S4 ● E100 An all farm tour and update...

What do you think, Jonah? I think it's like color wise it's the most beautiful box I've seen. Like purple sort of purple and not the purple this time. Yeah. Oh, we're missing them daikons. Very nice. So first iteration of packing station we're just using scrap materials that we've got around for the drainage but it seems to work. So we've got a drying rack over here and cold sink that sits sits on little clips here and then both of these fold up into the wall that we can get the car in here. Still got a bit of clean up to do and here. But it's nice to have water on tap. Just a simple setup here that connects to the normal hose that we use for our washing up station for dishwashing because it's got better pressure. Very simple drainage just going off here. We can direct that to the pond. But I think for the rest of this year we're just going to work a bit like this. And this is going to be winter car space so we might gravel inside here. We've got a plan to gravel the whole driveway because in the winter it's too wet down here to get up with the vehicle. So we're going to gravel the rest of this and inside here so it's a nice drained surface. These are the English walnuts that neighbour gave us and from a 25 year old tree in Shield. It's about 25 minutes away from us. And I never planted English walnut because I wouldn't have thought it would survive. But her Tree is now 25 years old and giving seedlings each year and a couple of Bittenfelder apples on their own roots to go up in nutfield. Dehydrators on some herbs and also shrooms lolliporcini and winter chanterelles at this time. Very nice. I missed the herbs and look who we got on the neighbor's lawn. So I've just been talking to the slaughtery. It's a local family slaughtery who will do the cows and pigs for us. And we're just arranging when we're picking those meat boxes up so that we can deliver some fresh to customers. You can see the extent that they have taken forest now and it goes all the way along here. Pretty efficient machines, pretty amazing technology but pretty destructive also. I mean that's really going to affect water draining into this land that we've been grazing this year. So we've let the pigs into this last paddock now except for the larch plantation on my right because we're off this weekend to pick up a trailer in the uk and what we'll do, we're taking the sheep to slaughter first, but then we'll take the pig pigs and it's harder to load up pigs so we'll probably get all the pigs that we want to take away down in this plantation where we can then leave the livestock trailer and start feeding them in there to help load it up. They've been going around the edges and cleared some of the undergrowth already. So I'm cleaning down for the fourth time in two days. We did 250 birds yesterday, chickens and pack them in the evening. So we do a clean down after we've finished the birds, get everything sterile and clean as it should be and then we pack down and then we have to do a clean down again because we've been, we haven't cleaned a chiller at that point. And then we're packing in this clean room but also passing birds through here and they're weighed on the, you know, on the side here and packed into the kanga boxes. And then today we did turkeys averaging about seven kilos or so. So that's 15, 16 pounds. And we've kept 14, I believe to grow on to much bigger beds for restaurants for Christmas serving, etc. Maybe one for ourselves for Christmas. Really liking the spray foamer. It's definitely, it does a really good job of cleaning in here. It dissolves any sort of fats or blood and that's the unit there. So I just attach that to the hose, spray everything down and it creates a sticky foam that's then washed off after a few minutes. It's quite an alkaline solution but it's guaranteed to kill germs and dissolve blood and fats. And when you're processing birds there's a lot of fats involved. I really like it. I really enjoy the clean down process actually because it's where we, you know, really know that we're managing the whole slaughtery. Well, when they've come to check the slaughtery in the past, it's been spotless. And you know, that's really nice because these kind of places are often really manky in industrial settings or whatever. Same with like food producing factories, etc. You know, I've seen all sorts working in different jobs. So it's a real pleasure to manage this ourselves fully at the farm. But really great job from the team. We've got some very nice birds and lots of little jobs going on around the farm before we go away on the Weekend to the UK with all the campers gone, turkeys are back up in here and we managed to get the gobbledygoing there too. These birds are going to be left now to grow on quite large as big, you know, celebration table birds. A few of the toms are starting to get blue heads now and puffing up. And autumn's definitely coming. The rain is here and it started to get really cold. Pond is healing up nicely and we got some good grass. Haven't been in front field for a while except for making the pad. So we're just about to put the concrete footers in for the new polytunnel built and then that'll be trying out with the layers in a few weeks from now. And Dr. Stefan has joined us today from Germany. He was here as an intern last year and was here for the birth of our son, Baby Wagner. And we called him in last minute. He's one of the leading lung experts regarding anaesthetism and lung function. And he's joining us again for a couple of weeks to be at the farm. It was great to have him. Last year when Ragnar was born, we ended up having to have Johanna and Ragnar airlifted to hospital because the breathing was complicated after a beautiful birth. And because we're in internship mode. Stefan was showing me how all the machines worked that the paramedics had, which was. It was beautiful and hilarious at the same time. They were all freaking out and we were enjoying learning about things that go bing. We've been cropping a lot of berries this year and grass is doing good still. It's interesting to see this lane will be taken by that Eggman bove shortly. But this is where chickens have just been. But that will bounce back quite nicely. Strawberries have done okay this year. You remember, we got. Strawberries were lost in the post, so they sent us double amount and they need to be covered next year. We'll probably put some kind of row cover on them. Some of the chestnut seedlings doing really good, but the grass sort of grows in on there and that's okay, but we want to keep them a bit protected and keep the grass from rooting in there and we'll be able to start taking suckers. Technically these are protected identity plants. Actually you're not allowed to take the suckers from them because it's someone else's. Sort of got the rights to the plant propagation. But, you know, some tend to root themselves here and there, I guess. So we're off on Friday to go and pick up this Trailer and we want to get the pigs into here that we can bring the livestock trailer we bring back here and start feeding the pigs in the trailer. But hopefully we've got time tomorrow. I'd like to get in here and start felling some more trees to put in some more mushroom logs. We've got enough logs for quite a lot of mushrooms still. And it's quite a good place for logs down here. It's always been full of mushrooms, you see right here. It's got a nice natural humidity level and quite dark and damp in here. So I'm excited to finish up some of those logs. Thinking about the rest of the season now. It's quite easy. The jobs we've got laid out so empty yet now just the market gardening course. We got a full market gardening course which is awesome and excited for that one. But just a few things to do now. Fill Ragnar's sandpit with sand. That's taken most of the summer. But we're putting some reinforcements in the brooder because the barn is sloping over slightly. But it's not worth a major job for this old barn. So to hold up the roof we've been putting 5, 6 tonnes of hay up here in the winters. But time for some reinforcements with free wood. Got the polytunnel to build and we're going to prototype a couple of new lighter weight nest boxes that will go in the new eggmobiles next year. And we've got some slaughtering of big animals to do for home supply. And we're going to move our homemade grain silo to the old chicken barn so we have room for winter storage. Storage of the rhino. Take this yurt down after the market garden course and organize our workshop and build a roof because the workshop's got a loft that's good for storage, but it lets a lot of heat out in the winter. If we put a wood stove in there, which we put in last year. Gotta finish painting the last, last bit of the barn. Tiny bit of painting left to do and build the new market garden. Toolboards finished the wash station that's nearly there now. Just got to clad the outside. Pick up lots more free timber to do that and pick up a couple of free caravan trailers to build the new eggmobiles. And then we're going to start. Matt and Nicholas are going to be here for the end of the season. Stay into the early winter. So we're going to start turning the intern wagon into an egg packery and smokery. Lots of noise from the rain now, but these Girs have been amazing for us. They're girs, not yurts. The gyr has straight roof poles, whereas the yurt has steam bent roof poles. It actually transfers the weight down into the wall as opposed to a girth. So this has a 5 ton cable around it to hold the whole thing in. It's only true yurts and reciprocal roofs that have a roof that actually pushes down into the wall most. Most roofs are pushing the walls outwards, hence you need all the internal structure. In theory, you don't need these dragon posts, the vertical posts, but there's about 500 kilos up above people's heads, so it's there for security, but beautiful spaces. Johanna and I built both of these in about seven, eight days and about. You could build one for €1,000 and seat 50 people in here. And wow, they've been amazing for us. You know, put them up, set them up anywhere, move them. Takes about an hour and a half to set up. And there's only two makers of these in Europe at this size, or last time I checked, and they're €15,20,000. So about four days, five days work and a thousand euros you can make your own. One of the jobs I hope to get around to before the weather gets too colder is to finish up the inside of our tree house. Some of you will be familiar with this, but this was built out of mostly scrap wood and recycled windows. As a response to. Hey, how do we get revenue out of these trees without the gross sort of clear cutting like we saw in the hills over there? And this is a beautiful spot. You can just see the lake where we go fishing here. And the woods are nice here. We built this one. It's sitting on four bolts and each of them bolts is pretty mighty. And it took a week from Nicholas and I to build this in the middle of winter. It's very nice. And if we can rent this out for a few nights a year, it's more productive per square meter than our whole forest. So it's pretty simple in here. There's a sleeping loft for a child up here and windows on each side. It's a bit echoey right now, but it's got this incredible view. You won't be able to see, but it goes all the way to the lake and the light comes in. We've cleared a couple of trees to make this little avenue very nice. And we're going to put a wood stove here, so it's big enough for a double bed. I'll make some little stairs out of a Tree trunk up here you could get up there, and a little desk and a wood stove and it's good to go. You know, I could spend quiet winter days up here. Very nice, about a thousand euros to build this in a week and very nice thing to have, but I think I'll keep it as an office now. I bought some beautiful wallpaper, very old style wallpaper that I'm gonna wallpaper this with and find some secondhand little stove. So it's good in the middle of winter to come and do some writing or reflection for quiet time. We've had so many people around this summer and it's, you know, it takes a lot of energy. Everyone with their different frames of reference, points of view, needs, desires, wants, abilities. It's, it's a lot and it's been great. But each year I get progressively tireless. So I'm looking forward to winter and I'm looking forward to a radical shift next year and much less people. What a place for a little office house. Beautiful window side view. Just for reference, the forestry is about 1.8 hectares. It's worth perhaps €20,000, but it took 90 years to get to that age. And so when you calculate €20,000 by 18,000 square meters divided by 90, it's about 0.12. So 1.2 cents per square meter return from this forestry, which needs clear cutting in order to get it back. Now if I rented out this tree House for two nights, €100 each night and you know, lovely food, tour of the farm, meet some interesting people. It's more profitable to rent this for two nights a year than it is to cut this forest down every 90 years. It's amazing to think about. We were looking at some of the big ag farmers on the course recently. They're turning over €400 a hectare, including subsidies for large scale cropping here in Scandinavia. And it's mind blowing, you know, it's a hundred times less productive than these small scale intensive systems we're running at least. I mean, you know, we turn that over on broilers in one hectare in the six month season. So when you stack in the other enterprises, it's amazing how much more we compete with intensity, with freshness, with locality, with insight and knowledge. You know, that's our leverage points as small producers. That input, output analysis thing is so important because it's easy to get lost in numbers and not even look at the numbers. We were talking about one of the big cropping farms and their input costs €150,000 a year in Chemicals currently for conventional ag. And we talked about taking land out of soil degrading practices and putting it into grazing, holistic planned grazing with beef. And it's a lot of investment costs to buy a herd of cows, you know, you know, talking hundreds of cows, it's, you know, running into the hundreds of thousands of euros. But those costs would be cut immediately by stopping soil degrading practices which are running on subsidies anyway. And so it's really important to sort of look at these input and output analysis for different enterprises because it's amazing how unintuitive it is for people, it seems, you know, and that's why we take such good care with our time and motion studies. Because a lot of people are into market gardening now. But it's massive inputs time wise, you know, and inputs, you know, outside the farm, the fertility, etc. People always say, you know, well yeah, chickens run on grain. Well, of course they do. And we fully acknowledge that we're using that as a nutrient driver for our farm to recover it from, you know, years of neglect, you could say without animals. But it's no different with market gardening. You know, it's very easy to forget that those systems run on intensive animal inputs. You can't grow good veg without animal manures, you know, certainly for no sustained period. It's, you know, there's people trying, but you know, show me it in a hundred years time. Animals have always been the drivers of fertility in farms. And if you look back over thousands of years, all farms were smaller and mixed, had tree crops, had annual crops, had animals. And animals are key to fertility. It's amazing to see just how much soil has been built here in the three short seasons that we've been growing any amount of animals. And I think we're only halfway into our production. We could double everything. So it's just going to be insane to watch ecosystem processes work. And I'm really glad to share the journey in this way because I know a lot of people are really valuing the sharing and insights that they gain from following us around a bit. And it's definitely something I'll keep doing because I really enjoy it. I think it's a lot of value to see things. I can write these things down, show photographs, but they don't capture that feeling. And, and yeah, it's something I'll definitely consider to keep doing. Our online training is going to bring a lot more focus, but it's going to be focused on people designing their properties and really there's a big niche it Seems like for people wanting to design their own properties and needing the mentorship of knowing they're making smart choices to get on with it, really the learning only begins when you start for yourself. That's, you know, without a doubt. But, you know, we certainly have a lot to share as farmers, as designers. You know, I've done design work on over 100 projects all over the world now and I'm doing less and less of that because I just, I'd rather be here than anywhere else, to be honest. But it's, it's something I have a natural skill for and I'm good at seeing whole pictures and really making sure we're not missing any major gaps. So I'm excited to take our education a step on. I've got a good format now and so we'll be doing this tiered system where we're releasing a lot of video content from trainings and from around the farm, looking at all the systems in detail. And that's going to be available at low cost for anyone who, you know, regardless of their sort of income level or whatever. And then we will have another tier with all of our spreadsheets and business planning stuff and you know, behind the scenes stuff. Stuff that's really valuable data, you know, save you a massive amount of time to have that and still like a mid cost that doesn't involve my time. And I've been considering this really carefully over the advice of friends and loved ones. You know, my time is really limited, I'm super busy and I work extremely hard consistently all year and I need to slow down that, you know, momentum a bit because I get very tired by the end of the year. And you know, some of you have spotted that in the videos and it's true, I work very hard in the summer and I love it, I really love it. But part of the online training thing is to save people time and money of moving around. I think it's really valuable to go and see places in action and I want to target my educational support to a very select few who are really just about to make a leap and not, you know, bumming and ahhing. If they're doing it, they've already committed their life to it. And it's a special sort of character that I'm looking for here. It's a lot of people come here who are amazing people and you know, we get a very diverse amount of people here. But I'm looking to support very particular people with the resources or creative capacity to really take the bull by the horns. As it were and run with it. And quite a high percentage are. But there's still people coming here that I'm really sure if they want to go into this life. And I just think there's other people that can support them. My time is needing to be more focused than that now. But the final tier of the training will be over some amount of weeks, maybe 10 to 15 weeks. And there'll be a weekly webinar is what I think I'll do, which will go onto some kind of work based platform where people upload all the files. So there's weekly activities as you create your own farm plans and enterprise plans. And I think that's a real leverage point of what we're doing is like we're sharing a lot of design experience and management experience with the fact that we're, you know, producing really good results as farmers. I think if you really want to set up a farm, you need to learn from people farming successfully because there's all these little nuances and details that you, you could never know if you weren't doing it every day for yourself. And it's those insights that will save people a lot of time and money. And it's something I'm excited to share with people coming here and something that will be really beautiful to work with people on a longer term basis to, you know, have time to reflect on all the things that we're discussing and bringing up and have this peer review as well. There's a, you know, hundreds of people that are interested in taking this training so, so I'm going to work out how we limit the size to keep it really productive. But I think ultimately we're going to try and support as many people as we can into starting out and in the sort of specialist field of smaller scale intensive local based farms. Because that's really where I see the future relies upon, I think more and more whilst conventional farming is getting bigger and more and more debt based, more and more machine based. I think ultimately it's inevitable, it has to come back to lots of local solutions and it's probably based on the way history seems to go. It's going to be, you know, when it comes to crunch time that's going to be the way it is. But I really feel like small, high quality producers are going to be running the show down the line. And I've put out some, you know, sort of posts on Facebook and things recently about, hey, why aren't farmers driving the nicest car in town? You know, why aren't farmers putting the pride back in farming for themselves. Like, it's almost like when I read other people's posts and things, sometimes I just feel like people are playing into victimhood and why is it so hard to be a small farmer? Of course it's hard. Farming's always been hard work. But I feel like it's up to us as farmers to bring back the dignity. And that revolves around how we act, how we speak, how we interact with our community and, you know, however that is locally or globally. But I feel like no one's gonna give us, you know, free lunch, as it were. We're making free lunches, that's the point. But it's, you know, it's up to farmers to hold their heads up high and speak with pride. I meet so many people on my travels and people really second guess when I say, hey, yeah, I'm a farmer and I'm super proud of what I do. And I'm more excited and passionate about what I do than what they do. And it makes them think. And it's really interesting for me because it's, you know, farming used to be such a noble profession and it's regarded as like a lowly thing to do in a way. But now we're changing that, you know, I couldn't think of a better life for myself, for my kids. I was hearing from Johanna yesterday that the neighbors were mentioning that they think wild boar had been in their forest. And I came up here late last night because I knew it wouldn't be wild boars. I'm seeing signs of wild boar around here, but it's piglets. The little piglets have been escaping and they've been snuffling through their woods, just turning the moss and things over, which is, you know, not creating much damage, you can see here. But it's the sort of thing that people are very sensitive about. So I wanted to come and check it out, but I had an amazing experience up here in the dead of night. It was just alive. It was, I don't know, 10:30, 11:00 clock at night. And I've got a very nice head torch that really illuminates very brightly. And this place is magical. I mean, and with the pigs up here too. I was thinking about this idea. Every time you bring an animal to a piece of land, it supports the. The conditions for up to seven more species to exist there. And I was reflecting on that a lot recently because, oh, there was so much light. I mean, I had my head torch on and I could see about 40 bats just whipping through the trees, like catching insects. And there's so much insect life. It's here right now even, but you can't see it with the light. But at nighttime it was just wild and I was disturbing birds roosting in the trees. The pigs were waking up when I came in and they were really cute. They were just sleeping under the trees in little cuddle puddles. But it was just breathtaking how much life is going on. And it's something I've noticed since we've showed up and started farming intensively. It's just creating the conditions for so much life. I mentioned in a video a couple of weeks ago about the birds and just so many young birds moving in and you know, having their young here now. And it. It's got to be that thing, you know, we're creating a safe island where things aren't getting sprayed, things aren't getting trashed and life is being supported. And, you know, it's really. I'm really noticing it and, you know, it's not circumstantial, it's for sure the creation of habitat that is supporting life to flourish. And, yeah, it was really breathtaking. I wish I could have filmed it because it's surprising and it's so important to go and view your land at different times of day under different weather conditions and you see so many things and it's those little things that instruct decision making in an intangible way. I can't really describe how, but so many decisions come about from, you know, random observations that take place very early in the morning. Often for me, like 4 o' clock in the morning. In the summer, it's light and everyone else is asleep. So I sometimes like going out and about on the farm because my days are quite hectic and a lot of people wanting my attention. So for me, it's the ideal time to, you know, go and see what's happening around the land. I'm walking back now across my neighbour's land and just moss, very few grasses, stunted grasses. And it's just been amazing to watch our land transform from this to thriving grassland. That's the neighbour's land just there. And here is our land. And this has been grazed about seven weeks ago and this time it's as tall as my knee, not fully recovered, but very different to what we started out. Sorrel and ladies mantle. And there's clovers, vetches, very different power of chicken. They've been putting in these boxes around the village because of the burying of the electric Cable which is going to open up our viewscape but also give us a bit more room around the fields. And now I'm walking back along the road. This is where Reuben is the big boar. And you see how the land is regenerated in here. It's amazing to see all these pasture species coming back in and wide spaced trees. We're looking to turn it all into wide spaced open agroforestry with grazing in between and hopefully our new sheep herd minus cow. So we might have to change our logo and take the cow off and stick a peacock or something in there. There's the big man himself. Hey, Reuben. He's sleeping. Hey Ruben. He's lost his winter coat now. Hey Reuben, am I waking you up? Hey. I don't know if you will get the scale of this pig, but that's one big pig. Lindenwood don't grow as big as some other breeds but he's a. He's a mighty pig. So last batch of boilers all gone. We're down to three more slaughters for the rest of the year now. And it's been very useful, very smooth this year. And so we're still doing our feed trials and we've got birds on different ratios of boiler pellets and grain and some on pure boiler pellets for restricted time. So unrestricted feed for a restricted time. And then we have some on layer food which a consultant recommended to us. But they actually seem to be the birds that are least vibrant in my mind. And so we're going to keep the experiment going to. I was saying before, like we've just bought bulk feed this year in silos so it's a different quality of food. So these little things make a change. And so we're just testing it out to see what gives us optimal bird health and produces birds we like. So this lot are in one of the new style roller pans and it's been a bit wet so they're looking a bit grubby. And it's difficult when there's so few because you can't set up the fence properly. But we're getting some shorter fencing to put up 50 and 25 meter pens. But it's nearly dinner time so they're expecting me to have food which I haven't got. I've been cutting a lot of. There's a lot of birch and willow coming back in the field here, like here. But I cut all over this land and a lot of spruce at the top. We've never been able to get eggmobiles over here because there's a few springs coming up here that go down over the top of failed drainage. They tried to drain this field twice, but I've decided to make pocket ponds in here. It's quite clayey soil and the drainage has failed. So just build little receding pocket ponds on top of it and maybe plant trees and things. I'm letting these alders grow here. Just running broilers down here once. Now, this is the first time we've had birds up here because we can't get the eggmobile across. It's too swampy. But it's made a massive difference to the grass already. So we've cut the trees and we're going to dig a sort of crossing here and put a pipe down with some gravel or something just to be able to get over there with the eggmobiles because it really has improved the ground dramatically. And I want to improve the field conditions here. But the fields are in good state. They've just had boilers over them. You can see where they've been. But they're recovering still. Growth is still quite fast now at this time of year. And I expect growth will, you know, dormancy will kick in maybe start of October or so tell with the weather. But I want to have this ground with a good covering on it before the winter and that should happen. It looks like it's well on its way. Pond has been serving us beautifully. And these are the young alder that we put in with new grapevines this spring. You can see they've grown. They've grown pretty good. Nearly 70, 80 centimeters and mulch is holding up. You can see the grapes are in there. They're just getting a bit overgrown, but they're still well mulched. So I'll be coming back through here and just clearing it up a bit. A lot of clearance to do just to drop this grass and nice little young vines here and some vines to just thin out here and chop through here as well. But liking this, the way the GCL is covering over now. So we didn't put any rocks back on here just because we couldn't be bothered to go and collect them, really. But it's grassing over and the clay seals around it. So it's still leaving water to the pond, no problem. And good stream flow again Now. It was drying up earlier a few weeks ago as it dried up, but lots of water flowing around now. We've had a lot of heavy rain and we got nice grapes are growing. Right up in the trees. That's all today, folks. Just a quick update from around the farm and lots to do before I go away on Friday. So just organizing, making notes, making sure everything's in line, and look forward to seeing you in the next video.