S4 ● E128 2018 Apprentice positions at Ridgedale

So it's just two days till I go away on holiday. So I won't be on YouTube much in the next couple of weeks. I'll be enjoying Southeast Asian heat. Snow's melted today, it's a little bit milder and the river's up high. But today's is just a quick video to announce our Apprentice positions for 2018. So if you've been following us, you know that we don't work with short term volunteers. We really like to give people a whole season of production to really get their heads around the different enterprises that we run here. And if you've been following the videos, you'll also know we've restructured how we're doing things and we want to introduce this model of profit sharing to really support the people that come back here multiple seasons. Nicholas will be here for his fourth season. We've got four positions available and basically it's a three year tier system. So people coming in their first year not paid for their position, they're learning on the job. It's a workplace learning environment where they're trained up in every different animal enterprise. And basically we'll all be taking responsibilities for different animal enterprises on a rotation, so changing throughout the year so that everyone gets experience with all the different enterprises and how they run. And then we'll treat the market garden as where we come back to once we've done our animal chores for the day. So everyone coming here gets to learn how the field operations work as well as all the project work around the farm. But we've done all our big investments now. We're not doing any major projects in the next years. We're just refining and tweaking our systems. We've moved away from our internship program. All of our long term education is now online. The online training is now released and the full course with myself starts mid January. And there's still spots available on that for anyone interested in going through a design approach with a farmer, designer and educator to design their own enterprises and property. And I'm excited for that. I'm going to be getting engaged with that again when I come home. We'll put that training online to allow people the time and space to really digest things and apply it to their own unique time, place and circumstance. And then really our training on the farm will be short courses. We're just doing a few this year with Curtis Stone and we're going to do a pastured poultry, both broiler and layer enterprise together over a long weekend and a market garden training later in the year we also have a farm scale permaculture course. But other than that, it's quite a different year for me. I'm going to be on the ground full time, training people on the ground and working alongside in the field. I'm really excited for that because a lot of my summers has been engaged with managing people and it takes a huge amount of energy for anyone that's done that, you know, that it's, you know, it's very consuming and I'm really looking forward to just being on farm fully and sharing responsibility too. So the first year apprentices will come for six months. They get room and boards and amazing. Beyond organic food, we only eat organic food and farm raised food here and access to Wi fi and sauna every day. And these are the perks that come with being at the farm. But then the position for people coming back in their second year will be based around a basic agricultural salary here, which is about €1500amonth. That's without contributions to the food kiddie. But someone can come here and really start learning more about the sales and the back end of things and the logistics of running a place like this, taking on a bit more responsibility and walking away with a nice paycheck for seven months of work. And then people coming for their third year will be invited into the season planning at the end of the season to really get their head around the season planning and all the budgeting and finances and all the back end things and they will be on €2,500amonth. So quite a good salary for an agricultural job around here. Now, I think it's a neat model we've been looking at. How do we improve the learning opportunities for people that are committing their lives to this kind of farming? And you can't learn this stuff at ag school. They just don't teach this kind of stuff. And in fact, there's very few places, you know, working farms where you can learn all these different things in one place. So we want to focus down, really narrow down who we support here. Now we want less people around and we want the right people around. So what we're saying in the application process is like, hey, this is really suited for people who are about to go off and start their own enterprise in the next two years and please tell us about it. We want to know. We will give preference to people who understand the context and the climatics and they're going to be able to use that to their advantage, designing their farm and enterprises, coming here for a season and working hard you could really understand the practical day to day logistics of, you know, the enterprises we run here. But to really learn, you know, that's half of it, like the back end, the planning and the business and the management are, you know, a bigger task, you could say. So to learn that stuff, I reckon takes two or three years of very focused work. Definitely, you know, someone coming here for their third season, like Nicholas, is getting engaged in accounting and all the back end stuff is really learning a blueprint of how to go away and set up a business and I think that's invaluable. Getting paid progressively higher salary whilst being trained and learning something that you can't go and learn through university or ag school or in many places like this. So I think it's a really cool model that we've come up with. We're going to test it out, see how it goes. We don't know if it'll work well for us. The way it's going to work practically is that we'll guarantee half the salary and then at the end of the financial year, come December, we will pay out bonuses based on the percentage profit share. So you might remember in a previous video we were looking at how many hours does it take to run this farm and what does that look like? It's four people working full time could run the operations. And so by having six people it allows us to rotate, have a bit of time out, time off, take weekends out on a rotational basis. And that sort of structure we're going to work out when we get to the farm. So there's a lot of information in the page link below for people interested to find out about the positions and to apply there. We're only taking applications till 31st December. Any applications after that we won't read will just be deleting. So you must get them in between now and the last day of this year. We won't be responding to anyone until at least mid January when we'll be having meetings and discussing all the applications and deciding on on a short list that we contact for interviews. We'll be doing Skype interviews then and narrowing it down, but less positions than we've had before. And I'm really excited for a really small, dynamic team and to be able to spend more time dedicated to training people on the ground in the field. Less time sitting around thinking about conceptual design and the theoretical planning and those kind of things. And save that for online course where people can really extract the juice out of that over a longer period of time with reflection and you know, design takes a long planning a whole farm like this takes time and you need that longer period of time to go back on things and reflect on things and find out information, do research, come back to it. So I think it's neat. I'm happy about it and it feels like a bigger risk. We're going to be putting out, you know, a lot of money into salaries, but I'm up for reward in the hard work, especially people coming back multiple seasons. So I feel like it's a neat model to reward that. The sort of mindset that comes with. Yeah, I'm here on my learning journey, but I'm here to contribute to the whole. And seeing that that extended period over two or three seasons can really give them the whole framework and I'm excited for that. I think it's a cool model. You'll remember I talked about George Henderson and reading some of his models from back in the 40s and 50s. I got really inspired to try this out because I feel like it's. There's not many places where you could come and learn this stuff and in three years be on €2,500amonth salary. It's a big new chapter for us and I'm really excited for it. Nicholas has been amazing with the planning process in the last few weeks and Matt's been amazing too. He won't be joining us. If you remember from past videos. He's going back to Canada to start his thing. But he's been a great contribution too. And so Astrid, who I also invited into the business, is coming today. She's going to be farm sitting for us while Matt and I go away. And Astrid's amazing. She's someone I would love to have here. But she also wants to start her own thing closer to home in Denmark. So it'll be great to see her briefly before we head out. And I'm looking forward to two weeks of tropical fruits and taking it easy, getting some good bodywork done. I've got some, some little niggles in my body that I need fixing out, but I feel like it's time for a break now and come back refreshed and get into this online training, which is another huge chapter for us too. So thanks so much for watching. If you're interested to see the positions or to apply, then you find that in the links below. Don't forget to hit subscribe if you haven't already and share the channel to help spread the word about regenerative agriculture. We need a lot more farms like this in Europe and abroad and you can find out more about the courses as they release. The course with Curtis is up there already and our 10 day farm scale permaculture design training is up there and the other two short trainings we're offering this year will be up there in the coming weeks. Thanks so much for your time and see you in a couple of weeks.