S5 ● E34 Processing old Laying Hens and other updates

Today's first day with the team in the slaughtery taking the old laying hens. It. So we're just cleaning up now. We took half the hens, we're going to take half again tomorrow and then transform the polytunnel ready for nearly a thousand tomato plants that we're putting in this year. We're going to have cucumbers in the small tunnel, the old tunnel and tomatoes exclusively in the big tunnel. The processing went well this first time for everyone in the slaughtery so it takes a bit of time for everyone to get used to it. But we have some positions for people and that carries responsibilities in the clean down also. So it's a big job to clean down the slaughtery after the whole process. I'm really itchy but I'm still covered in chicken. But really good job from the team. It's a little late lunch today but I think tomorrow we'll start a bit early and we've done more than half the bed so we'll finish a bit earlier I think tomorrow. So last bit of the clean down we've done pretty much everything and now I just come in with the foamer, give everything a once over and sluice it with water again. And we're going to pack birds tonight but we're packing them in grey crates because. Because we're bulk processing them into stock which will sell the rest of the year and through the winter. Whole lot of chickens and so about the same amount again tomorrow. And yeah, there's a lot of birds in there. They're small layers are much smaller than boilers. Obviously they're half the weight but it's going to make some amazing stock. A lot of fat on these boats compared to a broiler so they make for fantastic stock. But pretty good job. Very happy with the team effort and just finishing up clearing up. People are potting on cucumbers and things like that today. Soon be done in here and ready to go at it again tomorrow. So something we use now, I don't know if I've shown you folks this in previous videos or not, but we use a foaming device and this is using a chemical. When we originally got permission for this slaughtery it was for using hot water and soap and then cold water as a rinsing agent. But we upgraded to this foamer because it's so much faster. It's a little bit of noxious chemicals but it kills all bacteria. It dissolves blood and grease and that's a major thing with poultry. It's quite greasy and Oily. The floor wet is quite oily. So this is just really good for making sure that that all gets dealt with. I'll just show you a demonstration. You spray this everywhere, top to bottom and I need two hands to use it properly. But this leaves the foam you leave for 10, 15 minutes to seep everywhere. Then I come back and rinse it off with water and I'll come and squeegee the floor clean and then it's ready for the next use. Once they're packed in here tonight, I'll be setting up the slaughter again, ready for an early start again tomorrow. That's the way it goes. Long days and a big task to get the team ready to a massive job, which is a really important part of the farm during this season. So great work from the team. Very happy with the job done today. So first peas are up on nets behind me and super nice. The pea season goes on for many weeks here and really like the snap peas. We've been testing the old irrigation in the caterpillar tunnels and it's just some heads that are sprinkling about 4 0.2 meters wide and we can connect them in. We use for the pump from the pond, we use these gecka irrigation connections. So you see here, here's one output of the pipe. It's a 50 mil pipe that comes up and splits to the north beds in the south setup. So you can then connect the risers that we use to irrigate the gardens. We've been playing around a bit and just thinking about the best configuration and whether we can optimize irrigation. We're having a very dry spell right now, so it feels like we need a bit more. And we've got a lot more crops going in the tunnels this year with the extra tomatoes. So we need good drip irrigation in there. But it's really nice. I've asked First Tunnels if they have any opinions about irrigation kits specifically for this caterpillar design and just waiting on pricing. Still, I'm hoping to hear back this week about pricing and then I think I'll do a dedicated video just about caterpillar tunnels and start building up an email list. And I hope I can help some of you get tunnels before the end of this season. How are the micros, Carla? And how do you like the little shoe trays?

I like them. I think they're easier to work with, they're easier to carry, so it's kind of nice to work with them. And they have a good amount. See the density of this black One is a little bit too dense at some spots, so I've been using less now. But the broccoli look nice, radish looks nice. Peas are always good.

And you want us to build an irrigation table?

That would be awesome. Especially now when it gets so hot. Now they need water.

Much better. Yeah, it gets really hot. Right now it's evenings dinner time for most people and it's 25 degrees in here. But it gets, if you don't come and open the doors quickly in the morning it rockets up to 30 degrees. By what sort of time would you say?

Really fast, like around 10, 11 if you don't open.

Sun is up at about 4:35ish, would you say at the moment. So it's, it gets light really quick and so it heats up in these spaces. We typically been opening the caterpillar tunnels before breakfast on really sunny days. After breakfast, if it's not so sunny and getting ready to plant out these tomatoes. Now we've got a big job in the big tunnel. We need to put up wires to like high tensile wire to be able to run the strings from and we've obviously got to clean out all the bedding. We're going to hire a bobcat or something like that to do that job and then make beds. We'll probably have eight, maybe nine permanent beds, permanent for the summer anyway. There will always be livestock in there. And then it's getting these in the ground and stringing them up straight away. In the cabin where we have most of the tomatoes, they're getting quite big already and they really will need support when we take them apart. I've said in other videos, but they're in tiny little pots and so they're reaching the limit of how long they can be in there now. And it's good timing. It's tight, but that's the way it is. Really excited for these tomatillos. That's a new crop for us. We've done it always as a little home scale thing, but we'll hopefully be adding them to the market stands as well. I'll just give you a sense the tomatoes in here, it's become a little troublesome to water them and Toby's been keeping good care of these. It's challenging. They really need to be in the tunnel. But it's, it's good that they've got such a good start in such small pots in the conditions that we've had to deal with this year. Obviously we can be better prepared for this next year. But it was Very cold when we had these all set up, so it was necessary. But it's great now to have the last slaughter of hens tomorrow and then focus our attention, pretty much everyone in the gardens for a couple of days and really help push the gardens along, get the tunnels all set up. And that's a nice way to spend this week with the glorious spring weather we've been having. The apples we all put in are doing really nicely and blossoming up. And you see here mixed in with seaberry. And then we've got Japanese quince as well. But great to see all the blossoms around. I don't know if you'll make it out, but there's a bunch of plum and cherry in blossom right now. It's beautiful. This last week has just really brought the farm to life and it brings back so much energy when the summer turns and to see grass underfoot, it's beautiful. The winters are so long and so dark here that you almost give up hope that life will return in some way. And I know that might sound drastic, but that's how it feels every winter, I imagine, for people living this far north. And, yeah, it's an amazing place to farm in, to really experience such contrast and such rapid growth. Just coming up to check on the bees here we have these top bar hives that allow for inspection. It's time to really expand the space they have as they start to build on new combs. Now, See on the drone footage, the cows are now over in the neighbour's land, moving really quickly. They've got several hectares that they'll spend less than two weeks in. So moving fast now and they're very happy and hens are doing great and it'll not be so long now till the broilers are out on the ground. So just for reference, it doesn't take long. You see, these chicks are getting their first wing feathers and they've grown exponentially. Now starting to make more manure that we need to start putting in bedding daily. And they've been here just over a week, so they've got just less than two weeks more until they go out on pasture. If you remember from last year, it started snowing when we got the birds out. Now we did the birds a couple of weeks later this year just to avoid that risk, which is ever present. But it's less likely now. Last year we had a gas burner and an extra heater in here. You can see this year we got all the lights off during the day. It's just too warm in Here, but the birds are very comfy. Just catching the last of the evening sun over here. See the birds are clever. They're hiding in the shade now in the late evening. Interesting to watch layers. They often become very active quite late in the evening. Eight, nine o', clock, it's a bit cooler outside, but tomorrow we're going to try and take the birds up into the very top of nutfield. I've built the culvert now. I've spent Sunday putting a bunch of gravel down and so we're going to see if it's sufficient to get these birds over into the top of Nutfield, which we've never been able to do before. And that's quite a bit of area for a few days moves and I really want to bring a bit of nutrition up there. It wants to turn back to forest but I want to keep it open ground and I want it to be good pasture. So it's a nice little addition for us. It's always hard taking life. It's, you know, it's a humbling thing. It's a very sincere thing that we take very seriously here. And we have aimed to perfect the art of the operation of our facility, you know, and try and perfect each role and optimize it for efficiency but also for welfare and, you know, really treat that with the dignity that it deserves. It's an interesting thing always to observe a new group coming in, using the facility and learning about this important part of farming. Something I always say, and I've said many times, is life and death are literally two sides to the same coin. You don't have fertility without death and decay. They are one and the same. And that's something you hear about in spiritual texts and things like this. But it doesn't make any sense to when it's abstracted out into an intellectual kind of concept in farming. You see it everywhere in ecology. This is what we study. And yeah, I just really finding it interesting to the diversity of people that come through and the perspectives they have. And we're a meat producing farm and we slaughter animals here and we eat meat here. It's interesting to reflect that there really are no vegetarian ecologies anywhere on the planet. Animals are what drive fertility systems. That's the basic fact. And it's an important thing, I think, for getting people back in touch with life, with death, with themselves. It's a serious thing. It's not an easy thing, not everyone's up for that. But I think for people interested in regenerating soil and regenerating Landscapes and habitats. It's a vital thing. We need animals. You can't do this in a whole systems way without animal systems. You know, when I have people here on trainings or for tours, I spend a lot of time explaining how the popular memes of vegetables sustainable and green and meat production bad. This might be true of industrial productions, but it's the exact opposite. In regenerative agriculture, you know, the most efficient thing you can farm is a herbivore turning sunlight via grass into flesh. All flesh is grass, essentially. And the only thing you're exporting is bones, which is minerals you can put back, you can put them back yourself if you process the animals with ways of charring the bones and making soluble phosphorus and calcium, etc. But for me it's a very important part of what we do because I feel like unless you're hunting or farming, you can't really wrap your head around what it means, you know, to be in that position to take life. And some people have a lot of objections to it, but they're often very removed from their food base, from their ecosystem, from their food shed. And it's not something we particularly enjoy. You know, I'm not super excited to go and slaughter animals, but I eat meat and I'm, you know, 97 odd percent of the people on this planet eat meat. And anyone eating meat products, eggs, dairy, etc. Then killing and death is a big part of it, you know, so it's been an interesting couple of days just watching people get their head around the idea of, hey, this is about to happen and you know, for us to have eggs, we need to replace the layer flocks. And that means culling flocks and nothing goes to waste. We're making some amazing stock. We'll also sell stewing birds, we'll eat a bunch of birds ourselves. I might make some sausages and put some in the smokery too. So it's, you know, it's important to really look at, hey, how do we take things away from the industry? What's it look like to do this on a small scale, respectfully, with dignity, for local consumption, using as much of the precious resources that we have to make valuable products and not waste these resources that we have under our responsibility. But it's a nice day. I really value the humility and the impact that this kind of operation has to really make people reflect on the reality of farming, of soil building, of life and death. Thanks for listening to that. I feel like there's a lot I could say and do say about these kind of things. But it's something obviously on the mine today and something I'm grateful for. I'm hoping that you'll be able to make out some of the insect life. This like the evening time is a really good time to get out in the pastures and just look down low and you start to see a lot more life going on. It's so important to observe your land at different times of day and night. You'll see different creatures and I often wake up earlier than the team and go for a walk and I learn most about my farm and the surrounding area at like 5 in the morning before anyone's up doing chores. So that's it today folks, just a quick update and busy days at the farm, getting people used to working in the facility and then, you know, quite a sincere little process that we got going on as we start up the slaughtery on farm. Slaughtery for the season, up again tomorrow, another busy day and then looking forward to getting time, getting the greenhouses prepped for tomatoes and cucumber transplanting. So thanks as always for watching our videos, appreciate your views, your likes, your comments, etc. And don't forget, you can follow us on Instagram and find out in the links below about all the trainings that we run. Hope some of you get to enjoy the season with us. And I know a lot of people are valuing the book Making Small Farms Work. And thanks for all the comments from around the world about how that's influencing you. And send me photos too. I'd love to see photos of how that's influencing you and what you're building up in your farms and your infrastructure and those kind of things. So thanks as always and look forward to seeing you in the next video.