S4 ● E27 1000 day-old chicks turned up at at farm

We've just had a thousand chicks arrive at the farm today. It really marks the start of the season, and the crew is all here, except for Frida, who's coming a few days late now because she's celebrating the end of her diploma with the students she's been studying with for the last few years. So it's a quick update from the Farm.

So our Brazilian friend Natalia has shown up in Birkenstocks.

Nice.

He has no. No boots.

Okay.

So the good news is, is that people always leave behind boots here at Ridgedale. So I just need to find him a pair of 41s and he'll be good to go.

He's never seen snow before. No.

Oh, man, these could be perfect. He's never seen snow before. He's extremely excited, and it's nice to finally have the crew here.

It's been really cold and it's put us back with a lot of things, including, like, welcoming people. We've all been crammed in the house, and it's been fun just getting to know people's characters. And we've just started organizing how we're going to arrange the different tasks. And we're all here with the intentions for learning and growing and doing things together in a beautiful way. And it's a really big part of what we do here. We have a lot more people here than we actually need to run the farm. The people that are coming here are looking to go off and set their own enterprises up. So we want to cultivate the space for the learning to allow these people to really hit the ground running, as it were. And I think of all the people coming here, the core team are the ones that learn the most. And we got an incredible team again this year, and we've been blessed to attract such amazing people from around the world. And it's super exciting to get to know people. And, yeah, we're having a lot of fun already. We're just, like, organizing a bit our daily structure to get into the rhythm. But we haven't set a lot of space, and we've had a bit of a minor emergency with the boiler chicks that you'll see in a minute. But it's been a lot of fun already. And we're just going to watch the preview version of Gracie's Backyard, which is super exciting. And I know Olivia's put a lot of love and hard work into that, so it's going to be really interesting to see what people at Know the Farm think about that. And also people that are just coming here for the first time, how they reflect upon it. It's our first supper with everyone here except for Frida. She's not coming for a week because she's celebrating her diploma. Matt, do you know everyone, where they're from and something funny about them?

I believe I do.

Okay.

Astrid is from Denmark, and it's maybe not so funny, but she's an incredible mathematician. That's hilarious, isn't it? Okay. And then we have Omar from Mexico. What's hilarious about him is he can eat an entire spoonful of sambal, which will make most people cry. And he says, no problem.

And he bought. This is sambal, actually, it's a hot chili sauce. He just eats a teaspoon with every spoon of food. And he bought some nice tequila.

Then we have Carla from Germany.

And.

Something funny about Carla. I don't know anything necessarily funny about Carla. I just know that her parents raised some very nice pigs and she shared this awesome pork product with us, and it was quite good. Then we have Tim. And Tim, I think is from Germany. Although I haven't confirmed it yet.

I can't confirm it now.

Tim is from Germany. And what's funny about that? Is he a funny guy? Which normally people from Germany aren't funny at all. He's funny. What I like about Karl is that when I called him Karlskopf, he said, you don't need to pronounce my name, by the way. That I thought was funny. And also he taught me that I don't. That I. That I can actually. I know more Danish than I thought I did. I thought I only knew one thing, but now I can change the last word and say pretty much whatever I want.

So.

Information. And then we have Robin. Robin is from Switzerland, but Robin actually knows. Between Robin and I, we know 18 languages. I know English and French, and he knows the other 16. There's Grace. And Grace is from England, but also now from Sweden, and then from England and then from Sweden and so on.

Then you forgot America.

And America. I'm sorry. And what's funny about Grace is that she knows lots of stories, but she never tells them. She always asks other people to tell, which is kind of funny. And then we have Maria, and she's from Denmark. And what's funny about Maria is that.

She.

Hasn'T told any jokes yet, which I've heard people from Denmark, like, that's the first thing they do when they meet you. They tell jokes. And I just thought it's kind of funny that you haven't told any jokes yet. I'll step up my game then. And then we have Matty Eli from Brazil. We've just met Matty Ellie because she just showed up today with Natale, who's also introduced them at the same time. Nice couple from Brazil.

And they've hitchhiked from.

They've hitchhiked from London and they've managed to successfully beat the odds, which is that they rely on the kindness of strangers, which I would have bet against, but here you are. So that's.

And they ended up staying last night in with a chicken customer in their cast. Yeah.

And Natalia said it doesn't matter if we have to sleep outside because it's so cool. It's snowing. I've never seen snow before. And he showed up in Birkenstocks and Marieli in Crocs. That was hilarious.

Lucas.

Lucas is from Venezuela and Argentina. There's nothing necessarily funny. So I don't know anything funny about Lucas yet. Except that in his picture he's wearing a rugby T shirt and he looks like this rugby player. But then he told me he doesn't play rugby at all. So there you go. And we have Johanna hiding in the background, which is so. Which Johanna likes to do, even though she has so much to do. She always seems to be in the background somehow, even though she has a thousand and one things to take care of. And it's kind of funny sometimes.

And Ragnar, he's hilarious. He was playing that for me, wasn't he?

Ragnar's from Sweden and he is hilarious.

He loves.

He loves laughing and he loves butter and he likes laughing about butter. I think that's everyone.

And he likes laughing about me and.

He likes laughing about Grace.

So we're having our first dinner together and we're super excited to meet you, Frieden, when you arrive in a week. And then when our team is truly complete and we're having a proper feast tonight, Lilkas is a barbecue prawn.

Argentina, because I'm never going to remember. Sorry about that.

We did a big tour of the farm today just to get an oversight of what we're up to here, but also the context and approach we take here, which is quite different to a lot of places. Permaculture place, as you could say, because of our focus on profitable agriculture. And everyone's seen around the different things. And we like to. Whilst people come here with different roles, say garden managers or farm managers or chefs, we want everyone to be involved in all the processes. It's really important to the functioning of the whole and the team spirit. We have. And it's been a beautiful day today, really sunny, but still bitterly cold into the minus three, four and at night minus six even it stopped snowing. And the snow's melting away now, which is nice. I'm just up at the pigs now before dinner, but it's been quite a shock to get the space heated up for the broodery. And we're going to have a look in there in a minute and I'm really looking forward to hearing about the gifts and strengths and talents that everyone arrives with. We're going to do a session together just looking at everyone's different skills and what they want to learn while they're here. So we can really design a way to facilitate that happening. And it's amazing to see people that have left here what they're up to now, and people starting up their own enterprises. One of the key aspects of what we're trying to do here, besides show and demonstrate profitable small scale agriculture in a regenerative way, is to also facilitate a new generation coming through. And we've got amazing people again this year and people full of passion and excitement start their own thing. And so what we want to do is really tap into what people's particular skills and gifts and talents are areas they want to develop and the sort of topics that they're excited to learn about so that we can really facilitate their experience here over six months. And for us it's a, it's a really mutually beneficial situation. We don't work with short term volunteers here. We like to have people coming long term who are really committing to learning because ultimately everything we're working with here is process based. It takes a long time to learn the little details and insights that actually make it work. And I've said this before, but, you know, you can read about pastured poultry, but until you've run that whole cycle through a couple of times with your senses engaged, you don't really know anything about it. So that's what we're really focused on here and it's something we excel at in my mind. And so it's really nice to like spend some time this week when getting to know each other, getting to know where people are coming from and where they want to go to. So we spend a lot of the first week just orientating, learning the basic rhythm of the farm, setting up places to be comfortable and safe and warm, etc. But also like really hearing from each other. And we're doing this as a big group experience because we love that, we love the social aspect of it. And we love learning from people from different cultures and different perspectives. It's amazing to sit in a room with 10 other people, similar sort of age, who together have all the skills to run an incredible place like this and, you know, even run a small town with the skills that we have together. So I'm looking forward to time out from the sort of daily schedule. I typically have to really just connect with people in a different way before we really start ramping up the activities on the farm. Hopefully the weather is going to change now in the next few days. It's going to be cold at night and so we're going to really have to watch the brooder. But other than that, I think it's generally warming up again and a lot of transplanting in the gardens. On Thursday, the hens will come and we'll have 800 hens out on pasture. And in two weeks we'll get the sheep and cows over to the neighbour's land. It's actually downhill here. I'm up at another neighbour's property above our farm. You might just see the eggmobiles in the background there. So a thousand chicks turned up at the farm, which really marks the start of production. And we had a micro disaster in that the recent cold snap has really sucked the heat that's built up in the walls over the winter from the cows. And we've had a bit of an emergency because it's Easter holidays. All the shops have been shut and we needed to heat this space up more, even with 16 lights that we have. We have four of these lights over each pen, 250 beds in each. It just wasn't heating up in time, even with, like 30 hours of attempt. So we've managed to go out and just get a gas heater as a temporary measure for the next week while the weather is still poor. And, you know, it's just one of these things that you just got to find a solution there and then in a moment, whatever it looks like. But now, happily, in the evening, the temperature has gone up. I have a thermometer here. When the birds arrive a day old, they have not eaten and drunk, so the process has been to introduce about 1 in 20 of the birds, 1 in 30 of the birds to the water. And once a few birds know where the water is, they all start finding the water and we give them unlimited food for four days. And we keep the waters and feeders a bit spread out from under the lights to encourage the birds to run out and get food and water and come Back in, you see they're huddled under the lights here which is typical. If they get too overcrowded though, they start to crush each other. So the temperature is critical. We're looking for about 32 under the lights for a day old chick. It's reading about 30, 31 under this light which is empty. On the backs of the chickens here it's about 33, 34. And these chicks are comfortable. They've got a soft chirp happening. They're not stressed. They're able to get around and get to the water and food. And at this age we'll come in and service the pens about five times a day to clean the water out. You see we have. The water is up on this little wooden two pieces of wood just because they quickly fill it with sawdust. And so we raise it up to an adequate height. That just helps keep it clean long term. But I'm happy now. I was very anxious before because of the temperature in the building. It was about 6 degrees in here this morning and the birds arrived today. So it's been a stressful day. But we can rest a bit now. I'm a bit concerned about the evening. It's going to go down to minus 4 tonight so we're really going to have to watch closely. I'll probably cut up a couple of times in the night to check in here. But it really marks the start of the season. It's the first batch of boilers out of six and it feels like we're really starting to get organized with the new crew coming to how to roll in an effective way whilst doing all the other things that we're doing here at the farm. Thanks for watching our videos and click subscribe. If you want to keep up to date with the farm, you can find out a lot more on making small farms work. I'll book the link below. Thanks for watching. See you next time.