand that and i think it makes sense because alternative ag is still so very niche and it's easy to sort of pigeonhole yourself and make yourself insignificant so i appreciate that thinking but i'm there giving a talk about how we can make a good living doing things very well and the next talk is about minimizing glyphosates like exposure and and that's part it's like that's not part of regenerating anything as far as i'm concerned so i think it's a problem and i think i i've never been part of any movements because of movement's sake as i do not appreciate movements like i'm interested in farm design i like systems design and i'm good at chatting about it sometimes but i'm not interested in being part of a movement but i'm guessing the regen ag movement will turn into something else at some point too you know there's all these buzzwords and but i don't know i just it sort of ties back to something i was well that you touched on earlier that maybe we can come back to about i guess it's part of getting older but i'm it just made me think about how there's this if you look through social media there's this constant drive to innovate and and i sort of started sitting back more in life feeling we don't need more solutions it's like we already have solutions of course like little tweaks of tools improve them and da da da but it's like we already have all these things in place it's like it's i've become much less interested in following these buzz trends and you know and i can see it i'm not so interested in whether big ag is taking over that term it doesn't take up much of my headspace you know i'm not sure i'm interested in that it's like i'm not sure i'm interested in the next fancy upgrade to a caterpillar tunnel i've lost my interest in staying on the edge of all the new things that come because it's like we know how to grow vegetables it's not rocket science to grow vegetables it's not rocket science to raise beef it's like just get on with it and let's eat nice food and i guess yeah i just get an old and grumpy farmer's days now i like.

It let's switch to the nerd out phase of farming i think we're there can you tell us a bit about why anyone should care about pa yeoman's.

Work.

Yes i would say my work's been heavily influenced by like different ecological design thinkers and that spans from you know various different people over the last seventy years but one of the biggest influences on my work has been pa yeomans keyline design and what pa yeomans came up with seventy years ago was he was in dry land australia and had watched the chinese miners masterfully manage water on gravity through the sluicing of all of the mining rock so he developed systems low tech systems using earthen resources found on farms to work with gravity to allow them to let's say go off grid with water so gravity fed and irrigated farm systems he also developed a pattern of cultivating the land that makes water do something very unusual and opposite to what it would normally do in a topography and he was he could create farm patternings on topographic maps that you can't really do on the landscape very easily you need to do that on a map to understand and he also developed what we call the scale of permanence an ordering framework for how to design farm properties based on how permanent a feature is i've done a lot of work with property designs from you know a couple to hundreds of hectares in different climatic zones and that one piece has helped order my understanding of how to approach land based design more than anything else so i guess i like to synthesize the work of pa yeomans together with holistic management which we use for decision making and context setting that's an extremely potent foundation and that's how we begin all of our educational programs or consultancies is getting very clear about what we're actually trying to do but yeoman's developed that scale of permanence it was the first integrated holistic land planning system and yet very few people fully understand it today and it's also been applied to city planning urban planning and most urban planners have not heard of that either like he wrote a book in the seventies called the city forest designing cities within their watersheds that could harvest the their own water and distribute it by gravity that could clean their own waste within the city boundaries growing coppice agroforestry that fueled the townhouses and had their roads in the correct places and landscapes to passively collect and harvest water with all the infrastructure laid alongside where it's easy to locate it rather than hack through the middles of fields like we do today just beautiful sublime design like i've never come across a more sublime design approach than yeoman's scale of permanence so we use that a lot in land planning and not always it's it's a lens through which to look at the prioritization of farm planning and it's suited for larger landscape planning like when you're let's say on the garden scale so if we think of our intensive enterprises where you can you know you can make a living as a gardener on a half an acre or whatever you get to kind of dictate the entire landscape but when you working with extensive enterprises on tens or hundreds or thousands of acres you need to really read the landscape and understand how topography affects the water movement in the land to be able to optimize that landscape for energy efficiency for the climatic conditions you're in etcetera so it's it's a very important piece it's a very big topic as someone's life's work that i highly recommend to anyone who has got a farm to plan and by farm i mean a larger landscape not a you know vegetable farm is small enough that you you don't need to get into all those subjects necessarily because you get to dictate the landscape a bit more so it's been massive for me.

Yeah can you tell us about the idea of how tool innovation made farming fun again for you i thought that i've heard you say this before and i thought that was interesting because maybe just maybe new people take for granted some of the tools but it's when you think about how much small tool innovation has actually happened in just the last twenty years i think it changed things a lot and you've said that it basically just made vegetable farming fun again for you compared to your first experiences could you elaborate on that yeah.

So i guess i came into veg growing more in small tractor massive loads of plastic using like woven plastic three hundred foot lengths and having to drag them out with the tractor and plant forty thousand leeks before breakfast and getting paid like five bucks an hour working like a dog for twelve hours a day and so i that was the point i was like this sucks i you know there must be a better way to make a living from farming and with livestock that's often much easier i mean a big part of what i did with my book regenerative agriculture was trying to put together a way of like it's almost an impossible book to write which is why no one's ever written a book like that but it's a missing book in the literature because i've had all these people coming on training say like yeah i'm inheriting the family farm i got two hundred acres i think i'll be a market gardener it's like no that's not a responsible way to manage that what you know most people will give an arm and a leg for that and you're just going to use a tiny bit what are you going to do with the rest of it or likewise people would be like yeah i think i'd like to start a micro dairy and they've got like a two acre back lot and they say no it's not going to work economically like there's a critical mass to do all these things so what i tried to do is a comparative analysis of all the sort of different enterprises that people consider of like okay if you've got this much money and you got this much land and you need to earn this much there's three things you could do you can't do any of them you can't do any of them you can only do these three they're the only things that can really fit that time place and circumstance and when i set up the farm i remember i was looking at these old documents that i published the design process of this farm before i even moved here so i came to see the farm it was under snow and then i had to work abroad all winter and bought the farm having only seen a topographic map and under fifty centimeters of snow so i designed the farm and i published through the scale of permanence that we just talked about i published about what we were going to do here over the next years and we literally spent the first four or five years three d printing onto the ground and it's interesting how if i read those old documents now the vegetable garden was only ever intended to be about three allotments like few hundred a couple of hundred square meters just to provide food for the people at the actual farm and most of our commercial garden now is actually on what was the neighbor's land and it was interesting because i think particularly through your work jm which you know i think you've done more for the small farming movement than pretty much anyone i can think of and just the exposure to like some of the basic handhold tools that people like elliot coleman developed it's like that makes it fun it's like we have enough we don't need lots more it's like you know you can spend a couple of thousand bucks on a toolkit that makes it fun to grow vegetables again and that's enough it's like so that led me to feel like okay we'll scale this up and all we had to do was bring forward the design we had designed irrigation pond well we designed a pond in the landscape i had no plan to build that for many years because it was just going to cost money not generate any value other than sort of ecosystem value but then we just cash flowed that in our cash flow plan so that we would be able to irrigate the gardens and set up a garden a few years in and yeah it's been a lot of fun and it's yeah i'd say primarily thanks to tools that's the only reason i considered it again it's like the advancement of those basic battery powered and hand tools and you know anyone familiar with jm's work or my own work will know you know the the basic market garden toolkit it's very cheap very easily accessible and it's very different to how i got involved in veg growing which was still like just really wonky tools that the tractor fit for the sort.

Of commercial the tractor the tractor around everything it was always around tractors yeah.

Or just by hand like really inefficiently and i guess the farmers were not paying me much so they could afford for me to be pretty inefficient and.

But yeah can you tell us about.

Rico rings yeah i can so we a rico ring is it's a play on words in finnish it means circular so the idea of circular economy and what happened when we set up the farm probably the best thing we ever did was spent a lot of time in the first year setting up customer emails and making contact with people we did loads of farm open days we had little flyers in the local sort of free ads paper and suddenly like a few hundred people show up in this little sleepy village and we we did five open days that year i think and that's the basis of our the customer list and then we fed them you know we like face paint the kids will spray paint the cows to look like a zebra or whatever and like just make it really fun and get everyone's email address and it's like hey you've seen this we've got the best eggs you can't buy eggs like this in store but you can only buy them at the car park on thursday at five till five thirty that's where we drop them off and you can only buy them for three months at a time so you can buy one tray two trays three trays a week whatever you want but you have to pay for three months now so like a csa essentially so we set up the csa for the vegetables in a sort of familiar way we set up subscriptions for our eggs and we set up pre sales for our meat chickens which there were no like parsley poultry didn't exist in sweden there was two or three csas in the whole country when we moved here and all this stuff was kind of new so we set up essentially buying clubs inspired by people like joel salatin like when i set up this farm the only person in farming literature who shared anything about finances and time and motion studies was joel salatin and it was all really out of date and american like pasture poultry profits how to make sixty thousand dollars in six months off twenty acres it's like we can make one hundred thousand dollars off two acres in four months they were really out of date but at least they gave some basis for like starting from you know so we made these buying clubs and what was really funny was with our meat chickens we made a a currency a farm currency called a ridge dollar and the original swedish money was a dollar and so ridged ridge dollar it it made a nice play and i got on six o' clock primetime national television talking about bringing down the agricultural system we sold a thousand chickens and i hadn't even moved to the farm yet nice and i love it but i knew how to produce them rates so this is important to sort of you know it's of course better to pre sell things from a cash flow perspective but you need to know you can deliver what you're promising which i came from many years of farming experience that i knew i could produce what i said i was going to otherwise you sort of because we're farming customers at the same time right we're farming the type of customer we want and we're using a bit of a leverage principle because there's always you know this eighty twenty idea there's always a percentage of misses jones who just want to tell you about their cat and how it got run over last week and they want to talk for forty five minutes but only buy six eggs it's like i don't have time to hear about your cat i don't care about your cat just want to sell you thirty eggs and then get out of here and that intimate connection with customers is that's all it takes is a bit of eye contact and like hey how's your holiday you look nice in your suntan see you next week that's enough intimacy doesn't need more than that you know i can't hear about your cat unless you hold the annual like cat get together weekends and you've got two hundred cat lady friends who are going to buy my eggs too then i'll give you five minutes but you know there's always a misses jones and it's like you need to then leverage those customers out eventually like we're farming the customers who are willing to meet us at five to five thirty in that random car park regardless of the weather and not be late so we did that and we would drop you know five six seven thousand euros of products in that half hour window on some well chosen like it started actually in mcdonald's car parks because that's on the way out of town and we would go at the time when people finished work so we're there in mc mcdonald's car parks dropping pastured eggs and pastured poultry and vegetable bags and it felt like yeah we you know.

Yeah it's probably the first time in a long time any of those people had stopped in that parking lot perhaps.

If ever but it worked really well right so that it took a lot of work and a lot of time invested in the beginning but now we had an extremely efficient sales model so we we had it one hour in the summer half an hour in the winter because it's really cold here in the winter and then our friend was making sourdough bread really good bread and standing on the market in our local town so we would go to a few different towns because it's about forty five minutes away there's a town of seventy five thousand fifteen minutes away there's a town of ten thousand half an hour away a town of fifteen thousand so we would go to those points and our whole philosophy has been we're going to sell within a fifty kilometer radius because we don't want to spend time in a car driving and like oh you want to learn how to do this well i'll teach you but make sure you go one hundred kilometers away and go do it over there so that i can keep doing it here i've now like filled up the rico rings with people i've trained to to saturation point but that's part of the intention in my case anyway we haven't got to the rico rings yet the baker was always standing there selling a perishable good on the market square and we would come and we would he could see we're just dropping all this product we emptied the whole van and we're gone and we're like dude come sell bread with us like we're going to this place this place and this place we drop it all off in half an hour you don't have to stand there all day you don't have to bring anything you haven't already sold but it was a bit too like swedish people are very conservative conservative ultra so they weren't really up for it we asked a cheese maker we asked like someone else but no one was really up for it and then rico came along and i wonder if i got that little i've got a little ricoh book i could show you for people that are interested i had it out the other day but here it is so ricoh was developed by a man called thomas nelman this is a little book that i was part of contributing towards for people that are going to be interested to look this up more you can find it online it talks a bit about how it works and it gives case studies from all over europe so thomas nelman was in finland he was paid by the government to come up with a sort of circular economy way to deal with local food consumption so ricoh is what he came up with and it works exclusively on facebook and that happens to work because most people at that age on facebook so they don't have to do one extra click and that's key because people have tried to mimic this with an extra click to another website doesn't really work so you have like a inward facing group and that's where we say right okay we're gonna sell and we're gonna say thursdays five till six at this place and we go to some coffee shop and we say hey can we have like a couple hundred people come meet here you'll get the benefit of selling more coffee and we'll be gone in one hour people like that are like yeah that sounds great or like an old car park behind a sports hall at a time that's not busy or you know somewhere that makes sense and we founded all the rico rings around us there's five of them and so we just made them the same time and place that we already did and now because it's got an official banner the cheesemaker came the baker came the fishmonger came there's like charcuterie people da da da so now we've got like a whole array of food and then you have your outward facing group and it works on sort of copy and paste i say hey richdale farm we have pastured eggs they cost this much for a tray of thirty here's a little link to how we move our hens every day we have vegetable bags this week we're doing ten varieties for this much special offer for midsummer link to this and whatever you've got and then people say okay i want two chickens and tray of eggs and a big vegetable bag and that is a sales contract so that means you don't have any trading laws like a farmer's market or something like that we're not going and selling anything we're going to drop off things that are already technically sold even though the payment happens there so it makes it very easy from that perspective and yeah that's how it works so suddenly all these other people that wouldn't come before now come so now it's like a critical mass is there that you can get enough of your weekly shop there that is worth going to so it attracts more and more people and we just out competed everyone because we like you know there'll be some guy in a filthy volvo covered in cow shit and he opens a boot and there's like some dirty eggs in the back and it's like no hang on a minute this is like really good quality food we're selling so we're like putting our shirts on with our logo we've cleaned the van before we go we've put up little market stands with like what's up at the farm right now and we treat it a bit more special you know and so we just harvest everyone else's customers because we're doing a nicer job and what's nice about it is it promotes a healthy competition because you can see everyone's purchases online so you can see my customer's going over there this week oh they found a new way of bunching their salad bags that looks pretty fancy i'm going to do that too and so it drives everyone in this kind of healthy competition have you seen richard like.

People in the us use that model.

Rico not many but i've had students take it to south africa australia i think there's one in canada maybe some around europe but i i to be honest i'm out of touch with how the health of those are there is a lady here in canada i believe that's featured in the book no we can't name this nadia mod but this is just some it's not all of them but what's interesting about this is i mean there are hundreds of millions of dollars moving through this there's five hundred in scandinavia in finland it's something like one in five euros is spent at a rico ring on the food.

Market wow interesting okay so crazy that is crazy and the concept is really working it's like it's a proof proof.

In the pudding and it's i have never seen anywhere in the world a more efficient sales mechanism it's like our entire we stopped selling to restaurants and any wholesale we just started funneling everything to this because it's i mean it's.

I honestly it almost sounds too good to be true but i know it's working it's just from i guess it's probably the hardest thing is just getting it off the ground in a new place say yes there's an adoption aspect whereas that's already been done in some.

Places but this is crazy right in my local in the bigger place the city of carlstead there is seventy five thousand people there's eighteen thousand people who have consciously gone and joined that group themselves wow it's like over one in five it's like you couldn't you couldn't market your products even if you paid better than that it's like these are people who have individually gone and joined that group on their own volition so it's pretty powerful i know it's probably.

Too big of a topic as we're winding down on time and we'll have to get to rapid fire but i just have one question on the rico rings how does one manage inventory because it sounds like if you're putting out like how do you how do not too many people comment and say what they want and then you don't have.

Enough what's the you have to manage that so there is some people have written scripts to take the data out of there so it takes a bit of time on that side but not when you add up the whole it's very efficient but the trouble is when people like some of those are easy technological things but i tried to support a guy in sweden in his startup of another system it doesn't work as well because you have to do that extra click and the thing i loved about ricoh is that the farmer doesn't have to pay to use it and nearly all of these services that you find some of them take up to twenty percent of the sales it's like no farmer can afford to do that so i don't support any system that the farmer has to pay for the privilege of selling it's like that doesn't make any sense to me so i like this because of its simplicity it's like you know if i if i put out a sleek website for the benefit of all the farmers it would be very hard to get one in four and a half people in my local town to go look at that website that's true so yeah manually i have to take some orders off or i have to cut the sales at some point and be like right sold out but bear in mind these are the sort of you know we're farming the types of customers that we want and they're the sort of people that say i sold ten more chickens than i had and i was like oh sorry dave i haven't got any this week i oversold there's the sort of customers that are going to support you know they get it and so we've never had problems with that the more the problems would be misses jones is late yeah and so it's like okay first time misses jones like we need to get back to the farm and do chores still like we can wait here a few minutes but like okay i'm coming i'm coming okay second time misses jones we got to go back to the farm you need to be here before five thirty i'm leaving your bag at the door of the shop there all right see you by next time say misses jones we don't have eggs for sale anymore like sorry we don't have enough subscribers and then we just call her out because that's not a good enough customer you know misses.

Jones so you have to be a.

Little bit you have to be a little bit you know it's like you have to same with the culling of livestock you have to put fine lines to manage that well i think yeah.

Do you have anything else to say.

Jim no i'm i'm impressed like i didn't know about that rico and i'm gonna look into it it's hard to.

Translate i know a lot of students because i used to do a lot of promotion of this around europe but also with students around the world and i know that the critical thing is having a critical mass of producers like you need a baker you need someone doing dairy someone doing charcuterie you need different meats you need different veggies eggs.

Yeah it's like a farmer's market yeah you need a farmer's market choice it's.

A food hub but without the added click because it's on facebook yeah yeah i mean we have some local people producers but only of one thing that do sell through facebook like kind of ask people to place an order as far as i know but no no.

One then what would happen is then i'm training up people you know people are coming to our farm and they're getting all the back end spreadsheets and planning and finances and then they've got what's amazing you know is that they've got their sales and marketing platform already built for them in scandinavia so people have come here on a four day poultry training started a business at full scale that i've built up over several years and they don't have to do any marketing or sales at all it's.

Amazing yeah and with with meat chickens i mean selling it's probably a lot harder than doing the actual growing because it's well so fast and it's just.

Fairly simple yeah i've really come to realize that the missing i don't know the missing link but you know the propeller of all the things that we're doing in farming is really the sales like the production side like i've been working really hard to look at production and how to improve it how to streamline it but in the end you know it boils down to sales and markets and that's really where know i've come to realize that that's where there needs to be breakthrough because all the small farms here whenever we're hearing that they're struggling and then some of these farmers are very very unaware of messaging and and and comms and they'll be out there it's all this our work of line is so hard we're we're working twenty hours a day we're struggling but they never talk about the fact that they're not they're not selling enough that's that's why they're struggling it's it's really never production it's it's like when everything sells man it's not that complicated.

To make it work now farmers love to be victims all over the world they're all the same i always joke you know it's like we take a lot of credit for things that we don't actually do like it's not very hard to grow lettuce or produce an egg it's like you don't actually have to do very much like lettuce knows how to grow and a chicken that was how to lay an egg and we don't need to take credit for that it's like making the business work that's impressive and you know sales is half the work and i think a trend that's going to come along we live in increasingly time starved you know all these lovely innovations we've been told to buy and subscribe to making us busier and busier and that doesn't seem like that's going to change and i think probably the way it's going to go here i don't know if it's different market there but moving towards more convenience where you get together with some of your other farms and you provide you know ready portioned meal subscriptions things like that i think that's probably where a lot of this is going to go in the future agreed because people.

Are yeah all right rapid fire it's richard we do rapid fire at the end of our podcast these are like quick questions where you don't need to think too much and if you're if you don't have the answer we can.

Pass yeah sure and you don't have to be that fast you can elaborate if you wish what's a book that you've either read multiple times or just one that has been on your mind a lot lately.

One that i love and is my next writing project to write upgrades or updates sorry is george henderson's the farming ladder classic a classic of the classic very classic book and i was in touch with the man that runs his old estate and asked if i could use the title to write a modern version after being likened to him by several people and so i've actually put together a draft for the book and that's going to be my next project a bit more prose.

Based wow and that book is what's the basic plot idea of the book.

He was an innovator back in the forties and during the austere time of the second world war he was running thriving business he was doing plastered poultry and movable pens he made money on farm inventions as well as breeding heirloom animals mixed farmer and his journey into farming with his brother i mean they made a plan as teenagers of how to afford a farm starting from nothing and they just carried that out and then he ended up training new young farmers and i just share a lot of his love for the countryside and for the farm life but also attention to details finances time and motion studies and these kind of things did you.

Read adrian bell classic book have you read adrian bell adrian bell adrian bell the english author have you read him from the nineteen thirties and forties and okay well it's similar an english author from the twenties through fifties really wrote a lot during the war about english countryside living and farming anyway richard when.

When your new book comes out make sure to have a us tour which includes a little trip at the old mill ah yeah so that we can talk about the the book in person and have a good meal together that.

Sounds fantastic what's advice you heard when you were really young that you only appreciated much later in life.

Oh gosh i think i took my parents were very sincere and i would have taken i can't quite answer that question but i took my advice very seriously and i didn't ignore any of it but i took it to heart and very much and my father always taught me only to ever spend money that i already had and that's something i am very much i mean we haven't talked about the financial side of restaurants but that's i'm pushed myself in closer to complete failure than ever before and i think about that often i'm spending money that i don't actually have it's almost.

The opposite of the question what's advice you heard and once heeded that now you're letting go of which also is a valuable question too because different people maybe reacted to advice differently different times what's advice that you give often to people.

What don't you need to do like how small can you go and what don't you need to do you have an example i've always prefaced my video library in the past with like hey this farm is not a farm i would set up if i was trying to make a family living i could do that with my hands with my broilers with my market garden it's like i'm specifically setting this up so that you can learn about how this interacts with that and it all fits together in a system but if i just wanted to make a living i would only do one thing here it's not really why i set my farm up i wanted to set up a little revolution and despite having said that thousands of times on videos some people wanna just do what they see here and it's like no you don't need to do all this it's like it's a lot of work and you get a lot of extra wrinkles for making it more complex than you need to.

What are people not talking about enough.

They'Re complex traumas that they bring into this alternative space like one thing that i think i'm going to start talking a lot more about publicly is i'm very interested in psychology and having been a mentor in this space for fifteen twenty years i think nearly everyone i've ever met in the alternative agriculture space comes with complex trauma and it's something that we started weaving into our programs here and it's amazing because it fits so well with the premise of regenerating the landscape too and we can't act with our full intelligence or capacity until we do work with those things so that's something i'm much more interested to engage with and i think is not spoken enough about in society in general but in this movement particularly.

What'S a nature experience that really sticks out in your memory from your lifetime.

Feeding fish so these trout rainbow trout that had escaped from a fish farm and lived in a tiny brook in my village and i used to sneak down there i was always a fisherman so i used to sneak down and feed them bread and i grew these rainbow trout into full sized trout in a tiny little stream like barely deep enough for them and it stands out for me because i was very very young at this time and yet i learned my innate relationship with the world around me it's like i can direct this and that's exactly the feeling i get when i plan farms and work with the livestock here and all the plants is like i am very sure about my relationship with this ecosystem around me.

What'S.

The best food experience you've had in the last year.

I'Ll probably be quite boring i mean i i love the beef i have here i have old heritage swedish mountain cows and i have forest raised pork i a stickler for i can eat pork belly most days of the week i can eat my beef every day of the week i like simple i like one of my favorite things absolutely favorite things is raw beef i've studied all the different raw beef recipes from around the world and i think the southeast asian versions are my favorite but i eat that a.

Lot what's a great difficult decision you've made where at the time it was a super hard decision but then afterward it turned out to be for the best and it led you somewhere better.

To come back to the farm recently was gonna leave the farm and just leave everything i've built up here behind to fulfill my introvert dreams but i came back to the farm and that was powerful interesting would you could you.

Share just a moment about that what what was happening how did like why were you being pulled away and then what then pulled you back so quickly.

Well like i ended the relationship that i was in when i set up the farm and that's it left some of the meaning of creating this place like i decided to be a farmer at fifteen and i wanted to be a farmer to build a habitat to raise kids in that's like the whole whole my whole journey is based on that so it kind of lost the feeling of you know it's like i'm a foreigner in a foreign country in the middle of rural nowhere and so i felt like okay maybe maybe now i move on from here like and go start a different thing like with a bit more culture and a bit more proximity to to things i'm feeling familiar with and then i was in mexico teaching a course at a wonderful farm there las canadas and i was sleeping my daughter had come with me and two o' clock in the morning she had a breakdown in the bunk above me she was like i want to go back to the farm and i had a breakdown and i was like so do i and we just decided we're like coming back and so i've taken a pause from the farm but then yeah we started it up again last year and it's yeah i'm i feel very well and at peace and content and fulfilled when i'm here so it's it was a good decision.

I'M super happy to hear that it's.

Really nice final question what's something you're really into maybe even obsessed that's different than farming and the things we've spoken about today.

I'M very interested in this topic of like exploring past like archaeology anthropology i'm very curious around these topics and how they play into food and how like i guess the convergence of neuroscience and archaeology and anthropology that's what i spend most of my time thinking and looking at like i don't listen to many farming podcasts or i don't like i don't follow farming stuff i follow my other interests because i spend my whole life farming and that's what i'm very interested about.

Awesome all right.

Richard so it's it was a great great talk i got to know you so much more just like having this conversation with you and wish you all the best with the restaurant keep us posted if there's anything that we can do to help promote it down all the way up here we'll do it we definitely want to come and visit i don't know how this is going to happen chris but let's let's make a wish that we ended we ended up silly what's garden silly garden so.

Well to the anglophone board is a.

Farm all right yeah yeah just going to thank thank you for your time richard thank you for your time thank.

You everyone for listening this was a great episode don't forget to like us on facebook and instagram and all these social media platforms makes a difference and on youtube i think it's important for people to subscribe and like the channel gives us the signal that you guys are into it and we'll have another great one one next time see you one see y' all see you later.

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