S5 ● E15 I'm back on farm. Seeding veg. and planning caterpillar tunnels

Back at the farm now, Astra's been taking real good care of the farm and I've had a much needed break. And today I just wanted to make a quick video to update you on the book project and basic overview of the changes happening at the farm this year and where we're at right now. I've put the book project down and I know that will disappoint a lot of folks. I was really hoping to have it out by the spring, but it was very complicated book to write and making a comparative analysis of all these different enterprises and making it relevant and applicable across cultures, across marketplaces and continents is very challenging. And I was diving right into it, but it was stressing me out. And this year is all about balance. I feel like, you know, we have so much to celebrate here and this year the theme is not pushing things, it's about finding work, life, balance. And I really wanted to honour that. And I was feeling stressed and I had to make an unexpected trip to the uk. So I just decided to shelve that project for now. And now the season's starting here. I'm not going to pick that up again this season. So I'm sorry for that, you know, for the anticipation and let down for anyone really waiting for that book. But yeah, it feels really good to just drop that in the face of all the planning and preps for the season now. And we've got Nicholas and Carla coming in a couple of weeks and then it's only a couple more weeks till the other apprentices show up. So things are warming up even though it's still 60cm of snow and freezing cold outside. So here we are in the lean to greenhouse where seeding is underway and we've actually nearly filled this entire lean to greenhouse. It's holding temperature quite well. We've got the. If you remember, Raggy, I'm just going to sit you on my knee while I show people up above the door here. There's a fan on the thermostat that's blowing in air from the wood stove in here. And right now there's no lights on because everything's not sprouted. Nothing has sprouted yet. But you see we've also got a little low powered heater here and the sun's come out today, which is unusual right now, and you can see it's holding at 24 and when the sun isn't out, it's been holding between 17 and 19 degrees even at night time, which is awesome. So a bit of a logistic challenge this year. You can see we've got thousands of leeks and onions going on. We've got 1500 tomatoes in already and they're going to all get potted on. We don't put tomatoes out until typically mid May at the earliest. And so it's going to take a lot of logistics to put all the plants out this year. We're thinking we might end up using the brooder because we're going to possibly start our broilers later this year. We're scaling down a lot of things. We're going to be doing about 250 to €300,000 in sales in the six months of production now. But we're going to be doing less broilers and we're going to be doing more hens. We've got 1200 hens coming as the new flock and working with Rico a lot for the gardens. And we won't have any sheep at all. We're just going to have the cows. What do you think about that, Raggi? Yeah. You're happy with that? Can you see the cow here? You can see it on the screen. Where's the sheep. And the pig? Where's the pig and the chicken? Look, look, look, look. We've also got a few microgreens in here. We've moved them out of the wagon just because it's so much nicer in here. Because we're below the ground, we can use water in here very easily. And so we're going to end up needing the wagon for seeding additional seeds. We've got loads of herbs. We're thinking to expand the herb garden this year and I want to put a lot of edible flowers in. So part of. We're trying to find this work life balance, but also like not pressuring ourselves to produce too much. I want to focus a bit on the beautification of the site and have more flowers and have a bit more diversity in the crops. I think there's a phase in the business where you're trying to shave off all the things that aren't needed and trying to maximize profit everywhere. And. And I feel like after that phase is like going, well, we've kind of reaching another point now where it's like, well, actually it's nice to do certain things that perhaps aren't so profitable, like growing certain vegetables that we just want to eat and not necessarily super profitable, or having flowers everywhere just for beauty. And so that's a bit of the. Of what's going on this year. What's up, dude? You can see some More. Oh, you saw a spider. Spiders out. There's one on the wall. Spindle. A bit of organization to go on in here. This is a lot of seeds here stacked up and I got to get it all sorted out. We use Johnny's in America, but we also use Tamar Organics in the uk, King Seeds and a few other small supplies as well. What I've got here is a seed calendar for the year. And so these yellow. We're in March here. So these are things I've already seeded. This is all the leeks and onions pretty much. I've put in all the tomatoes and some extra crops for the caterpillar tunnels that we're growing. Today we're here. I'm just sorting out some herbs and other things. Tomorrow is the last of the spring onions. And what you see, I don't know if this will pick up, but you can see where s seeding bed S39, two times 64 cells. Three varieties in one bed. That's kale. It should actually say kale there. So that's a little mistake to iron out. Yeah. And There's a receding N38 that's 1 times 144 cell. Tray of lettuce, flashy trout. And so we got these little symbols seeding. And for the first couple of months it's basically all seeding. But then it will also tell you on this calendar here we are in April where things really get going. But you'll see then we have symbol for harden off. So you take these trays out to harden off for the week before they get transplanted and tells us when we're putting our cucumbers out. You see, it gets pretty busy. May is very busy. June, then July and then August, September, it starts to really quieten down and then our veg supplies end in October. That's when that boxes tend to end. Thing we're super excited about this year is developing a European model of a caterpillar tunnel for folks that are wanting to get into mobile extended growing season stuff in Europe because currently it's only Farmer's friend places in America. You can get this. We've bought some components from Farmers friend that I'll explain in a moment. But we're working with first tunnels who we have been recommending for years using their standard 4.3 meter wide hoops because that will cover four of our 75 centimeter beds and end up in the pathways on each side. So we're going to test a 20, 30 and 40 meter model. Play with all the Variants and help make make a kit that allows people all over Europe to be able to buy a turnkey solution. So basically the caterpillar tunnel is a bunch of hoops set into rebar that's buried in the ground. And then the bits that farmer's friend have done a nice job of are these little stainless steel plates. So imagine there's a bit of rebar sticking out of the ground. This will sit on top of that and then the pole of the tunnel will sit there. And then you have a string criss crossing to each of the carabiners on the bottoms of the post. And you can have it either X shape or just going over once, depends. But a double one will be obviously better for wind protection. And so what this does is means that the metal post can sit on here, the string can sit here and the plastic has room to move it up and down. And then they use these to just sit by their own weight on the actual posts. And these move up and down the posts that allow you to secure the plastic over it so you can lift the whole sides up both for access and for airing those structures out and facilitating watering, etc. So we're going to play around with these bits and think of a good way to get them built here. This is stainless steel and pretty thick, it's very good quality. And these are also stainless steel, these clips. So this is one of the key components that we need to work out how to get made here. And it's important we get a European model because it's just not efficient to send steel structures and all these bits across from the states. It's pretty easy componentry to get built here. We're going to be working to find sort of best solutions for 20, 30 and 40 meter tunnels. We're going to try with ridge poles for extra rigidity, corner bracing, different ways of doing the ends and just play around with it to find a good setup for setting up a kit so that people can source them all over Europe very easily. So that's quite exciting. We're going to have a 30 meter one in the new north beds here, 40 meter ones stretching all the way across the beds there. And in the south we'll have a 20 meter one. But it might be this year that we're actually using the 20 meter one to harden off crops or to put our potted tomato plants in because the tomatoes don't go out until mid May at the earliest. And there's chickens in the greenhouse till around that time too. So we'll need somewhere to grow them on because we're scaling up the veg production this year because of Rico and we just don't have the space in our lean to greenhouse, etc. One level it can feel like spring is coming. I can hear the birds singing. But it feels like it's going to be a really late spring this year and I imagine the ground will stay frozen quite late. It's going to be helpful hopefully to have these caterpillar tunnels to extend the season. But because we're so far north, it might not actually help to extend the season so much at the start of the year. Certainly at the end of the year it will help and it will accelerate crops growth, that's for sure. But it could be that the ground is frozen well into late April and we won't be able to even get the tunnels up. So one project I'm really excited about is building a spokery for our chickens primarily, maybe turkeys as well. Here we're outside the slaughtery and this window here is where we can take birds out of the clean room. So there'll be some process where we're packing fresh chickens and then we take chickens that we're smoking out, put them in crates of brine, wash down the refrigerator, put them back in to keep them chilled. Next day, after about 24 hours or so, we'll take them out and put them in a smoker here. It's going to be a simple unit, maybe two by one meters with brick on the bottom walls and maybe cement floor and then wood and well insulated on the walls and roof. We're going to use the model of the man that's going to teach me. He lives about 45 minutes away and he's basically going to show me how he smokes in a super simple, low cost smoker. I'll do a video of his setup sometime because it's really inspiring. Right now we're doing smoked chicken for customers on Ricoh and giving out samples for restaurants. And we're paying quite a lot to have them smoked. So it's something we should definitely be doing ourselves longer term. If you've been following us for a long time, you'll remember we were considering converting the other wagon like this. This cost us €200 and we kicked it out as a slaughtery, one of Europe's lowest cost slaughteries. But we have another wagon like this that we've been using for microgreens over the winter because it's easy to keep heated and we used it as accommodation in the past. But we don't really need it anymore. So we're thinking we might turn it into a meat processing room and put the smokery, like a fully automated smoking facility in that. But really it's a huge investment, maybe €10,15,000 for the whole thing. And we can do the smokery on a much lower cost. We're going to use an old sauna heater, so it's on three phase. You've got the three phase socket here, so it's very easy to run. It's going to cost us a few thousand crowns to build a smokery and add a bit of workflow each week to processing chickens. But I'm really inspired to learn that, especially with a mentor who's really excited to pass on his life's knowledge smoking primarily fish, but sausages and other meats as well. And he's been doing some chickens for us too. So I'm thinking that's going to get built here. And so we're going to be doing less broilers this year, but smoking them, which potentially doubles their value. So it's a great way to increase revenue while doing less birds. A large part of the focus this year is getting balance between work and life and having time with family and all these things. And we're just really not putting so much pressure on ourselves this year. We're trying to keep our work week sensible because it's very easy to overstretch yourself here in the summer when you have such long daylight hours. I think when you're establishing the business, you are really striving to shave off all the inefficiencies and make everything as profitable as you can. But really, success isn't just about the money aspect. So that's all today, folks. Just a quick little update to let you know what's going on and farms still waking up from the winter. Thanks as always for watching our videos and you can click subscribe if you haven't already. Let your friends know. Let's spread regenerative agriculture much further. Exciting year this year and I'm really excited to document what's going on. You can find out a lot more in our book, Making Small Farms Work in the links below. Below. We'll see you in the next video.