Some idiots stole our Broiler Chicks

Welcome back to another video folks. I haven't made many videos recently, it's just been full on at this time of year. 100 different jobs all taken my attention at once. But today is a little catch up and also a bit of a tragic day. For the first time ever, someone came during the night and actually stole all of our boiler chicks from our brooder. So birds were here at 11:30 last night. Somewhere between 1:00 and 5:00 clock in the morning, someone came in here and took 150 boiler chicks out of here. Now when we found that this morning, my mind goes to one of two possibilities. Either another farmer or smallholder who wanted to raise those birds for themselves, or some kind of animal rights activists who think they have some idea about the world. This farm is obviously famous for the way that we respect animals and show solutions for agriculture, that builds healthy soil, creates incredible quality food for local consumers, respects the physiology of plants and animals and working from really deep ecological principles. What sickened me most about this whole thing is that someone came into my house and farm and thought it was okay to just take some livestock from my farm. I'm really happy I didn't catch them in the act because the result would not have been vegan, that's for sure. I don't know if it's vegan activists, but I just can't think another farmer would steal livestock in this way. I mean, these are five day old chicks that need the heat lamps. They need very special care. And unless someone really knows what they're doing, these birds will not have a good life and they will never have a better life than we've shown and demonstrated on this channel for the last eight, nine years. I'm really sick and bite. I do have security cameras around the farm. Unfortunately they were in for charging and so they were not on. And that's an irony. This is the first such event at this farm. Now I just make it clear because I'm sure whoever targeted this farm watches our social media. You will not leave this place very easily. If you try that again and you will see a darker side of me. I'm sure it's not okay and I hope no one gets to suffer at the hands of twisted individuals like this. I'm sure it was a small group. It was obviously very well thought through and planned and obviously someone that scouted out this area and I would imagine follows our social media. I would like to prosecute and make a public example of people like that. It's totally unacceptable and the limited Worldview that you're operating from is not benefiting anyone. We're trying to provide a solution to the industry that you're probably trying to vocalize against, so, you know, screw your head back on. See, you know, if you can't come to a bit more sense, I hope wherever the birds are that they're not all dead or being neglected. I can't imagine a better life for them than daily moves onto pasture at a farm dedicated to such things. It makes me really sad. Makes me really sick. I will be very vigilant with our security and if we catch you or anyone like this again, not only will we personally deal with you, we will make sure the whole book of law is thrown at you and prosecute you as far as we can. It's not acceptable and it's something that started to happen in Sweden. Obviously, we are a very public site with public social media, etc. And so obviously we would likely be a target for such groups. But I'm also willing to offer a reward if anyone brings information that leads to a prosecution. So that's more for local people, but I know that there's plenty of Swedish people watching the channel. It's really sad. These birds can be replaced and it's just a pain. And it's just really sad that someone would think it's okay to come into my house and trespass and steal things. I mean, it's. It's left a really sick feeling in my heart and. Yeah, I'm sure many of you listening will be as shocked as I was this morning to hear that some people will do such things. Okay, Friday night we're going to the lake with Tom. Foolery fishing boat. Time to catch a big pike. First fish of the year. We've got a pike each. That's a good one moment. Whoa. Let's go. Come on, then. Hey, up, Hot sheep. Luckily they've got plenty of shade in here, haven't you? Yeah. Gotta help her gracious nail. So Grace is laying boards up against the wall and then sitting them tightly against each other and using rocks to hold them in place so that I can just shovel down the back of it. That really comes together nice. When you get that edge flush and you really start to see it. Cool in the making. Zoomed out there. You get a sense of the scale. One. Another butterfly standing here and then it catched it and then the butterfly dragged it down. But despite. So we should bring a little bucket of. Okay. Up in the forest. Starting to put up the first of the girls. The other One is sided over here. So just putting up the 60 odd roof poles, just putting them up equally all round to get even pressure to avoid this structure twisting. And these are all bolted in so they can't fall out. And we actually bolt on some metal brackets so it can't possibly move. So it's nice and safe. Lovely. Okay, frame up. Now we've got new canvas that was sewed by the sail maker locally who works for tent teepee, where we got the teepees from. So we got some little cords to add on and see how it will go over. Okay, that's where we got to put the roof on after. Nice color. We like this fabric. Very nice. Okay, Picking up grain, oat and wheat. We've been having incredible weather. The warmest spring I can remember. I've been trying to get a bit of this going on in three moments. So I've put in the insulation that you can see just at the wall there. And then I've started shaving in the sides so that helps start to reveal the shape of the pond, this being the water line around like that. And yeah, it's brought up a couple of things. So one thing I'm still waiting for the building permission over here, but one thing immediately clear to me is that the backside is very steep and it's not going to work so well with the gravel. So what I'm going to do there is probably because I'm going to have decking that overhangs the water like so I'm probably just going to leave the liner there and on these shallower curves, put underlay on top of the liner and put back gravel and plants. I'll still have plants here because if you remember, you've been following the process. I'm going to put timber on top of the wall here. That would hold the gravel back probably about 40cm and that sort of defines the swimming lane. And what I'll do then is just put some potted lilies along the back here and they will grow up to the surface and you'll have the wood lilies on the surface with decking overhanging. I think you won't really see the liner behind that once the lilies are established. So it's going to be quite good. Next step in here is getting in and leveling the floor, that the insulation for the floor sits nicely and then it's time to start putting underlay and liner. But it's really starting to give a sense of what the pool is going to be like now. So with the warm Weather, we've seen some good growth with vegetables. We've been putting the irrigation system on, so we've got regular watering to do with the direct seeded beds of carrots, radishes, etc. Still prepping beds on this side. And we've been taking strawberry suckers out of the south beds. We're going to put them along the beds next to the trees because the trees suck a lot of water. We trim the roots every year, but they're still sucking quite a lot of water. So gonna put some perennials there. I've actually culled some of the crop plan. Something that's obvious to me is we've got way more veg than we actually need this year, even with the camping enterprise starting up and the courses that are running here, etc. And so, yeah, it's no problem to put some of it down to perennials, but when we've had beds of lettuces that are waiting to come up, there's no point putting another one in when it's just us here. Got quite a lot of strawberry suckers that we can divide up into other beds to further propagate those. Now here we're just hardening things off first. Squash are going in artichokes, small peasants in olenta. It's only partially full now. We've got beans, we've got squash, we've got pumpkins, got the cucumbers. But the tomatoes are really something else now and you can see many of them have gone to flower. Some people have been making comments about top watering tomatoes when they're in the greenhouse setting like this. I have no issue top watering them. In fact, I will only top water them and then once they go into the tunnel, they'll be exclusively on drip. It's more a problem for top watering bigger plants when they're young. In the nursery setting, it makes no difference. I'm very happy with the plants. Although this is the first year they have actually flowered in here. It's been very hot and they wouldn't normally be planted out till end of May, early June. I'm actually going to start putting these in tomorrow. The weather looks like it's not going to frost again. If it does randomly, last minute, there's not a lot I can do, but I need to get these out and in the ground. Now, normally, as I said on other videos, I would separate every alternate plant and take it out to give each plant more space to develop. You can see they're getting quite leggy in the middle, but if we just Pop one out here. Maybe it's easier said than done. I'm not actually going to pull it out, but the plants are good. What I'm going to do is lift them out a tray at a time. Because if I take these, the most vulnerable spot for these is on the journey down to the greenhouse. So if I take them out tray by tray with whole trays, it's going to be a lot easier to take these fragile plants, which are actually quite robust here. This one's easy to take out. The plants are quite robust and so as long as we carry them carefully, I'm not so worried about them getting broken. It's obviously not a job suitable for lots of small kids running around. It's been a lot of fun having the kids. So we've got seven kids here, three around Grace's age, so 10, 11, 12, and we've got four between three and a half and five and a half. So it takes a lot of time. And so naturally there's a lot of time spent doing things very slowly with kids or people putting energy into doing activities with kids. So it's a lot of, you know, it's a big difference for me from running this farm at this time of year when we've got full scale production. It's a lot of focused people working very fast, very hard. This is very different with the lower levels of production, but it still feels very full. I've actually not been feeling like I'm getting enough free moments in a day, but that's also just part of the process of people getting used to the farm, how things work, where things are kept, etc. So big day tomorrow. I think we'll get the tomatoes out of here. That will give us space to pot up the cucumbers, which are coming on nicely. They're only quite small still, but they're ready to pot on into bigger pots and probably will wait a little bit to put those out and we'll give them some extra feed in there. We've got loads of squash pumpkins for the small tunnel. We've got a whole bed of meal corn to put out and then the rest of the big tunnel beside the tomatoes is going to be watermelons, melons and cucumbers. So that's going to be exciting. We'll probably get them in next week. We've been eating asparagus basically every day and lots of rhubarb to process, put away in the freezers. It's a busy week this week, so we're picking up turkeys. We're also having to pick up replacement broiler chicks. And that's important because of the course that we are planning around that to enable people to learn the process all the way through the process. And a lot of the people producing pastured poultry in Sweden have been here on educational programs. And I feel like it's a really valuable and important thing to be able to show people how to do that in an effective, skillful, respectful way. Okay, so most of you will recognize this tunnel. This is set up five beds at 22 cm for tomatoes. And then the remaining three beds we're running at 45 cm. That's for cucumbers and for melons as well. We run them at the same spacing. We need to get some water in the ground here. It's pretty parched. There's a bit of water deep down under the drips that we ran for a short time, but it's pretty parched. I think I'll bring a sprinkler in here and get this set up. It's going to be a big job, hot job in the sun, but it's going to be great to have these tomatoes out that lean to now. There's a small risk it could get cold again, but I think there's a bigger risk of keeping the plants in that environment for much longer now. Well, the little Ridgedale Minnie is doing fine. It's a little bit of a different thing and obviously the birds have much less of an impact than the old large flocks, but they're doing fine. We're just using two 25 meter nets and they're only moving like five meters a day, so it's going to take a while to get through the place. But we're getting lots of tasty eggs and the hens are looking fantastic. They're having a great time. They get a very balanced diet. So I expect them to be full, healthy form all summer. I'm a little bit more worried about predators this year. We've never had big issues with predator birds and as I've always said on videos, I think it's largely because of the large flock size. When you have 400 birds in a few hundred square meters moving daily, it's just too big a risk for predator birds to dive bomb in and take them. But this is working so far and we'll just have to keep an eye out. I did see another pair of buzzards nesting, so. So we have a pair of buzzards nesting here. We have a Harves Orne, the white tailed eagle, nesting up at the back of the farm, we have another nesting buzzard over here, and I just saw another pair building a nest. So predators are moving in and that's surely the measurement of a healthy, thriving ecosystem. How many predators we can support that are fat, healthy and plump. Grass is growing fast now, so we haven't had an official grazing plan yet. We've gone nearly all the way through top field and we've actually worked down the bottom. We're working back up these last two strips tomorrow, maybe the next day, and then we're into Nutfield. Our sheep shearer is very busy and can't do any shearing until after midsummer, so we've decided to buy some cordless sheep shearing tools and do it ourselves. You can see the sheep are very much keeping out the sun. They are probably very warm, they're fine, they're eating properly, drinking okay. But there's a lot of flies around and we need to get this sheared. Shears are coming on Thursday, so Friday is a day for shearing and a couple of the girls here have got experience with shearing horses. Bit of a different job, but I think between us, we're going to work it out and that's a nice thing to be able to do. From then on, cows are working together to deal with the flies, standing end to end to help each other with their tails. It's a bit of a wonky grazing round. We've got to use the nets right now because of the sheep, because the sheep have been working hard to get out of their winter paddocks. But we'll be going on to reels and double wires once we get up into Nutfield. See who we've got. Hey, who've we got here? Hello. Hey. Hey. Yeah. So, despite not having a grazing plan at this time of year, grass growing fast is all about getting around the farm really fast. When grass is growing fast, you move fast. When grass is growing slowly, move slowly. If you don't know what to do, slow down. That's because of the recovery time around the farm. But we've got nine sheep, we've got two cows. We're never going to keep up with the grass. The egg mobiles aren't really impacting the ground at all. The broilers are so low in number and the turkeys will be low in number that we're not going to be able to even keep up with the grass. I'm considering, even for the first time, getting a machine to cut the grass to help with the management of that. But we'll see. Right now we just want to zip around the farm. It gives us a bit of time to get everyone up to speed with basic jobs around the farm and time to also create a grazing plan. But it's fine. I'm happy flying like that because of the experience we have. And we're not going to overgraze this year. We're going to have trouble the other direction of not being able to even manage the grasses. Things are going good with the veg garden and the animals other than the broiler robbery. But what to say? You can see things are really greening up. It's such a magical time of year now when the blossoms are coming out and all the birds are twilipated and the grass is really starting to grow. It's cold in the mornings here so the grass is not growing as much as it might given the sort of hot sunny days we've been having. But that's a lot to do with the cold temperatures. So this is where the cows are coming into, into that field and we're actually going to let them graze entire strips to make it quite a quick journey through the farm. We'll take them up to the far far corner and then the trees are in a diamond pattern that we graze strips across the field and we'll give them whole strips. So it'll probably only be in here 10 to 14 days maximum. And by that time I reckon at this time of year top field will fully have recovered. But we still got front field to go through as well. So the first of two yurts is up. These are the yurts I made when I first came to Sweden. I made these two structures in a week. However, the roof canvas does not fit. It's a real shame. We're hoping to open the camping in June but we're having a few setbacks. And so you can see here it's the. Just to not overlap him. This strip should. That's the roof there. This roof should come down at least 25cm overlapping. I'm really gutted. It's sewn really beautifully by the local sail maker that makes the tent teepees. Really nice quality job. It's maybe a bit out of focus layers. However, it's not good enough. It's. It needs some urgent repairs. So on this side we got three of these six meter teepees. These will be rented out for families or hiking parties. Really nice little structures. All right. Compost lure. Nearly done. So the plan is to have two compost loos up here in the forest. This is the first. Very nice. It. Okay, that's a wrap. Busy days ahead. So just wanted to give you a little update. Please don't leave hateful comments on this channel. Even if someone has perpetrated a crime at my farm, I don't want to see hateful speech. I think the people that have done this will probably reincarnate as broilers in an industrial setting for them to learn some kind of lesson. That seems to be the way things work. So they have their. So they have what's coming for them anyway. But you can share opinions, experiences. But please just keep speaking speech as if your kids were reading it. I think that's the way I like this channel to operate and a bit of respect and dignity. Whether you have different opinions about whatever it is, just show up with respect and dignity and all will be good. Any hateful comments will be deleted. You will be banned from my channels on all forms of social media. So just don't do it. All right? Peace. See you in another video soon. Don't.