S4 ● E120 The Farming Ladder...

So I haven't been posting much lately. I've been away in the UK visiting my daughter. She just turned seven. But here's some thoughts about the farming ladder. We've been. We're running up and down this ancient iron hill fort. This is up above the village where I grew up. And I'm just bringing grace to a few of our spots. But it's quite a. She's hiding behind one of these hills now. She's coming along the ridge. But we've been spending a couple of days in England just with Gracie and coming to these spots where I grew up. And this is the hilllands where I decided to farm. And there's an old heritage here of sheep farming up on the hills. This is the Salisbury Plain. It's the largest north nature reserve in the uk. It's where the military do a lot of field training and a lot of ancient sites. You saw in the video when we came to England last time. This is an old hill fort that extends all the way around the hill, like many hectares. And these would have been dug trenches by hand a long, long time ago, in the Stone Age, even. No, this is Iron Age. And there would have been wooden ramparts all around here. And this is where the white horse is. We're going to see if we can see the white horse. So there are. There's seven. I'm out of breath from running up and down these hills all the time, but there are seven of these white horses in Wiltshire and we actually have the largest one. Our village where I grew up is just on the other side of that hill. And the farmer that's been raising these sheep has. You know, this is all over grazed sheep and cow pastures. They tend to have cows on the lowlands and they run the sheep up on these steep hills and you can just make out the white horse. This actually was the other way around at one point and looked more like a medieval horse. And it had a rider, I think, at one time. But during the Second World War, they covered this up. It was cut into the chalk and it was the young schoolboy's job to clamber down and scrub the chalk clean. Can you imagine doing that, Gracie? No. No. But then what's happened now is they've concreted the whole space and it's, you know, it's an iconic tourist landmark. But it's really on these hills that I decided I would farm. I used to walk a path that. One of our primary school friends had a pig farm here, and there's always been cows as long As I can remember since I was 5, 6. And sheep on these hills, you see how they make contoured tracks for themselves to make it easier to walk around these hills. But this is chalk downland. This is a big mass of chalk that was underwater. And they find over here there is chalk quarries they use for cement. There was a big cement factory here when I was growing up. There was a big chimney stack that they knocked down now. But they found a lot of big fossils. We used to come fossil hunting as kids around these hills, and they found some big sea dinosaurs in these hills as well.

Did you find anything?

Only little ones. I found, like little seashells and animites. All right, see you, Gracie. But, yeah, these rolling hills is. It's really sweet for me to come back to these places. That meant so much to me. I used to run long distance at high level, so I used to come training after school and I would run up hills like this every day after school, often training at lunchtime, doing sprint training around the track. But I used to have to run up and down here dragging car tires at the request of my teacher to get stronger for running long distance. But I love it up here and it's really peaceful and the wind's died down now. And we're just going back to Bristol to meet up with Grace's mother, Michelle, who's living in the community there and is, you know, doing great. And it's. It's interesting to really see that, you know, having two families and living part of my life here in the surroundings I grew up in. And then part of my life, or a big part of my life now is in Sweden. But my heart's really in these landscapes. I know them so well, and I would love to farm around here. I do things differently. I mean, it's a whole video series in itself, actually, but it's fun. I've been reading George Henderson's work that people have likened me to, and I really enjoy his books. He's very entrepreneurial, even if it's in the 1920s way. But, yeah, kept really good records of his farm and really, like, built it up on low budget, which is exactly what we've done at Ridgedale. It's been really fun with the guys looking at our holistic context and the things that came up for us all are about time and about relationships, family. And this big arrangement. To have Matt and Nicholas come into the business in this way means we're going to have to really shape up our act and knock a lot of hours off the Enterprises we run, but also generate double the income, which is really interesting because I don't necessarily need that income myself anymore. But what I'm doing through all this is trying to find a way to buy more time, buying time for family and buying time to take a couple of months off the farm and really just relax into not being there, which is, you know, revolutionary for me, as well as going down to like low daily work hours, like working normal hours, you know, 50, 60 hours a week would be ideal for me. And I'm really happy that I've put the energy in that. I have. And I think you have to, as I've said many times, like, you can't start a rural business. We've seen many great young farmers starting up in recent years and a lot of videos that you guys will watch on YouTube from other successful farmers. But in nearly all cases they're sitting outside a city or in a city where there's a huge marketplace. So to do what we've done at Ridgedale in the middle of nowhere, like really in the middle of nowhere, is amazing. I mean, I really think about that coming here. The first thing when I start driving around a city like Bristol is just how densely populated it is. The UK is about 25 times more population populated than Sweden and 9 out of 10 Swedish people live in Stockholm. Just coming into my village, this is the valleys and hills that I used to spend so much time, especially when I was running. I used to run in these hills every day after school and all the little trails that go around. It's basically one big farm that owns pretty much all of the landscape around here. And they're arable farm like in the old days, wheat cropping on the big hills and they run sheep and cow, you know, probably in a way that hasn't changed a huge amount in 30, 40 years. How are you doing, Gracie? Yeah. Gracie just turned seven, so we've been celebrating her birthday and I haven't been able to come to England much since. When was the last time I came to England? It was quite a while ago, wasn't it? But, well, I came to get the trailer.

I go to Sweden more than you come to England.

That's right, you come to Sweden quite a lot. But we've made a pact and next year we're going to be traveling a.

Lot more to see each other once every two months.

Every two months is a good target, I think, because we're both busy. Mum's busy, isn't she, too? And Gracie's mum, Michelle, is amazing. She's from America. We met in Thailand, but she lives in Bristol, in your community there. And Grace is going to school now and we're off to visit my mother and father. Your grandma and grandfather.

Well, I went to school in Sweden.

You went to school in Sweden and lived with us last winter with Johanna and Ragnar too.

For a year.

For a year. And you learned Swedish, like really fast. I wish we had time. Gracie, this is. I could show you my primary school and all the things around the village that we'll see. We'll go and see my folks and then we'll see if we got time. I could show you a few of the special sites around the village.

We have to go to the stream, see if we can catch a fish.

Oh, Gracie and I are at the science museum. This is one of these cool projection systems. So it's measuring, if I put my hand over, makes it rain. It's measuring height data, feeding it back into the computer and then projecting what it's seen previously. So if I take the top off the mountain, it takes it a second to reconfigure. But this would be such a cool tool for teaching keyline design where I can just primary ridges and primary valleys and essentially build a whole watershed and then show people how to topographically pattern their landscapes or city plans so that we can optimize the gravity feeding of water throughout entire watersheds. That's what this tool is best used for. Here. It's just for learning about contours. But this would be an extremely potent hydrological land planning tool for farmers and for city planners. Go for it, Frosty. Time to move. The cows. Can't even see anything. The mats wait. It's not always been easy with two children in different countries, you know, two families essentially. But it's been amazing just that both my ex partner and Johanna have been so like accommodating to having that. And now really, as time becomes more available in our new planning and new design, it's really important to prioritize family in a way that I haven't been able to with setting up the farm and getting the business stabilized. And it's a really, you know, it's a personal thing I'm sharing here because I feel like it's so important if you're going to start up something like we've got here. Mixed, diverse farm. It's years of really hard work to get to that place. I don't think we could have got here unless I put the time in that I have. And I was fully prepared to do that. And I think it's, you know, it's worth reflecting on. It's a big effort and it involves sacrifices of kinds. Not being able to see my daughter as often as I'd like to. That can change now slowly as we, you know, make different priorities. And really time for family is becoming my number one priority in a way that for many people would be automatic. But setting up an ambitious project like this that benefits so many people in different ways, I just felt that that's not been possible. You know, it's been important to prioritize getting this up and running. And now we have the sort of people in place to support this vision growing, but also allowing me to have more time. One thing that's amazing is to see that we're all totally fine and totally well with the arrangement. And that's largely due to the awesome nature and accommodating characters of Johanna and Michelle. And you know, I think for Grace as well, it's been. She's very keen to keep up to date with what's on the farm and she's well aware of the work involved and it's not always to her pleasure to have me been so busy for some years. But it's really cool we've been talking about the plan for the next five years or so because I'm really excited about sailing, global sailing. And I want to take the kids in five years time. I want to leave the farm for two or three years and go off sailing around the world, taking the kids and do a sort of global trip where we meet people and cultures that you couldn't access without a boat. And I've always loved sailing and I used to sail small boats, but not ocean going boats. But it's something that I dream of and I love to bring those things to manifestation. Grace will be 12, so it'll be like 12 to 14. Ragnar will be 7. So it's a kind of perfect age to take them away and do a bit of home schooling in a way that they couldn't get at any school. So last veg boxes has gone out while I was away and they seem to turn out really good. And it's been really successful. Planning a drop off point in Stockholm. Nicholas is taking a trip there in the first weekend of November and we've sold a lot of produce into Stockholm, which makes us feel like it's interesting to explore wider markets. We've always had a self imposed 50 kilometer selling radius, but the reality is we're outgrowing the marketplace here. We live so rurally that we're producing more than we can realistically sell here. I'm not sure what that's going to look like. We're really focusing on RICO for the next couple of years and just see how that works because it's such a convenient way to develop the sort of drop off points we've cultured over the last few years. And I think it's a really great model. I hope it really keeps on building. But it's cool to see that there's a demand for good produce all over the place. Even in Stockholm where there's a lot more distribution kind of services bringing good grass fed meats and organic vegetables into the city. One really cool aspect of being away is I got to sit and read a book cover to cover. It's George Henderson's the Farming Ladder and I read it because a few people have likened me to a modern day version of George Henderson. These guys set up a farm, £150 capital, back in the 40s and they basically, George set up the farm with his brother, but learned to farm by working different jobs at different farms from the age of 17, 18 and started back in the 20s. And it's a fascinating read for me and I really enjoyed the fact it's like a narrative as opposed to a textbook. I mean it's got me thinking about writing more books actually. But what I loved about this book particularly, it's the first book I've read cover to cover for over a decade. I usually read informational books and I don't read word for word. I scan and speed read and store the pattern language of the book in my brain so that I can access information when I wish for it. And what I loved about this book is I share so many of the principles and attitudes with what George wrote about 70, 80 years ago that still ring so true today. And sharing a lot of thoughts on how important diverse mixed farms are, as they always have been throughout history. But also his attitude to finances. They put a, you know, a shoestring farm together, which we've done in modern times. We started off four years ago with €20,000 or so and it's been amazing to build up a farm on a shoestring and reinvest profits to just keep building up enterprises. And also I've really enjoyed reading about his attitude towards labour and business and keeping accounts because we do that so rigorously here too. And what I thought, I mean I've written a textbook, Making Small Farms Work and I feel like it's a really cool Textbook book for people that really want to get into the details of the practical kind of approach to regenerative agriculture. But what this reading, this book has done for me has really made me consider the next few years and how to take our training in a different direction. Where what they were doing back in the 40s, 50s was training young people who had the right qualities of mind, not necessarily worried about the skills that they already came with, leaving them after a few years with a kind of using a profit share model for wages, which is something that we're looking at here, but leaving them with enough money to go and start their own farm if they stayed three, four years. And that was their intention, but people tended to stay seven, eight years in their system. What I loved as well is the kind of pragmatic approach to profitable business that I think is, you know, echoed in what we're up to here. And I actually thought, I mean, looking at the chapters of this book, I decided I might write a modern day version of it. If I look at the contents here, it talks firstly about the farm and their plan in setting up the farm then goes into poultry, cattle, sheep, pigs. Looks at labor and innovative kind of businesses they set up on the side. In this case they were building corn bins for sale because they could build them half the price of the ones on the market. Talking about taking holidays and the importance of time, farm buildings. And then there's an account of how they changed and farmed in the wartime austerity kind of era. And then looking at their accounts and conclusions. And then there's a postscript of ten years later on looking back and all the principles that George put down in this book. He saw that they still held true 10 years later and they do still hold true today. I really thoroughly enjoyed this and it brought up so many thoughts and it made me realize it's so healthy to get out the farm even just for a few days to change scenery. Now my brain is always hyperactive here, thinking about this stuff all day and night. You know, I can't stop my brain thinking about what we're up to here. And because we're farming diversely, there's always things to think about. But getting away from the farm gave me a really sort of wider perspective on where we're going for the next few years and thinking about time a lot. We've been talking about our context with Matt and Nicholas and Johanna and seeing my daughter and just realizing, you know, where I want to get to in the next few years. It's been really A breath of fresh air actually. And I've thought a lot about how to use this next year as the starting point of building a model that's profit sharing like we're planning, but really looking to train up people in quite a specific way. Something I share with George is the desire that everyone learns every system on the farm, both for redundancy, but for their own well being, setting up their own enterprises and leaves with the money and capital to go set something up. Certainly in the Swedish concept, you know, three years of good work here on the sort of salaries we're looking at producing is enough to buy a farm like this. So it could be very cool model. And part of my context is to. To fit into my five year plan to go sailing for two or three years with the kids is to have people installed that really know the ropes at that time. And that's something that requires finding more local people, I think because people like Matt can't commit too long term because his life is on the other side of the world. And it may or may not be that he can make it for more than a year, for example. But the most exciting thing I thought is I could rewrite this book from our perspective on our farm and update and compare some of the numbers and figures in this book. These guys got really well known after the war because their figures were, you know, way exceeding what conventional agriculture could produce. And we're already doing that on our farm. These guys set up to be able to buy their farm in seven years and did it in five. And we set off to pay off all of our debts in five years. And it looks like we're well on target for that. It may even be that we get out of debt by the start of next season. So it's really cool. I feel like in a good position to write something around a farming ladder in a modern day context. And I really like this narrative approach because in writing our textbook it's kind of. There's no room for storytelling, there's no room for some of the magic that happens in a place like this. And there's so much I would say to people visiting, you know, stories I would tell that fit into the narrative form. And I thought about writing this book over the winter. I'm not sure if I'm ever going to find the time to actually do that, but it's inspired me to do so. And so it's something I'm thinking about. And also this selecting which enterprises fit which pieces of land I still feel that will suit a small booklet that's very visually orientated with a lot of photos and diagrams. But I'm really interested in English and writing and prose and it's great to read an old book like this in old English. Very thorough, very concise use of the language in a way that you can't put forward in a textbook style. And so, yeah, I got inspired to write, so we'll see where that goes. I think one point that I resonated really strongly with was about single pointedness in mind and being able to stay focused on a task without any distracting thoughts or actions or movements. And reading Henderson's work, I see that we share that same approach to our work. I've watched people for many years. I've been running community based learning and working with groups for nearly half my life. And I noticed there's very few people who can remain totally focused and dedicated to a task without getting distracted by thoughts or speech or, you know, fooling around, as it were then. It's been really apparent here, you know, there's some people that have that ability and they turn out to be the people that get the most from their time with us here. And they're most likely, in my experience, to go off and start their own thing. And I think that, yeah, I just notice how I watch people, given the tasks will start performing and then gradually sort of break into conversation and lose focus. And I've always been interested in like, hey, how do I optimize my work? And hey, how do you have a conversation whilst transplanting super fast or whatever it is. And it's interesting for me because I love to be silent most of the time. Like I love to work alone and be very silent and focused totally on what I'm doing. And the reason I'm saying this is because I think it's so critical to, you know, making a complex project like this succeed. I mean, even a market garden or a single layer enterprise is enough to focus on. And it's really observation that leads you to good management, I think, and I see that it's. That's an approach I've had since a young age. But I think I've been looking at how would you teach someone this? And you can't really, you can support it and encourage it and create the environment to encourage that, but you can't really teach someone to approach their life in that way. I think some people are naturally born with that and some people aren't. And I'm thinking about this a lot as a topic at the moment because of a conversation I had with Grace's mother about how the teacher at their school had to play attention games all the time to get the class to pay attention. And in a way, it sort of doesn't support the kids to pay attention. Whereas a bit of discipline and focus. I see our daughter is very easily able to focus in on tasks at hand. And it's funny, I think, you know, the generation growing up today with iPads and computer games, you know, probably has such a short attention span. And you already see it in adults and my peers. I see people are totally addicted to things like Facebook or, you know, social media, and it's really disabling. I've always used those things as a tool and never spent much time. It's partly why I'm so bad at answering comments and messages. It's like I'm just not willing to put time on the computer. It's not something I value at all. And yeah, it's really interesting. I think it's, you know, and it reflects back to that topic of Gracie wanting to make commitments about how often we see each other despite international travel or whatever. And it's. It's not been possible, as I said before, to be able to give time to things outside the immediate environment here to make this project work. And I think that's something, again, I just touch on, to really, like, ground people in my shared experience that if you want to really kick off something like this, it's. It's either going to take you a very long time and with time for family, time for leisure things, or you're going to be going hard at it and not have much time or thought outside of what you're doing. And for me, it's been vital and I love it. It's, you know, it's not. It's almost like I'm not choosing to absorb myself in this thing. It's happening to me through me. And, you know, I guess many people passionate about what they're doing feel that way, but it's a point that came up in Henderson's work and I value it very much. I think it's critical that people are taught a bit more discipline and, you know, taught to focus and complete jobs. And I think it's vital if you want to run the complex business of a farm. So some windy weather and nice sunny days this week. We're still packing down the farm. There's lots of little jobs to do as well as the planning work that's continuing now as we start to build enterprise spreadsheets and start to look at the figures we're expecting to work with next year and I'm doing a big overhaul of the office. I've got a lot of writing to do over the winter and the online course to put on and I always am busy with packing books and things. So I'm restructuring the office to optimize workflows. I got really inspired by the accounts of Henderson and his brother building a new house and really building a farmer's house from scratch ground up to suit the workflow and not waste a single movement or time and their farm life, which is something I really aspire to as well. How do we optimize and make all our systems efficient and purpose built for what we're doing? So I'm doing a radical office overhaul. I'm very excited about it. In fact it's the most exciting DIY project I've ever done. Thanks as always for watching our videos. Hope you enjoy them. Let us know in the comments below and you can give suggestions of videos you'd like to see over the winter as we focus more on the planning sort of end of things. Anyway, you can find out more in our book Making Small Farms Work, an online training which is being released soon is linked there below too. Thanks for watching. See you next time.