S4 ● E55 Design process on the mind today

Everything's leafing out. And this is one of two of our first peach trees. It's even got flowers this year. This morning, chore time, we've been moving the layers with our group and they're learning about the water systems and broilers here with the broiler team. So we have a little wheel with everyone divided up in groups, and each day they rotate through the different animal chores and then also spaces. And hygiene is a really important part of keeping the farm together, and that involves washing up everyone's plates every day and taking care of the yurts and compost toilets, etc. So everyone is fully participating in all aspects of caring for the farm, the animals and each other, which is how we like to do. Not only is the grass really pumping, now it's bushing out in the silver pasture lanes. These are Ben Lomond, really beautiful large black currants. And the trees are all leafing out and you can barely see all the boiler pens down here. There's nearly a thousand broilers just in the view here. So we will come along and mulch this once the internship starts. All the animal bedding from last year will pull out any superficial weeds. And this is the bedding from last year with the original wood chip mulch covered in fungi that you've seen before and saprophytes breaking that down. But we will do any weeding and remulch all the trees and bushes. It's about a day's work to put all the bedding from the winter onto all the individual berries and trees here, which is many thousands across top field and front field. Chickens, Misa. Misa is our chicken dog. She loves moving boilers, but also putting the hens to bed at night, which is her main strength at the farm. As well as just being adorable. We've been showing people how to use these fences properly, which involves when you collect these nets, to really make sure you stack up the metal poles at the same level with one hand so they don't get tucked up and caught inside each other. And then to also roll them up if you're moving fields, always rolling them towards the actual posts. And this way they're easy to deploy next time and they don't get stuck up. Some people will intuitively roll the post into the net, which is the incorrect way to do it. And these nets are really a pleasure to use. They're quicker than real systems if you handle them correctly. And we're very impressed with these vertical plastic sheep nets. We're using them for the sheeps and Cows over here. And they're way better than standard sheep nets with these verticals. They're just much easier to put up. They don't get tangled so easily and they're much better on lumpy, undulating ground. They stand up nice and strong in those conditions. More wood chips. Wood chips everywhere. We're doing a last major layer of wood chips this year after putting the last of the major compost applications on. And as they say, many hands make light work. This took an hour to put everything down yesterday and it's really beautiful to make such nice, neat, organized, functional gardens. More wood chips. This is the next batch of wood chips that's going on south beds. Just because we've raised up so much compost with the extra additions that we want to level it off with the wood chip now. And that will be the last major addition just to beautify and make the spaces more practical. That compost is not falling off the beds into the pathways. Here's our brewer with our weekly spent grain delivery for hungry piggies. We're looking at design process and how to begin with design. And we've just been looking at Mexico City, one of the most water scarce cities in the world with 22 million people. And we've just been using catchment calculations in our understanding of main ridges, primary ridges, primary valleys. And we've ascertained that 23 million people have 200 IBCs that's a thousand litre tote each landing in their watersheds that used to supply this amazing lake. That is where you find the remnants of the Chinampas in Xochimilco. By defining the main ridge and understanding how much rainfall lands in this region within a year which filled that huge lake. And Mexico City today is a sprawling metropolis with the last remnants of these amazing water systems down in the south, which you can still visit today, which I highly recommend before they disappear. These were some of the best integrated aquaculture, perennial tree crop systems and vegetable pasture growing systems where intensive fish production further irrigated these landscapes. The water in the city has dropped so much now that they pump irrigating water onto any remaining small areas of vegetable and pasture production. Which is ironic because the beauty of the system is that fish poo fertile water irrigated crops passively. The soil for all the fish poop, fertile soil was dug onto these regions. And I had a tour with a biologist friend in Mexico. And it's just such an efficient system which I've also seen in Southeast Asia. We're learning to use laser levels, water levels, Bunyips and A frames and learning about mapping and contours. And then we're going to guess the height difference between a point up here and a point right down at the lowest point in the farm. Just to illustrate how poor our eyes are at determining heights. We're very good at judging distance horizontally. But I'm guessing the height difference from the bottom of the corner fence post and the boiler pan is about 3.9 meters. We've had guesses between 2.75 and 15. So it really illustrates the wide range of perception and why we need these tools to be able to mark lines on landscape to move water passively, to lay out keyline designs to put in guttering on buildings or building buildings. Really important to understand level and slope. 478 the verdict is out. Pretty good. That was measuring from the top of the boiler pan to the bottom of the fence post. It's very hard to guess. So it's an exercise in how bad our eyes are. Building begins. This is going to be our market garden wash station and it's going to double up as a place to park. We just got a new car. The guys went out midnight and bought a car the other day for the intern crew. But we need somewhere to keep the cars over the winter to stop snow coming in. It's going to be quite a flat long roof and buil out the free timber. We've been collecting and Astra's been doing mathematics and they've got a plan so they are busy fixing this up. So we had a great session talking about design process. How to start with a blank slate and really get clear about your context. What it is you're shooting for in life, the quality of life you're looking for. The resources at your management, the money at your management, who the decision makers are in your business, farm, family, etc. And then how to gather all the information and data with the tools and local knowledge digital tools that we have nowadays that we can start gathering data on wind and precipitation and soils and location to markets and all the things we need to actually begin design. The design process starts with schematics really in my mind playing with patterns of land use that respond to the planned activities. But also the land form, how to read landscapes and how that informs the choices of enterprises. The local biomes that tell us what species assemblies really thrive in any place, the animal species that will thrive. And then looking at markets and economy and really working out what's feasible and practical. And then something we impress on people is the sort of time needed for these different enterprises and sharing some of the enterprises here, both the economy but also the time inputs needed to run those enterprises so they can be scaled up and down to meet your specific requirements. Once you're clear about your context, what you're willing to commit to to achieve the quality of life and business you're looking for. Then we looked at some design examples, some of the work I've been doing in Mexico over the years and the sort of planned procedures I would run in that. We mentioned the scale of permanence. Yeoman's organizing framework for larger landscape design has really influenced my design work for many years and sort of played that out through design processes I've done in other parts of the world. And then we looked at a friend who studied the farm in Denmark, just looking at some of their contextual decision making and choices that they've created in starting up their market garden, pastured poultry operation and mob breeding of cattle for dairy and beef in Denmark. So super nice. And this evening we're starting to share participants projects and things they're excited and passionate about. And we have a few evenings during the course where people have a slot to share what they're passionate about. And some of those projects will be real life final design projects with real context and budgets and design objectives that we'll be working on and really getting people familiar with how to go away and do this stuff for themselves. Some really exciting days ahead. Great weather today. We've got some rainy days coming up. Amazing group. Had a lot of fun today as always and really excited for this group and this training. Gardens are looking awesome. Matt and Johanna have been off having meetings with the local restaurants who are buying mesclan mix and romaine heads. We're doing a large amount of rotations of romaine and mescaline and we also have a lot of excess kale and things that we'll be selling off to restaurants. So just setting up meetings recently to secure the sale of a lot of fresh produce. The gardens are really starting to pump now and we're going to be selling like many kilos of salad per week in a new plan that I've talked about in older videos and it looks great. And people are really excited about the products and we're really excited about the quality of the products we got out of the garden so far. And I'll be giving you updates on some of the economics of that and the practicalities, how that's shifting for us to be able to work with different delivery setups. And we'll also be exploring this ricohring I've been mentioning as a different way to interface with customers. So a really exciting year for us. We're flexing in so many areas to find out what's the most efficient ways to do things and the sort of supporting the other businesses locally that we'd really like to support. Also nice and quiet in the Buddha right now. It's interesting these last two batches of birds have been more flighty. They're running disturbed when I come in, which the first batch didn't do at all. But that packing we had in the first batch has disappeared with these two batches, so I don't know, it could have been overcrowding. There were more birds in those batches, but also it could have been the heat because we were concentrating so much on getting the temperature up in the cold weather that we didn't cool them down quick enough over time. But that problem's disappeared and the birds seem great. So nice progress on this front. Thanks for watching our videos. Click subscribe if you want to keep up to date. It's great to share the season this way with you. A lot going on here in a very short time. It's really inspiring place to be with all these amazing people. We've been filming today and yesterday and the filming looks great. There's some great footage that Eric's doing for all the outside sessions and great audio on the indoor session. So I'm really excited to review some of that tonight and then hear the participant shares. Getting an early night tonight. I'm a bit tired and looking forward to the days to come.