Some things on my mind...

So if you're a regular, you'll have.

Noticed haven't been many videos this week. It's because I've been doing a lot of other projects outside of the farm.

And running double slaughter this week and.

A bunch of stuff going on elsewhere around the farm. So just going to give you a little update what's going on and some of the thoughts going through my mind right now.

Well, things are super busy at the farm and it's not just the height of our production season, but I have a lot of projects going on on the site, including this new emerging tool company and also an amazing collaboration that I can't say much about right now, but I'm teaming up with some incredible people to basically get a large amount of money to create a competition to get some European regenerative agriculture Kickstarter started. It's super exciting. I'm not saying any more about it or answering questions about it now. Hope to announce something about it in the coming couple of weeks and it's super exciting. It's such a pleasure to find ways to bring together different skills and resource bases to facilitate more and more people getting started on the land. That's what I've dedicated my life to. So, amazing news to announce coming soon. I won't say any more for now, but I've been doing a lot of back end stuff so. So I have a lot of decision making to do and looking at the sales, tracking the business and deciding where to steer things at this time in the year where we're kind of halfway through the year. Our seasons are so short. We typically have this ramping up and frantic energy and I think the course we, Curtis Stone, really marked the transition between the two halves of our season where now everything's winding down. We did a double slaughter of boilers this week. It went really well, really efficient, some of the best teamwork all season. It's taken three months to get to a place where everyone's working very cohesively together and communicating well. So now we've only got the last batch on the field and so in three weeks all the boilers are done for the year, which is amazing. We've just finished cleaning the brooder out now, which is an epic job. Probably about 15 cubic meters of bedding to dig out, which I finished today with Lucas and I've been doing a lot of, I mean a big part of my time is admin stuff and a lot of emails. I get between 50 and 100 emails most days and it's a lot of work to respond to And I often don't respond to a bunch of them because it's impossible in my circumstance and I'm not in a place to have a PA right now or anything like that. So that's the way it is. So apologies for my slow response rate or my lack of response at all, but that's the way it has to be during production season. But yeah, I'm really excited about this idea of a tool company actually. And I think in the coming couple of weeks we'll have hopefully able to announce the caterpillar tunnels that will be available for shipping all over Europe pretty soon. And either way, we're hoping everyone gets them in time for the 2019 production season. I'm really excited about that. I've got a friend coming over to draft some 3D CAD based instruction plans for that and we're actually going to be selling them direct to people all over Europe. So I'm super excited about the development of that. And I've been having a lot of intensive meetings with different suppliers around the world of all the best farm tools that we actually use. So the idea is that this is a one stop sort of tool shop for market gardeners, people doing pastured poultry and all the stuff that we're doing here to supply people with the right gear at the right price. And I think it's really needed. There's a big hole in Europe. I am constantly getting questions from all over the world about suppliers and where to buy stuff. And I just figured out like, well, you know, maybe I should just start that because I use a whole load of companies all over the world and I've spent a massive amount of time researching who are the best people to buy things from and which products do we really recommend on the ground. And so I just think we'll focus in on the actual things we like and use and are passionate about so that we can stand behind every single thing we use and start the company small. We'll be just trying to use the capital we've got to invest to start it and cash flow it as we go. I'll talk more about it as it launches. I'm hoping that in the early months of the winter we really get this going and get people sorted out for tools they need next season. That's going to be really cool. But we'll be selling the whole range of innovative market garden tools and infrastructure and everything for pastured poultry, pastured layers and broilers and a whole bunch of stuff for tree planting and nursery stock and all this sort of stuff so I'm super excited and I just like to keep sharing a bit my thought process and you know, those of you that really follow us, like, you know, my ideas change and mould over time in response to what's happening on the ground, the mood of the people here. And that has a really strong influence on the direction I'm heading as well as how I'm feeling about it. And it's been an interesting year. I'm actually really looking to empty out the farm a bit this winter and take some serious time off because I've got massive projects coming up which I'll be announcing in the coming weeks and I need time out. Not doing farm chores point at some essentially. So it's going to be a very different winter for us on the farm this year, but I'm excited for it. Yeah. Just a few clips from the farm. You can see we've been moving turkeys. We're going up back towards the farm now and I just want them all to head back this way.

We're taking them all this week and next week and they like following me because I represent food in some kind of way. Look at them go. Beautiful birds, really happy. I love turkeys, they're so much fun to raise. They've got some nice forage in the shade around behind the riparian where it's north facing and it's a bit shadier, a little bit more moisture there, streams up and flowing again, which is nice to see.

Come on turkeys, lets go. So they're all coming back up to the farm and next week we have a triple slaughter. The first lot of the last batch of boilers and two turkey slaughters to take these 150 birds because that's what will fill our freezer chiller room. And right now there's birds in the chill room for smoking. So on our open day on Saturday, we've got fresh smoked birds for sale on the farm. We'll be doing a little farm shop after our farm tour. Always loved that we couldn't have anything up to a couple hundred people turning up into our remote little village. We've been doing a lot of seeding, a lot of direct seeding, a lot of transplants, a lot of microgreens. We've been watering stuff, working with the tomatoes, we've been doing a lot of work with the poultry and getting ready for roadworks that are happening to build a turning circle for the forestry. And yeah, it's hot days, still dry, but it's cooling down at night times and we've had A little bit of rain, the pond is full, and we're filling up the other pond again. A lot of people have asked about whether we're actually going to build more ponds based on this year's experience, and I think no. Certainly not my intention anytime soon. This year has been super extreme, and we haven't actually used the small pond at all. We only used the big pond and I think we used half of its capacity. I think we managed it really well. Some great veg coming out of the gardens, regardless, and I don't think I want more ponds, so we don't need them. They fit well in the landscape where they are, and we have capacity further than what we've used. But I don't think that I'm expecting this many years to be like this. And I'm actually thinking to really change the gardens in the coming year at the end of the season now, as the farm quietens down, half the team are leaving six weeks early because they're going off to university and things are happening in people's lives. And it's just going to be a small team at the end of the year. But I think we'll be done with all the other livestock and just focused on the market gardens. And we're going to actually transition the market gardens into a very different mode of production next year as we really streamline the farm and actually cut down on some of what we're doing to really free up time, which has been one of my holistic context points I've talked about many times that hasn't actually been met this year. I've been busier than ever and a lot of things going on outside the farm. Also, Lucas turning 17. Look at this. Wow. Tiramisu. We like it when people have birthdays, don't we? Oh, it's a shirt.

Is. That's awesome recipe. Yeah, Sometimes, like, really not so well.

Who's this by the road?

This is a mama. And she's not so scared now. She is jumpy. Just come back again.

Now.

I don't know if her other calf.

Is just around here.

She's got a. She's got a baby here in the forest. I wonder if she has another one in Ragnar. Look out your window. Do you see Ragnar? I'm gonna turn the engine off because I know she's got one calf in the forest, but she might have a calf son over there, and that's why she doesn't want to run away. Or she also wants to eat apples because she knows there's apples on this tree. Can you see? Ragnar?

I go out.

I don't know if she'll like it. If you go out, she'll run off. I think she's hungry for apples. You know, elk go crazy for apples. Just zoom in. I think she's hungry for apples. She's not silly.

I'm eating grass.

Eating grass. But I think. I think she's picking up apples from under the tree. Yeah. Now the baby is in the forest. Ragnar. I saw a baby in the forest, but I think it's probably hiding, waiting for Mama.

And there are also apples.

Yeah, there's a lot of apples on the trees right now. She is loving apples. They will come within a couple of meters of you just to get apples.

Some very exciting announcements to make in the coming days. And yeah, I look forward to tuning in with you then. So thanks so much for watching, folks. I really appreciate the comments, the shares. Please feel free to share these videos on your social media. It really helps to grow the channel. I've tried to keep the channel really genuine and not get into clickbaity titles and just making videos for the sake of making videos. And that's not what you know, that's.

Not what we're about.

And I'm trying to just share useful information and insights and I know a lot of you really enjoy that, but it doesn't grow a channel very quickly. So it really helps if you share videos you enjoy on social media, like the Video subscribe if you haven't already. And that's a way you can support us too. So you can find out a whole bunch in the links below, including our book and other resources. We've got an open day on Saturday, so if you can make it down, it's going to be awesome. We're going to have a great farm tour and then we have a Fika and snacks and different products available for sale and come and meet us and say hello. And we've got an amazing team here. So thanks so much for watching, folks.

See you in the next video.