STARTING LIFE'S WORK AT 70

Welcome back to another episode, folks. I've just returned from a quick flash visit to the UK to pick up my daughter, Grace. It's amazing to have her back on the farm. And we've been getting some amazing rain today, which is always a pleasure on the farm when you've been going through dry spells. And I wanted to put out a video from Roger, who we interviewed back a couple of years ago on our channel, and some of you have been asking about him since, but he kindly sent me a webinar he did with the 3LM network, that's the Savory Institute trainers over in the UK. And I know that a lot of you loved hearing our interview with Roger on this channel, and so I thought I would include it again. So it's a talk about his journey, starting his Life's work at 70, and it's titled It's Never Too Late To Get Started. And I think that's really fitting also, because I often speak about young people and I'm often speaking to young people, and that's not to be exclusive, of course. People can get into this at any age. But I do generally think that farming is a young person's game. We're not meant to work as hard as we do when we're over 50, I think, or certainly I don't intend to. But of course, that doesn't mean to exclude anyone. I'm just often referring to younger people because that's who I'm focused on mentoring and educating. But I thought for today's video you might enjoy hearing Roger's journey of rediscovery. And it's always a pleasure to hear such an inspirational man speak. So hope you enjoy today's video.

Good evening, everybody, and welcome to Salem. You might not think it or believe it, but. But the truth is that it's never too late. How can I say that? Because a whole new beginning opened up for me at the age of 70 and this webinar is about what led me to that moment. I can hardly believe that in my 75th year I'm talking to all you guys on the Internet, but there you go. I'm going to start tonight by giving you five words which I would like you to keep in the back of your mind whilst you're listening to me tonight. I'm not necessarily going to refer back to them, I would just like you to remember them. And they are commitment, hard work, dedication, responsibility and action. I think they're important because of the principles and values that are embedded in them and because they pepper the story that I'm about to tell of all of them, I think the commitment is perhaps the most important in my mind. And I want to read you something from a guy called E.H. murray, who led the Scottish Himalayan expedition. I don't know what year that happened in, but it's something that never fails to move me and I hope moves you too. Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creativity. There is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans, that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issue from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance which no man could ever have dreamt would come his way. I have learned a deep respect from one of Goethe's couplets. Whatever you can do or dream, you can begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. I just love that. I think it simply means that provided we're committed to the task at hand, that we should never, ever be frightened of stepping out purposefully in the direction of our dreams. We may eventually be able to accept a statement like this and adopt it as a belief of our own. But not in the beginning. In the beginning, we come from nowhere, our spiritual dimension to this, our physical reality, into the now. Here. I just love that play on words and for what they so accurately describe. We know that we're destined at the end of all this life stuff, with all its challenges, successes, failures, mistakes and imperfection, to go back to nowhere and be our spiritual selves again. When we arrive here, we are perfect. A blank sheet of paper to be written on. But from the moment we draw our first breath, we're conditioned, indoctrinated and given a set of beliefs by those who love us best. These beliefs are not our own, although we may call them so. For 95% of people. These are the beliefs that they will cleave to for the whole of their adult lives and never reach a point where they would have more what I would call knowings of their own. It took me until I was 65. Isn't that shocking? What you see is Michael, Marjorie and me. My mum and dad are smiling on reaching that perfect day. What it doesn't show you is what they had to go through to get there. A world war, six years of unremitting hell on earth. My mum lost her first husband in the first few weeks of the conflict that had been married a year. She was a REN cipher officer, coding and decoding messages and signals from warships at sea. Dad lost his elder brother in 1941 and spent six years at sea, pretty much four hours on, four hours off, with very little shore leave. I think we should be emulating these people. In 1939 when it started, they didn't have any idea of how long it might go on for. We've been into our present crisis for about three months and were already grumbling. I think we need to get a grip. These guys gave me so much and above all the principles and values that I've always lived by. Their simple guidance was to be honest, always to be kind and not to inconvenience other people. Aside from this, I was given a set of beliefs, as we all are from birth, one of which was that I had been born to be a farmer. This belief was reinforced throughout my childhood and late into my teens. Some of that reinforcement came to me from stories that were told around the fireplace about my ancestors. They were gilded and polished. True or false, they were beguiling stories nonetheless, and they were really, really powerful. George Thompson, my grandmother's father, he started out life in the 1850s as a smallholder and potato merchant. By the end of his life he was farming 8,000 acres. His son Henry, my grandmother's brother, went on to farm 28,000 acres under the plough, using horses and oxen as its motive power. Can you imagine that? This then was the farming dynasty to which it seemed I was destined to belong? Half family didn't come from a long line of farmers, but from a long line of merchantmen, clergymen and artists. So we sort of got into the whole farming thing by happy accident. Harry and Alice. Harry, my grandfather, was born a Vicar's son in 1881, qualified as an architect in 1904, aged 23. Self educated, he hadn't got a penny to his name. He fell in love with Alice, George Thompson's daughter. They married in 1911, but only after my grandfather had agreed to a marriage contract that required him to give up being an architect and become a farmer. Would you believe, between qualifying and marrying, he was clerk of works at Holcombe Hall, Lord Leicester's estate in Norfolk. I guess to learn something of estate management and farming. My grandfather was gifted a thousand acres on his marriage to my grandmother, but this didn't sit very comfortably with him. He insisted that his father in law act as banker and allow him to buy the farm. You see him here in 1930. Looking super confident at the time when he achieved this. When he died in 1960, he was farming 3,000 acres. And for someone who hadn't wanted to farm, not bad. So no pressure then. These guys were held up to be my heroes, the people I should emulate. It was powerful stuff. That was part of my belief system for most of the rest of my life. Aged just seven, I was sent away to school. 160 miles from home with a ration card round my neck so I wouldn't lose it. Food was scarce, no sweets. We were allowed just one on Fridays after lunch. Junior school was ok. I excelled on the sports field, but not in the classroom. Senior school, however, was a disaster. It was a really black time for me. For various reasons I was shunned. I never seemed to see the light of day either on the sports field or in the classroom. And left with just five O levels. English Literature, English Language, Geography, Art and would you believe, Divinity. There was some family joke at the time that I'd probably wind up being a literary arty African missionary. Everybody thought it was hilarious. I didn't. I spent two years laboring on the farms before going to Cirencester. I'd actually wanted to do the three year management course when I went. But I was told that I would do the one year short course instead. This was called the social course for obvious reasons. Thwarted by this, I found myself disinterested. They didn't teach me a lot there. Perhaps I wasn't listening or paying attention. What I did learn, however, was how to drink beer and chase women, which was great. I went to Australia for two years after that. Worked my passage as a deckhand on a cargo ship out and back. Left a boy and came back very much a man. I arrived home expecting that I would be right at the centre of things. Helping to run and farm 3,000 acres. I wasn't allowed in and had to sit on my hands and watch a catastrophic decline unfold in family fortunes that it seemed that I was powerless to to either influence or stop. In 1967 I got married, probably to get away from home. In the same year the first 370 acre farm was sold. In 1972, the thousand acre farm that I was working on as a foreman was sold too. Very suddenly I had nowhere to live with my young family. I had a blistering row with my dad that day and was told to go and farm a 250 acre farm down the road on my own. There were five men and a foreman on that farm. Can you believe that on the first morning I did the only sensible thing that I thought I could do and made all the farm staff redundant with the exception of one man, My father in law, who was a wily old fox and knew a thing or two about money, helped me with cash flow forecasts and a business plan and we turned a 15,000 pound loss into a profit in the first year. I was now a tractor driving farmer for the first time picking up the skills that I was going to need so desperately. A few Years hence, in 1974, aged 29, I was sponsored and accepted onto an advanced farm business management course funded by the Worshipful Company of farmers. There were 18 of us from all branches of the agricultural industry, banged up in a hotel for three weeks with no time off. I was by far the youngest. It was run by a guy called Ian Reid, who was at the time head of European Studies at London University's Y College. On the first morning he pointed at me and said, roger, why do you farm? And I went. And he said, if you don't know Roger, perhaps you shouldn't be. That was the truth. It took me until 1990, 1995 to tell myself that truth. What I had believed since birth was not my truth and it was not my belief. I didn't want to farm, I never had, but did so, perhaps out of reverence or obligation to past generations, or perhaps I just couldn't say no to my father because I was frightened of him and the expectations he had of me. Anyway, I'd left it too late because on 5 May 1976, he died very suddenly, aged 55. I'd spent the last week of his life fishing on the River Dee with him in Scotland. We had a really great time together and that was always the case with us, as long as we weren't farming. We got home on the Sunday, we met on the Tuesday, had a heated conversation in the middle of a sugar beet field and at 11 o' clock in the morning he stormed off and by two o' clock in the afternoon he was dead. I got a call from the police who wanted me to identify a body that they believed to be my father. Having identified him, I collected his effects. Amongst them were the keys to the safe. I immediately went back to the farm office, opened the safe and took out the books. I didn't have to know anything about economics, money or farming to know that we were in deep, deep trouble. I went to tell my grandmother and mother the news, other than the shock. Mum took one look at the books and said, oh, for goodness sake, Roger, whatever you're going to do. And I said, to be truthful, Mum, I really don't know, but I promise you this, I'll fix it. If I've ever displayed any wisdom at all since then, it was to know that I didn't have to be clever or smart. I just needed to make sure that I always worked with people who are cleverer than smarter than me. So I went and found the best in the business, John Green of Green Brothers of Soham. He said he was too busy and handed me on to a guy called Dick Ferber, who was farming huge acreages for the Dennis family in Lincolnshire. The ground rules with Dick were that he would pay me a visit once a month from nine in the morning until 12 noon, and that I'd pay him £1,000 on his arrival. We did this for six months. When he arrived on month six, he held out his hand and I gave him the cheque and I said, dick, I'm really not sure what I'm getting out of this and I'm really, really short of cash. He looked at me and said, actually, Roger, I'm not going to be staying. I've just come to tell you that you don't need me. You're going to be all right. You'll make it. Well, I grew as many inches as it took seconds for him to pay me the compliment. It was a huge confidence boost for me. There hadn't been too many compliments flying around in my life thus far. This is a recent Google Earth image of our main holding. A thousand acres of alluvial silt, 15ft of topsoil, no stones, and perhaps some of the best land in the uk. I would normally ask a live audience what it was that they would notice or see most of in this photograph. The answer should be bare soil. Even the fields that would appear to be green when viewed from above at ground level are in fact 80% bare soil. It's not something I would have noticed in my previous incarnation. We humans have been creating bare soil and destroying ecosystems for 10,000 years. This is a photograph of our farmyard and is really to demonstrate the continuous and unrelenting demand for capital investment if you want to be a player in modern agriculture. Grain store, onion store, chill store, packing shed, offices, stores, workshops, you know, you got the picture. It represents about 3 million pounds of investment on the back of low value product. This would have been taken about a year after my father's death. The white is all new concrete and a new grain store in 1976. We had nothing, no modern buildings. Those that we had had been built on the farms that had been sold. We had a fleet of 35 horsepower tractors and one and a half ton carts and a load of old machinery. The cottages were falling apart and we had too many people. I mean, it's such a long time ago now. I can't remember how many men we had exactly. I think it was about 13 or 14. Most of them were made redundant in my first month in the hot seat. This is the remains of a 3,000 acre estate. My first harvest. We were still carting grain 15 miles to this grain dryer. Again, I would describe this as inappropriate investment on the back of low value product. When it was built in 1961, it cost £120,000 at today's values, because I've looked it up, that would be £2,272,883.99 and don't forget the 99 pence. We turned it into a business in its own right, storing and drying grain for government intervention, local merchants, malsters and farmers and generating a profit of about 60 to 100,000 pounds per annum. Clean, uniform, not a weed in sight. A really good example of monoculture at its best. Green. When you look across the field, walk into it and look down and it's 80% bare soil. I think it was sterile. Everything seemed to have to die in except for the crop that we were growing. And yet this had been virgin marsh. It was first plowed up by George Thompson in 1919. There was not one molecule of that original ecosystem left. What you see is the result of an unholy alliance with fossil fuels and their derivatives and the chemical industry. We were just using soil as a medium to stand plants up in whilst we fed them N, P and K and sprayed them with a cocktail of herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, growth regulars and desiccants. When you say it, it doesn't sound right, does it? This was a 60 acre field of potatoes. I. I think they were a variety called Romano. I was so proud of this. For me this was perfection. This and the previous photograph the super clean wheat field and turning the grain dryer into a business in its own right were the epitome of what I was all about at the time. I was really, really good at my job. But I think I wasn't a farmer, I was a technician. This is the same field in the autumn of the year, me with my youngest son George, guess who he was named after? Now 42. And what do you see? Bare soil and compaction. This is a picture and you'll have to excuse the language of my big fuck off tractor. I just loved it. Great clouds of black smoke with an exhaust pipe you could stick your fist into. Air conditioned and quadraphonic sound. Insulated against the natural world. It could pull eight furrows at nine inches faster than you could walk. One man could plough a hundred acres in a day, no problem. It worked 24 hours a day in two shifts from harvest time until late autumn. Subsoiling and ploughing, two drivers and amazing work rates. But what do you see? Bare soil. The unintended consequences of laying soil open to wind, rain and sun have been with us for millennia. But more so within my lifetime. Technology has accelerated the damage exponentially. And I'm the industrial exemplar of all of this. Shame on me. This video clip was sent to me by a girlfriend who'd been driving through a heavy downpour in Yorkshire. She'd recently been talking to us about soil and land management and she knew she had to film what she was seeing and send it to me. It's. There you go. Huge amounts of topsoil leaving the farm gate. We're losing 27 tons of topsoil for every ton of food that we produce globally. And we burn 10 calories of energy for every calorie we eat. We were suffering from collapsing soils. After rain it would run together and then bake like concrete, making the establishment of crops, especially those from small seeds, really problematic. Knowing what I know now, I know that I have the solutions to these and other soil related problems. If I could have my farm back now, I would be doing something truly radical. If I'm honest, the whole farming thing terrified me. The bank and the early days were always on my back. The weather was always unpredictable. At least I thought so. And we didn't understand what was going on underneath our feet. If we had, we would have no doubt done things differently. It took 20 years. We now had a very smart farming operation. I had done the job that I had been given to do. There was a Damascene moment when one day I thought I was going to be farming for the rest of my life. We were on an even keel. We'd done all the difficult stuff, some plain sailing now, only to wake the next morning knowing that I needed to sell the business, that I just didn't want to do this farming stuff anymore. The farm was sold. We gave the money away to our linear family, leaving enough money for Jilly and I to buy a house and renovate it. There was a great and good leveling in the family. It had never sat very comfortably with me that my siblings didn't get a penny piece on my father's death. That was now taken care of. So we bought our freedom. I was bleating to one of my boys about not being quite sure what I was going to do with myself. He looked at me incredulously and said, oh for goodness sake, dad, get a clue. I thought, cheeky young monkey, what did you want to do when you were 17? I said, well, I wanted to go to art school. And he said, get off your ass. So I did. I went to college and did a two year furniture making and design course. I absolutely loved it. It became a big part of what I thought my future was going to be about. Earlier, Jilly and I had discovered that we couldn't have children together, which was a huge black emotional hole. We knew we needed to find a new purpose in life. So she sold her thriving dental practice at pretty much the same time that I sold the farm. We decided that we would spend the whole of the rest of our lives adventuring, doing the things that we'd either never dared do or never had time to do. So we flew aeroplanes, raced motorbikes, rock climbed, fire walked, skied, did all sorts of crazy stuff. Amongst all of that, we bought a house in the foothills of the Pyrenees from a couple of very pissed people at a bull fight for what seemed like peanuts at the time. 90,000 for a newly renovated Landais farmhouse, 1.5 acres and a swimming pool with some of the proceeds from the dental practice. We thought we might live there. I mean, what's not to like? We could and did let it for a thousand pounds a week when we weren't using it in the summer months. I mean, it was a good deal. One of the things I wanted Julie to try was sailing. So we booked ourselves a passage on a charter boat that was going to sail from Brixham on the south coast of England down the west coast of France. And since we were thinking of going to live in France, it seemed like a really good idea. It was so popular that in order to secure a berth on the boat, we were asked to pay £1,200 at the time of booking a year in advance of going on the holiday. I it actually seemed a bit steep at the time, but we booked it anyway and promptly forgot about it. Three weeks before the due date, we had a phone call from the charter company saying that they'd had an accident with the boat, it had been repaired, but they didn't want to leave UK waters. They had decided that they were not going to sail down the west coast of France, but we're going to sail up the west coast of Scotland instead. And I went, oh. Jilly said, oh, come on, Rog, where's your attitude? It's just sailing, for goodness sake. Anyway, it would be a great trip on the bikes. Well, it was and we had a good week. Although the company and the food were great. The weather wasn't either. No wind or too much. There were 19 people on board. Other than the skipper and the first mate, we seemed to be the only physically fit people and it turned out to be a lot of physical work. So by the end of the week we were absolutely knackered. But what we saw from the deck of the boat was absolutely stunning. Before we got back on our bikes to go home, Jilly said, do you think we could live in a place like this? The answer was really a resounding yes from both of us. We would go home and test market our house. That was at the end of August 2001. We just finished a 10 year renovation on an Elizabethan hall house in Norfolk. It was a wreck when we bought it. Underneath the wreckage was an untouched original and by the time we finished it, it was just perfect. On a Saturday morning in mid September, just after our holiday, we were sitting at our kitchen table writing out the particulars for the house, drinking a cup of coffee. Bread had just come out of the oven when there was a knock on the door. There stood a young couple, they said they'd been passing, saw the house, thought it was so beautiful, but they couldn't resist the temptation to knock on the door and ask if they could have a look round. The intrusion meant that it took a minute or two to agree. After a guided tour, a cup of coffee, they got up to leave. The guy put his hand in his pocket and handed us his card and said, if you're ever thinking of selling this place, could you get in touch? Jilly and I looked at one another, said, well, we've actually just been writing out the particulars. And he said, how much are you asking? We told him and he said, can you be out in a month? And we said no, but January would be ok. We got home from our holiday at the end of August 2001 and we were living on the west coast of Scotland by January 6th, 2002. Does this sound familiar? Once one is committed, providence moves too. We could do no wrong. A few weeks later, a modern bungalow to rent, with five bedrooms, a workshop, lock frontage and a deep water mooring manifested itself. On June 15, 2002, an enforced meeting with a solicitor in Oban to get some family papers sworn was interrupted by a phone call. That phone call brought Salon into our lives the next day. We had a period of three to four years when stuff just seemed to show up as if by magic. This photograph was taken on the day that we first saw salon, 74 acres and a croft house. We'd promised ourselves two things when we moved, first being that I would never, ever, never, ever, ever have anything to do with farming again and that we wouldn't live on an island. Or we failed miserably on both counts. But we couldn't say no to this. We arrived at 11:30 that day and by 1.30 the deal was done. We were about to experience what happens when you get out of the way and let nature do what she does best. Six years later, this is what Salon looked like. We hadn't done anything. We'd introduced three Highland cattle and a couple of ponies because we were told that if we didn't use the croft, our neighbours, under crofting law could use it without our permission. We had no intention but to keep them as grass cutters, only to find when we came to sell the bullocks, that nobody wanted them. So we had them slaughtered and butchered and sold the meat. That was the beginning of a small direct sales business that's still going today. This is what it looked like 2017 and 2018. 2002 to 2009. Salem was a lifestyle choice. You know, we'd retired, for goodness sake, and quite frankly, it was like living on the edge of heaven. Spring of 2009. This is Rebecca Hoskin and her business partner Tim Green, who sadly was killed in a farming accident. Shortly after this photo was taken, they made a documentary called A Farm for the Future. We'd had it recorded on our sky set top box for weeks. It was part of a BBC nature series at the time. Jilly had tried to watch it and fallen asleep in the process. And I think I'd probably done the same. She said, I'll delete it. I mean, how close can you come to missing something that has the power to change your life completely forever? We watched it. It took as long to watch the film. 48 minutes and 38 seconds to have my whole belief system reversed. Having watched it, I believed none of what I'd spent my whole adult life learning and believing. The film showed me that ploughing and cultivation was the worst thing that you could do to soil. That it should be kept covered at all times and not exposed to sun, wind and rain. That chemicals, fossil fuels and their derivatives would sound the death knell of modern farming, if not us as a species. It was truly shocking. For the several nights that followed, I didn't sleep that well. This is the true nature of a paradigm shift. It can turn you upside down and inside out and made me realize that it's never too late. That my past experience, that perceived waste of time doing something I didn't want to do, was in fact my preparation for this one moment in my life. One the response in me was immediate. I got up out of my chair, went out and started to create a no dig vegetable garden. It took just a few days. We stuck some boards in the ground and created lowered paths, not raised beds. I remember saying to Jilly, this is never going to work. Clashes of paradigms, past and present. But look at the result. Jilly said, how are we going to feed all these plants? Me, a farmer, I couldn't answer the question. I didn't know. A whole lifetime in farming and me at the top of my game, not able to respond without an agronomist and a bag of fertilizer. We later learned that soil biology was the answer and the foundation of absolutely everything to do with feeding plants. This was never mentioned at agricultural college. They didn't teach it to me there. None of the clever people, the agronomists and the technologists that I employed ever mentioned it during the whole of my time in farming. Quite the reverse. In the mid-1980s, I went out to the USA to study strawberry growing. Brought back the technology and took average yields from the UK's 3.5 tons an acre to 12. The first step in the preparation to achieve this, I was told, was to sterilize the soil. Good grief. Whatever did we think we were doing? It brings to mind at the same time the day that Jilly came to live with me on the farm on 10th May 1985. Etched into my consciousness forever that when we woke up on the morning of the 11th, she said to me, good morning, sweetheart. I've been thinking about the farm. I know I'm not a farmer, so please don't think me critical or patronizing or stupid even, but where are the animals? Oh, how I wished that I'd been able to listen. This was a gem. A view into the world of whole systems thinking from this huge paradigm Shift started the very real journey to living authentically with our own set of beliefs and a commitment to make a difference. We started by following Joel Salatin and got into trying mob grazing. Just the beginning of understanding the principles of mimicking nature. With animals bunched and moving, putting dung and urine where it was meant to be, not where it's so commonly found by permanent water sources or shady trees. We were growing topsoil and sequestering carbon. This was our first attempt. It was so obviously right from day one. I couldn't have told you why. We had no idea what we were doing. But we were excited to be observing and responding to what happened on a daily basis in our new paddocks and noticing how differently our animals behaved with every change that we made. Then we came across Alan Savory's TED Talk and that completely blew our minds. Shortly afterwards, we were sitting watching television and this advert suddenly appeared on my iPad. I immediately and unilaterally decided to book and pay for a ticket for myself. Oops. I hadn't run it past Jilly. I hadn't checked that I could get a flight even. I turned to her and said, sweetheart, I've done something really stupid. Showed her the advert, I've just booked myself in for this conference without consulting you. And she said, so I don't get to come. Before we went to bed, we spent what seemed like a lot of money. We flew to America. And those few days in October 2015 were life changing. We left for home, feeling that we were right at the cutting edge of the changes that humanity needed to be making. I was 70 and knew that with Jilly's help and the beliefs that I now held that I had some significant work to do, a lot of it fueled by what I had previously considered to be my wasted past experience, it actually became very valuable. We have never really wanted to run a business here ourselves. We'd both done that before and didn't want to do it again. But over time, it had steadily been heading in that direction and we'd been getting older. I can't say that I ever noticed that until it was almost too late. Joel Salatin suggested in one of his books that us older folk should be getting out of the way and helping the young to get into farming and at the same time helping ourselves to get out by swapping our experience, expertise and money for physical energy. That we were fast running out of self interest has played a big part in all of this. We didn't want to leave this heaven on earth, but not coping with the work was becoming a problem, so we were looking for the right couple. Dan and Fika showed up in September 2016 and seemed to be a good fit. Everything went well until November 2018 when Fika became pregnant. This seemed to change their whole physical and emotional landscape. And in early 2019 they came and told us they couldn't stay. It was a big shock, not least because we had come to be very fond of them both. When they left in mid summer 2019, it seemed like we had wasted three and a half years. However, were we going to find the right people? Well, Dave and Alison found us in mid-2019 through some friends that we'd helped with a business startup in Glasgow a few years ago. It was suggested by them that they would write to us. They arrived here in January this year and we've been piling through the work training and familiarization and they've really straightened us out in short order. Other than for the parent pandemic, I think we're back on track. During these ups and downs, we've been piloting and trialing various enterprises designed to differentiate ourselves from the competition, finding niches into which we fitted, whether it be managing our land and soils differently, whether it be rainbow egg laying hens, 100% grass fed beef and lamb pastured chicken, or that we were not organic because we're beyond it, choosing always to be customer endorsed and certified. So what you see here are the photographs of the beginnings of all of this over the past few years. Jilly had always wanted to have chickens, but we couldn't have them because we had a mink problem. We trapped 70 or so in four or five years. And then I asked her, well, how many chickens do you want? A dozen? And she said, oh for goodness sake, no, no, no, five would be fine. So I built her this chicken hut, which became known as the Chalet because it looks like one, on a small trailer that was sitting around in the yard doing nothing. The first year we had 65 chickens. Mark 2 followed as a matter of urgency, followed by Mark 3, the Chick Inn. We very quickly realized that chickens provided fantastic ecosystem services and a really great pastor renovators when coupled with grazing animals. We piloted heritage chickens and pastured broilers for meat to find out whether we could grow them successfully in our wet climate. We're now licensed to kill chickens on farm and are the first new entrants into the Scottish poultry industry since devolution. And I'm the oldest chicken slaughterman in the country. We fattened lambs to 18 months here ever since 2013. But we can control them all. Our fences run down to the sea. So all they had to do was wait for low tide and then they could graze anywhere they liked. We now have them under control and graze them with the cattles and chicken. We use a kiwi tec 3 line electric fence system which is equally good for cattle and sheep. It gives us the opportunity to have an infinitely flexible system. That means we can change the format of our multi paddock system at will to suit our stock and ecosystem management. This is me demonstrating the ease with which a three line fence can be put up. It's equally quick to take down. It is very clever. We now graze behind electric fences. Winter and summer. Holistic planned grazing means that we know in advance of the year which paddock our animals will be in at any date during the summer or winter grazing periods. And that they will be in the right place at the right time for the right reasons. All paddocks get rested for 6090 to 60 to 90 days between grazings. We've seen a 297.38% increase in forage production since 2015. Now for some befores and afters. The results 2003. What do you see? A pasture with short grass set, stocked over, grazed, understocked and liable to runoff. Same view. What's the difference? Longer grass. A pasture that has been allowed to recover. An explosion of trees and vegetation and more diversity. These pastures will infiltrate water and store it. No runoff. This was taken just after we'd taken possession of the farm. The valley was floor to ceiling rushes. You can see that I've been doing some topping. I wished I'd taken the photograph earlier, before any topping had been done. Because 16 years later, same view, a different time of year. But I'm sure you can see the difference. I can tell you that most of the change with all of these pictures, including this one, has happened in the last five years. Same valley from a different angle and animals up to their bellies in grass. I think this is just beautiful. This is a short clip that was taken from pretty much the same place as the Last photo In February 2013, just two years before we changed our management. This used to happen in winter after heavy rain. It doesn't happen anymore. Why greater infiltration? Because we've been repairing our water cycle. In May 2016, I did my holistic management training. As part of the coursework, I was asked to take photographs of what I thought demonstrated ineffective and effective water cycles, nutrient cycles, energy flow, and community dynamics. All of the next photographs were taken on the 5th of May, 2016, which quite coincidentally happened to be the 40th anniversary of my dad's death. I think that he'd been very. He would have been very proud of me for doing what I was doing just now. Farmers at the time that this was taken were complaining that it was too cold, that nothing was growing and that there was no grass. So what do you notice? Look at the foreground. No one seems to have noticed that the roadsides and the grass there is growing. The land in the background is overgrazed understock with no rest and no energy reserves to grow. From the same field, looking down onto the pasture over the fence, what do you see? Not much grass, lots of bare soil and no diversity. Now let's look at our own pastures, looking across and down. This is less than a mile down the road from the last photographs. Same day, all the same native grasses, just very different management. I'm going to finish this evening by showing you a daily move. This is something that the uninitiated imagine the future. It's something I really, really enjoy. I hope you notice the grazed and trampled grass. Compared to the ungrazed, it looks really untidy, really scruffy, but that's what masses of armour on the soil looks like. I'm going to finish with two quotes, both relevant to the beliefs that we've touched on and the paradigm shifts that we've talked about. Our past experience has not made us the way we are. It has made us believe we are the way we are. In other words, we can always change and decide to become the people that we'd love to be. To discard the beliefs we were gifted at birth for, the knowings that come from our own life experience, we might then know that with courage and our own beliefs, that we can truly commit to stepping out purposely in the direction of our dreams. Buckminster Fuller said, in order to change an existing paradigm, you do not struggle to change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete. That, in essence, is the higher service to which we are all being called. I think we are in the right place at the right time with the right information and the right people. We just need to step forward and get this thing done.