Snow, bad lambs and chicken poo...

Welcome back to another video, folks. Bit of sun after a heavy snowy night. Staying up late with lambing and pretty tired. Johanna and I were up till 2 o' clock in the morning and then up again at 6. Well, first of all folks, got to say thank you so much. The Kickstarter campaign ended at 404% funded. 1.2 million crowns raised to get this book into print. Unbelievable. If you've been a backer for the project, please keep an eye on your emails. For emails from Kickstarter, I need surveys to get your information to be able to send physical books. When we get to that point, you need to respond to those or I can't possibly send you a book. So do keep your eyes peeled in the coming weeks. Well, this thing has been a very useful investment. I can't stress enough this is cheaper than her back. I've had chronic back problems since I was 14 years old, bending over into a crab. I was extremely athletic at that time, but I hadn't warmed up properly and herniated a lower disc. It's been a problem ever since. And this sheer amount of moving stuff by hand that we've done here over the years, it just blows me away. Looking back, having had this machine for a few months that I don't know how we did it. And to be honest, there's no way I could have built all those decks and done a lot of jobs. It's really, really, you know, it's a lot of money to shell out on a machine like this. Obviously you can get older second hand ones, but I needed something compact and there's no compact tractor secondhand market really in Sweden. I wanted very specific functions out of it. So yeah, it's a chunk of money. But you know what, prices are back. I haven't had a sore back all year and this time of year I'm usually at the Cairo several times a week in bed for a few days, not able to move my legs and neck. It's, you know, for a farming lifestyle this has just been unbelievable and it's allowed me to get tons and tons of books in here on the floor. I built in the winter for this purpose to move the storage of some of the books over here to save on warehousing costs. And I'm tending to send big shipments over towards Stockholm where they're packed and sent. Still got a big storage up in the village, But I've put 13 odd pallets here. If you want a copy of Regenerative Agriculture we got loads of copies. Weekend eats the Team cook at the weekends. And what we got today? Philip, you're going. I'm gonna make some lasagna. You're doing like proper homemade lasagna, right? Homemade pasta, yes. Freshly minced meat. Unbelievable. What are you tasting? Taking off the last spinach and pig fat. Nice. What else we got? You've already been gnawing them down. That's what Philippe likes. And we got mackerel, pate, a nice sourdough bread. We've been eating pretty good now. Haven't done bad, have we? No. Oh, my gosh. That's my favorite dish in the world. Ragnar, do the honors. I'm gonna cut, I'm gonna cut, I'm gonna cut. Do it all the way down the middle. Good job. So Philip has handmade all the pasta. Hand minced, well minced. All the meat with a machine. That looks epic. Ragnar, do you like lasagna? Off roading through the forest with Ragnar. No. No. You gotta walk, dude. What? Oh, you gotta walk. It's too bumpy. Follow zacher dog. You found Ragnar? A lizard. Whoa. He looks cold. He is. Let's tuck him in the brush in a really cold place. I think you should put him back where you found him now. But why? He. He was in a thunder cold place, so I don't think he wants to be there more. Look, first transplants on Sunday afternoon. What's been transplanted? Kales. Kale. Three types. Four types. Three, four types of kale. Very nice. And it's back to this happy April. Feeding time. Don't look now. Day 15. Day 15. In the brooder, Birds are hungry. First day of grain. So we're milling grain with a new dust extractor. These birds are feisty. So still looking like the birds will go into the tunnel. We've got to prepare that this week. Hopefully. Fingers crossed, they can go out in the snow after that. So we had two lambs in the night, both with Danley Walker syndrome. So this is something that these are lambs born with, I think co joined hemispheres in the brain. They've got very swollen heads. There's virtually nothing online about it. It's very sad. It doesn't look very nice. From what we can see, it seems to pertain to Suffolk. These are Suffolk Texel ewes. But Winston the ram was Suffolk purebred. It seems to be, from what we can find out, which is very limited, a recessive gene in both the ram and the ewe. And if both are carrying that recessive gene, it can be, you know, up to 50% of lambs will have this syndrome. There seems to be some controversy online. This is the mumma that's been birthing that's budding this small one. She's looking for her babies. We've taken them away because they were both stillborn, essentially. One was still breathing a little bit, but their brains had deformed. But, yeah, as I say, when we look it up, you can find farmers weekly articles saying that they think that it's linked to Suffolk and that it's been under reported because people are scared of sales of their thoroughbred Suffolk if it is linked to that. But then there's also comments from a geneticist that they don't see why it would be linked only to Suffolk. It's very confusing. And then that was a 2010 or something like that article. And then the only other things you find are back in 2004, and there's not much clear information. We've really been searching all over the place to find out more, but it sounds like because these sheep all had lambs last year that didn't have that deformity. So it's definitely not having Winston as the ram could help that. Got to find a ram that's a pseudo that hopefully doesn't have that recessive gene. It's a bit of a nightmare. It could be he had the recessive gene and they didn't. But we just can't find out enough information to know what to do. But it's. Yeah, I guess it's likely we'll have a few lambs, but so far we've had three lambs, all with that syndrome, which feels like way too high instances. Yeah. Super sad. Staying up late at night and. Yeah, just feeling a bit heartbroken with that. That's the way farming goes sometimes. One of the issues with this can be under reporting. Obviously, people with small flocks and small instances probably just don't report anything like that. And then bigger breeders probably are invested not to report to things like that because it affects their business. So it's. It's difficult to know. The people I bought the sheep off get the feeling they must have known because they sold Winston as a suitor to these ewes. So part of me suspects they must have known, but. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. It's a difficult one. But we either have to hope that the change of ram will fix it or begin totally again with new progeny. Okay, first eggs are starting to come, which means they'll be coming exponentially now. So we have to get ourselves ready for that with the nest boxes today. I want to put some bedding down under the eggmobile and I want to try and work out any kinks left with the nest boxes. There's only one egg under there from today and a jelly egg the other day. We've definitely got way too many birds coming into this one that we've taken the fence away this morning to see if they even out a bit. They're a bit spooked by snow falling off the roof, but so far we've not had to put any bedding down. They're not producing so much mess in here. There's a lot under the egg mobiles. A bit of tweaking to do to get the nests working reliably for eggs coming. Oi, Yoyoi. Well, even if there wasn't a bird flu ban, it wouldn't be very easy out on parsley right now. Anyway with this. I guess this is a typical April, but it's certainly going to be a slow spring here up at 59 degrees. First egg of the year. So double yogurt. Tastes like nothing. Literally nothing. Okay. Preparing for broilers by now. We harden off veg in here, but there's a thousand birds coming in here pretty soon. Even if the band lifts, birds have to be in. So what we're doing is netting doors so we can have the outer greenhouse doors open or closed. Some access door for us with a bit of space to be able to work inside. And then I'm going to get some bedding now. Come back with some bedding. We'll have to lift up the mipex and we'll go for peat moss, I think, because eventually we can let that compost down and turn us back to a growing space. This has always been difficult to work with because it's super heavy clay and it's very wet and a little bit weedy. We've used it for animals in the past as well as growing veg, cucumbers or different row crops. It's always had different functions. I was going to turn it into a tree nursery this year, but not sure yet. First it's boiler time. Okay. We have had four or five eggs from this eggmobile. We have had first couple come in from that eggmobile. That means we need to get the nest boxes operational and good. So. So we've had some issues that we've been playing around with. Now we're getting serious. We stuck on these side rubber bits. They're like door sealing rubbers. Because we need to know that when the nest mats lift, the eggs don't roll off. Now we've gone out and bought 100 eggs to give it some weight, because what happens is the side of this conveyor belt that's been sitting under is kind of warped this way, which kind of tips the eggs off a bit. But with the weight of a day's eggs, it's going to weigh it down a bit. So I want to test it properly with a bunch of eggs. Eggs are going to come exponentially. Now you have three one day, you'll have ten the next day. In a week's time, there will be 260. So we've just got to get on with it. We've been playing around with leveling this a lot better. And today we actually got all the chickens out of here. There were some chickens that were basically just hanging out in here. You can see underneath, we've put some wood shavings on top of the manure, which is getting pretty thick now because they've been stationary. And we'll just make a lasagna cake like that, hopefully only here for the next few weeks. But we're gonna wash down the conveyor. It's got a lot of dust on it and get it working. And then we need to replicate whatever's working in the other eggmobile ready for the influx of eggs that's starting to come. In the meantime, we're working on the broiler tunnel on the other side. So it's all go in the snow. Okay, the chickens are in. So we've bought a bunch of eggs, white eggs. We never do white eggs. We always do brown eggs. But we really want to know what happens when the weight of the eggs is sitting on the belt to know if this will just sit down. So, see, this egg is getting stuck outside the nest. We need to find out all these details, what happens. And so this simulation's becoming very pertinent now because eggs are coming. We've got the nest pretty level, both planes. But I think where this nest mat has been sitting a while, it's got a bit of lumpy form. And we've got to wind them in. See that we don't break them all. So we're putting 100 and something eggs in and we'll see what happens. This is where we've got to iron out kinks. There are eggs stuck. The nest mats can be further forward here. So we just have to work out all these little tweaks and see how the eggs come in. But we don't want eggs Getting stuck or falling down. That one's stuck on a cable tie that we didn't clip. Ragnar's bought dried mango. Thank you, Ragnar. Wow. Why sweet is mango? So seems to be working. The couple of eggs that were stuck here when we closed the nest to kick them back in. When I roll it, you can see the conveyor belt does sit down in the dish. And so the eggs and you can see they're centered. They're not rolling off to the side. I'm surprised. I'm very happily surprised. The eggs are a bit dirty because we're using dirty gloves, but they're just for us to eat. I reckon we collect them up, test them again, because if it keeps working, then we're set. So checking that things roll through, It's definitely looking alright so far. We'll go and check out how they wind in once the nests are closed. So this is only a third of the eggs that we'll be getting every day. So there will be a lot more weight on the nest mats on the conveyor. You can see it's got room to sit down. So when there's more eggs, they do form towards the middle. Now what we want to do is open these nests and see what happens to those side eggs. Do you want to jump out to watch for that? So what I'm hoping is that these eggs pop back in. It looks a bit hairy, but we can take the nest mats a little bit closer. Now there is an eggo cracked right there. We'll take that out so we don't get any mess. But then let's see. Do you want to wind them in, Mark, to see if we can get. Get them in without any dropping? Beautiful. Look at that. Will the benefits outweigh the fiddles? Well, I reckon it will take us all year to show you that. But bear in mind this nest, this egg mobile is not built for this nest. We're just testing these nests out for the benefit of the hole to see if we like them. But that looks impressive. They definitely sit down in the middle and they don't fall out yet. What we have to do now is replicate this side rubber in the other eggmobile so it can dry overnight. And we'll do some more testing tomorrow. There's only a few eggs coming, so we don't really even need to open the nests yet. But in the next couple of days, we'll be having the nest mats on timer. So this is what we're using on the sides of the nest boxes. Maltese is trimming this. This Is like a multi strip of door seal or something. So we're just trimming one edge to make a nice straight edge that we can line up with the edge of the metal bar. And we need it quite thin so it doesn't interfere with the nest mats, etc. Someone suggested putting wider rollers at the end of the green rollers under the conveyor belt to get that conical shape in the conveyor. That's not a bad idea. It's just trickier actually for us. It's easier to glob this on and easier to change. Mark has also been fixing up all of our cables for the energizers. The field energizers, nice with a bit of heat shrink cable to keep that solid. These are the sorts of things that just wear over time with daily use clipping to our fence lines and clipping to our earths. So we've got a nice set of those to go with our new energizers. Fireman Dave's here. Look at that transformation. Nice doors. So we picked up a bit of this chicken mesh that's good for protecting the sides of the tunnel all the way around. And we're putting down peat moths as the initial bed in here. And that's good for us for a couple of reasons. It's not necessarily the best bedding for the broilers. It's a bit dirty maybe on the feathers, but we're hoping they're not in here for a very long time. And then this will basically act as a sort of no digit cover up for everything that we've had in here. That's just been a bit weedy. We've had it covered up with Mipex over the last year because it wasn't in use. I'm thinking by the time the bedding's built up and it's fertilized with the boiler manure for a few weeks, hopefully they go outside. This will leave it in a good state for growing into or putting in tree nursery, etc. In the future. So double whammy. Well, since the team have arrived, we have been eating, eating, eating, eating, haven't we? Three meals. Fikas. Oh my gosh. What are you making there? Ragnar cookies. Are you doing all the work? Well, it's a chicken poo kind of day. What can you do? Okay, so this is what I'm up to. I am under the nest. It's very tight conditions, hate birds. And the guys are passing through those rubber seals with a bit of no more nails, strong glue. And I've got to stick it on here making sure it doesn't interfere with the belt that's going round and doesn't stick out this way that it will block the nest mats when they come down. It's very cramped covered in chicken poo. But I have been all day so it's all good really. I've just noticed that we got puncture on both tires of this eggnog beer. So to add insult to injury when we do get on pasture we've got a hell of a job to get this actually moving again. We filled one side with with the gunk and span that wheel around. It looks sealed. And then when we park this you'll remember the other wheel went but now they've both gone down. But we'll deal with that when we get to being on pasture. It's all fiddling this year. I've got a feeling we're just going to be fiddling all summer working these nest boxes out for you lot. Hey Berlies. Thank you. So you might just be able to make out. I get that rubber seal on and it leaves a couple of centimeters gap up here between the conveyor belt and the seal that seems to be working well in the other one. And I'm just trimming down the end to make it a perfect fit. Really bad for your neck lying like this covered in chicken boot. Okay, job done. Ragnar's just comes in cookies and bakes. Nice. Ragnar Saku is interested in hens as ever. Saku, what do you see? Alright. Bit later in the day. Birds have been fed again. They're getting a mill grain now. Turning some of the lights off. Now in the daytime there's only one light on in each pen and then at night we put more back on as the temperature drops. Things are rolling. So this is the grain mill that we used. We've just moved it down to the silo and it started blocking up. So we taken off the air vent that we had going out the window to try and eliminate dust. Not sure if that's what's the issue but it's been working since. We're just cracking the grain. I'll just show you down inside there. It's nuts. The aim is just to crack it a bit. You get better feed conversion and you see it comes out sort of half grains and quarter grains. A few whole grains get through. That's the way we do. This was here when we bought the farm. So we just kept using it. Very good cookie Ranger. Good work. It.