S4 ● E101 Setting up infrastructure, storing & selling produce and other things...

Had a really nice relaxing day. We've been putting cement on the footers for the polytunnel and building a bridge over the stream to take the weight of the ATV across and setting up logs ready for mushroom inoculation tomorrow before I head off to the uk. Great to hear water twinkling again. There's been a lot of rain. Evening moves. We're on our neighbor's lawn and they're done here. So it's time to go. These little calves are getting pretty strong. This little calf's lost. Making a little laneway to get us over to this strip. We haven't grazed on the neighbour's lawn but we originally when they said we could use their fields. These are the other fields that we graze up behind the trees here. They didn't want us coming up too far close to the house, but we've ended up. They invited us to go all the way up to the lawn so we've been doing that. Nice to see the. The calves are getting very bold, very strong. There's a couple of weaker lambs in there, very small lambs that are not doing so good. I'm not entirely sure why. Could be a parasitic thing. You can see the extent of the forestry. The machine's been working day and night. It's a very expensive piece of machinery. So they have to run that 247 to get the economy of it. But nice. We've taken a good amount of grass out of here and not grazed it too heavily and so that will sit well over the winter. Growth will slow down now at this time of year and end again in October. But to get them all out over here we're putting up a paddock that extends to the new grass. So we've got the laneway to join here and we'll get the cows and sheep over here in the morning and then we'll just build a new paddock of fresh ground around that and take the old fence. We just got some new nets arrived for the broilers so we bought 25 meter and some extra 50 meter nets for the new pen design. And that allows us like now we're still doing feed trials. We can put a 25 meter net around a smaller number of birds. We only have three more slaughters left for the rest of the season. So we've got a lot of birds stored in the freezer. Big freezer space we hire and they're going to go for the smoking. When we build that, hopefully over the winter we'll start that process and do a lot of smoke birds for next spring. It's a way to increase the revenue without actually doing any more birds.

All right, we're rolling into the Torsby campground here. There must be a few hundred places to camp and the season's coming to an end here. We've been delivering here all summer to a nice restaurant, nice fresh seasonal veg on a weekly basis. But the barbecue there is over. The barbecue in the buffet is over. So we have some veg box and egg customers here. It's quite a neat place. The old man who we may see inside, he's built all this by himself, perhaps with a couple of friends, but the story is that he built it all by himself. This is the veg that we leave for the customers. We leave a nice list for them. What's in the box? We they just come on their own time. They know the drop off point and few of them get eggs every other week. And it's quite nice, just this little shop. There's a little advertisement for the farm. Sorry for the shaky camera but just to give you an idea what's going on here. So now Maria and I are gonna head off to Suna. So this is Maria's first time coming out to market. We've just left Torchby. We're now going to drop off at. There's a local fish seller. I'm unfamiliar with his fish catching and packaging practices but he sells smoked trout, smoked salmon sometimes and really nice little place he gets. Him and his wife get a small veg box, a tray of eggs and chicken sometimes. But Maria, what's it like so far for you?

Really nice. Yeah, it's very nice to see where the product stands. Yeah.

And are excited to get some ice cream in town.

Very excited.

What flavor are you going to get?

Chocolate.

Chocolate ice cream.

Chocolate ice cream.

Okay, there you have it folks. It's going to be a chocolate ice cream. So this is one of my favorite places to come to. This is the fish guy and he's got his little honor system box here. You write your name down, what you've taken and some nice fish available. All sorts of different cuts or different prices to choose from. I'm quite a knowledgeable fish man as you can tell. And so here's. We leave his eggs here and the vegetables as well. If we have a chicken, we put the chicken inside the fridge, bottom rack and everyone's happy, including this guy. So coming up here on the right hand side is one of the only places to stop and pull over and eat actually. And it's interesting It's a burger joint if you're homesick or you're into Elvis or old car American cars. It's a great place if you like good old fashioned sloppy cheeseburger and fries and milkshake. Good old fashioned stomachache. It's a really good place to go, to be honest. But it also is a reflection of the lack of choices. And the next chapter of Ridgedale is buying pizza joint, which is about 10 to 15 km up the road. And for people going on long journeys in either direction, it'll represent one of the only places to stop to get real food. Not in quotations, just the actual definition of what food is. It will be real food and it'll have a reputation for hundreds of kilometers. We know that people who are traveling on long journeys will have a place that they know of where they can come to get fresh chicken, eggs, vegetables, pig, sheep, a whole variety of products that come from the farm, hon pickles, all sorts of things that I can't think of right now because it's going to be next level. I'm currently on this level. So anyway, here's some beautiful scenery. Not to worry. I'm hands free, the steering wheel that is. And here we go. We're heading on our way up to Ulfsby. Ulfsby is a bed and breakfast. They order eggs twice, 12, 12 trays of eggs 12 times 30 every two weeks. And they've also become a decent veg customer. They've ordered some. They order micro greens from us and peas and some salad every week. And it's also an opportunity to see that, you know, you don't need to necessarily have large restaurant orders. If you are driving a route that has a few different restaurants on it and you get small, consistent orders from all of them, it adds up quite substantially by the end of the year. So we're almost in Sune and. Well, we're in Sune. We're almost at market and of course it started raining. Now we do have a tent to stay dry and keep our customers and our products dry. But I'm wearing sandals. We have no coats. And so we're going to get. We're probably going to get quite wet. Karuan in. In Swedish they're beautiful. Ben Spice has put a lot of effort into harvesting these and making them available. They're good. They're selling at 150 crowns per half kilo. All right, pulling up to the freezer space here. Here we are at the convention.

And.

We rent some freezer sprays from them. These kanga Boxes are Fantastic. I've got 44 turkeys in here. There's four turkeys in each one. And they do a very good job keeping the turkeys chilled down. A couple of big boys in there. So I'm here inside of the consumed farmland, parked outside this port here, and we bring the boxes out onto this loading dock back here, chuck them up there, bring them inside, close the door. And now what we're using here that they're allowing us to use is a crate pallet like this and these wooden crates that you can stack up and four high should be enough for our 44 turkeys. Just put some clean cardboard down there at the bottom to stack them up. It's minus 28 in here, right? Yeah, around that.

Okay.

It should be. But when you drive this.

Okay.

The wind gets in the face and.

Yeah, yeah.

So it's winter time in Canada.

Yeah.

There's not a lot of stuff in here. It's like. It's kind of weird that it's so empty, right?

Yeah.

We.

When we got the word, we had.

To buff them some.

Okay.

So these are the turkeys we just did. They're quite a little bit bigger. We got 6.9, 5.8, 5.5. These are turkeys from last week, bagged up a bit differently and they had an average of four and a half kilos.

So these guys just came back from Rico with a gift. This is made of Ridgedale eggs from our friends the Bakers. That's really good, man. How'd it go, Enrico?

It was really good today.

Yeah. Yeah.

It looks like it's going well for everyone. So we have a lineup of about 10 people for the whole hour and people show up early, so maybe an hour, 15 minutes. Yeah, that's good.

Solar powered organic matter harvesters and compost machines. These cows are beautiful and it's going to be really sad to sell them, but it's time to get more clear about the economy of this lot because they've been giving us ample meat supply, milk supply, but it's not an economic part. It's been largely to benefit the people coming here to have an experience handling larger animals. But it's time to shape everything up. We're getting, you know, everything's been going very well at the farm, but now it's time to step it up a gear or two. Some people making comments about, you know, me taking it easier and having more rest. And I've just got to say, hey, I'm, you know, I am excited to do this stuff. I'm doing. It's not that I need a holiday from the work I do. I mean, I'm about to really begin. I feel like it's. We're really going to start pushing the limits of what's possible in small farms next year. And I think that, you know, I have boundless energy for it. I get physically tired and I get mentally tired dealing with a lot of people. But that's changing and we're just designing it smart. And I've, you know, been well aware of what I've been getting myself into. I mean, I don't need to take a break from what I'm doing. I love it. I find rest in moment to moment, you know, awareness in my working day. I don't think of rest as something, oh, I gotta stop doing something now and take some rest over there. It's not how I relate to rest. It's a state of mind and a choice we have moment to moment. So thanks for your concerns, but I don't have those concerns myself. Yesterday I was talking about how much life was going on in the forest when I walked up at nighttime to look at at the pigs. And today I had this wonderful experience with a sparrowhawk, just catching a young magpie as I was preparing for some logs for mushroom inoculation tomorrow. And I really interested in birds of prey. You probably don't know, but I've always wanted to be a falconer. I've always dreamed of having a falcon and now this time in my life I could actually, you know, feed from dead chicks or whatever and have space to fly a falcon. I'm in a country where you're not allowed to have falcons, so that dream's not progressing any further here. But it's very nice to see like there, you know, there's several apex predators living in the farm and that's a beautiful measure of things going good for me today. We managed to get in all the concrete footings. A lot of people skimp on these footings. And all of our posts, we actually adapted these posts. We've welded rebar off the sides of these. They didn't come with an anchor plate, so we've welded our own bits on and put them all level. So it's a really nice job getting these perfectly level. And you see they start to rise up out the ground slightly over here as it's not perfectly level. But foundations and roofs, these are things you don't want to skimp on. And for us in this windy climate, you really don't want to have these contraptions under the wind stress they get without being properly cemented in. It's a bad choice in my mind. So we've put the effort into cementing everything well and level. And excited to start putting the frame up now. Very happy with this pad. It's very nice. Someone asked about the tunnel manufacturer we use. We use first tunnels in the uk. I like their website and I like their service. I bought a few of their tunnels and I've sold several dozen through them, you know, by recommendations. And I like their service. It's good. It cost about €180 to send 2,000 kilos from the UK to Sweden and it arrived quicker than stuff ordered from Stockholm Wood. So very happy with that and very excited to see this tunnel up. Now, someone asked for a rabbit update. Well, unfortunately, someone that was staying here had a dog here and the dog ate most of the rabbits. We only have two males left. That dog has been removed. Obviously, that's not a dog we want around the Earth farm. And it's a bit of an unfortunate accident, but that's sometimes what happens. And it's made me resolute that never having dogs here again. Like, we. We've had a few people bring dogs that are staying here and it's always ended up me feeling like, nah, I don't like it. If people have dogs, they need to have some way of taking care of them and not bringing them to our farm. It's just too big a risk. And the dog that's eating livestock will soon, you know, twig that there's chickens in the fence and, you know, start to eat them too. Pond's healing in nicely. The geese have been hanging out a lot with the ducks. We've got a bit of compacted ground here that was cut just to sort of smooth that transition off, because we come out of here with the eggmobile. And so that ground is subsoil and very heavily compacted, but it's starting to sprout now. But most places it's doing good. The ducks always have a bit of an impact on the edges and we could have netted them out, but I don't want to net them out. You see, they love having access to the pond. And the good thing about this. Hello. These two have grown quite a lot since I've been here and they're quite grand. Love having geese around. Yes, you're the bus. But it's quite nice, actually, because these guys. This pond is siphoning from our main pond just over here in the vineyard, and it just runs a simple Siphon. It goes down under the road and back up and water is coming out here, but you see how muddy the ducks make it. And that's really nice. If we go across the, to the other pond, that's where we suck water for the market garden. And we have a very nice disc filter in there to allow us to clean the water for the irrigation system. But the ducks are always hanging out in that pond. And it just meant the filter clogged up a lot quicker. So it used to run for like 45 minutes or so before it clogged up, and now it runs an hour and a half, couple of hours. We're not really using much irrigation at this point time of year because it's so moist and raining a bunch. But it has been, I mean, that sound of the river now, that's been dry for a lot of time. This has been working really good for the irrigation setup since I moved it all. It's, you know, had really no problems. But the water here is much, much clearer, you can probably see. And that's the beauty of not having the ducks here. They like to hang out in the other pond. So it's kind of perfect for us. So we've had no energizers on the laying hens on their mobile fencing because we've had it on the broilers up here because they're more vulnerable. So we've had chickens escaping, hiding in the brush, hiding in the ditches below here. And we're just testing now a new energizer. And gotta say, I don't really like it. I got impressed. I've researched all solar mobile fencing energizers you can get. And the reason I went for this one is that it's more powerful than most. It has six stored joules and up to 15,000 volts. Now, it's interesting because most mobile models are not very powerful shocks. And the trouble is with things like poultry fencing, where you have so many electrical lines throughout the net, especially in longer grass when it's naturally grounding out, because, look, they, they build this so that the bottom line is not electric. And then all the ones above are. So if you're on any length of grass, it's just not working so good. I bought this one because it's got a 20 volt panel. It's several hundred euros, same price as the smaller ones. But it didn't come with a battery, so I've had to put an old car battery in there and it was only reading 1100 volts on here. But what I think is it probably has a lot higher stored joules, so the shock is more powerful. And so I think, yeah, there's definitely no hens escaping today, are there? And they're standing back from the fence, so it's good. It's. You know, chickens learn so quickly and they teach each other what's going on. We just had a few days without an energizer and they suddenly there's 20 in the bushes. Curious birds. I like chickens a lot, but, yeah, I'm not sure I like this one so much, so I really like the ones we've had. This one's a bit funky design in that you've got a dial here that turns up the voltage, shows you the battery charge, etc. But it's really clunky design. It's right under there where you can't reach it. I mean, I appreciate that that's weatherproof, but, you know, it's a bit of a pain in the bum to move and it's quite big. That's not a problem. But I wish we still could buy our old ones. These are our old units and we've got several of these, but they stopped making them and we get them from a UK company, Hotline Fencing, and it's an old Helios model and I like it because of its size and weight. The battery is not too heavy, it's quite easy to move. Supports for the solar panel are metal, which means it's lasted longer. It's in its fourth season now. One thing that they, you know, has been poured. They have nice clips at this end of the fencing, but really crappy ends at this end. So we've had to replace wires many times. And here's a bodge job someone's done, but I just bought some new wires and clips to remake all of these a bit better. That's been a weak point because it's a cable inside an insulator inside the outer wire. It's very brittle, so it easily breaks, which is not ideal. So actually, some thinner, normal cable is much preferable. They still make this shock box, but not with the integrated solar panel. And I'm going to write to them, actually, and ask them what's going on with that, because I have had these four years moving every single day in Swedish climate, sitting in a dark barn all winter and flawless again the next season. I really like them and they're much more powerful. I looked at all the best fencing supplies around the world and, you know, no one's got a shock box that I just feel is worth having for running a couple of poultry nets through long, wet grass and having the robustness to move every day. And these have been really amazing. I actually really like them. And so the thing you need to consider is the stored jewels as well as the power, because it takes a lot to run these nets. Now, an energizer like that can run, you know, a dozen kilometers of wire, but only two of these nets. I bought this one thinking that it would be more powerful than this one, but it's not. It doesn't turn out to be. Although the stored jewels is the interesting bit. So I think I will put it on the pigs and bring the pigs. The pigs have got a solar one up there, so I might bring that one down. Got some tidying up to do. I want to trim all this grass back. It's just a bit overgrown and the cows and sheep aren't coming back in here. And, yeah, just tidy this place up a bit before the long winter begins. And on the lookout for some trailers. Going to build another eggmobile starting soon. But I might lift. This is eggmobile number one, the first one we built. And I've said before, it's a really nice design. It's really compact. And because it's got this wedge, a, we can park into the wind and B, the rooster, you need to, by regulation, have a certain amount of roosting space per bird, which you need to look up for your local area. But you can fit a lot more roosts in this sort of slanted angle. But what I might do this winter, it's an idea I had this morning, is lift this one off the trailer and just pop a new caravan trailer underneath because it's. It's an old car transportation trailer. It's very, very heavy and it gets stuck sometimes. This morning it got stuck and the rhino ripped up the ground a bit because the grass is just long and very wet in the mornings, so the rhino, poor thing, can't get a grip. You can see over here what it looks like. You know, when this is covered in dew in the morning, it's just impossible to get through. So it's all good. But it would be very much more enjoyable to move on wet days. If it's how to load the trailer, it wouldn't be a big job. So I'm considering that this is the intensity of manure where the birds slept last night. Now it looks like everything is a bit trampled down, but this grass is vegetative, so no stems are broken and this will just stand back up all of it. We're going to have some very nice grass growing still into December. I would get. However, we got a conundrum because we might not have any herbivores left. They're mostly going to slaughter. Some of the nut trees doing fantastic. And here we are in September and we've got strawberries coming in. So this needs all a good tidy up to get this grass back off the edges. But still got strawberries coming. Very nice. So this silo, which is the wheat and oat we get from our local organic grower, is not quite empty, but getting empty enough that we might begin the relocation. We're going to put it in the old layer barn here. The nice thing about this old style of silos, it's very easy to take apart. We've just got three lorry straps and there's a couple of screws holding the top board together and then bolts down each side. That is all that holds it together. So we can. And these centre supports too. But we can take this whole thing apart quite easily and pop it in there. And the reason we want to do that is we'll never keep birds in here again. It's. It worked okay. They're up off the ground. It's very dry in here, but it's very dark. And I appreciated them being in the. The polytunnel a lot more. But we're on quite a solid floor here and we want this space for parking the ATV in the winter and other heavy tools. This part of the barn is raised up in the air and interestingly, this is an old charcoal basket, actually, from the times when you can't really see. But this is a wicker basket that they would have pulled by horse down from the forest when they used to make charcoal in this area. The fins were very apt on that. But the floor is not so strong in here. It's overlapped boards but up to a meter off the ground and it's a bit ropey. But then if you do the mathematics, it's, you know, it's 10 tons of grain that fit in here, but it's spread on a very large surface. So I think it's going to be fine. But that's a job to maybe get on tomorrow before I go away. Turkeys are just going to sleep now. It's getting dark a lot earlier and you'll see if you keeping in tune with our videos, you'll see the season's really changing now really fast. Summer is short and intense here, but autumn comes quick and frost can come. You know, in two weeks time. I wouldn't be surprised if Frost came. It might be a month yet, but we'll see it changes very much each year. Thanks as always for watching our videos. Really appreciate your views and comments and shares, and look forward to announcing when our books it's about two weeks I think, till we get new copies of the book. I know a lot of people are writing and asking about that. I'll let you know when it comes so you don't need to email about that. And thanks so much. I appreciate the desire to find out more and learn about what we're up to. I wish I could just update that book instantly because there's a million things I could add already, but that's a project for another time. Thanks as always and we'll see you in the next video.