Taming sheep, rambling on, smoking chickens, Midsummer and Keyline planning

Well, we've been through summer solstice and technically the days are getting shorter and we're heading into winter. But not to put it down on it, here's a few clips from the last few days and we've had great success getting the sheep and calves together.

Okay, we've got cows and sheep together and they seem to keep their distance. Cows like the shelter under there. Poor forage on the side here. This is about as far as we've ever come down with poultry. So a lot of greenery in there, but it's not necessarily good forage. Cows are enjoying getting a bit of tree leaf, which is obviously nutrient dense, but we'll see. I'm just checking if they've got enough forage for the day. I think it's going to be a bit thin by the end of the day, but I'm happy if they heavily graze because we don't come down here very often. So fine for now and I will be checking in later. Next move is kind of up to the new fenced bit where the ram is. But we have to separate the ram out if we want to do that. Quite a lot of nettles and things. I'm surprised they're not eating them, although they might. Well, this soon. They're working their way up. The bull has been really taking bark. He's obviously short on minerals. See, that will impact these trees, but these are just willow in the riparian. They're not of any value. I'm happy if animals get the opportunity to express their needs and take what they want.

I'm happy with that.

But they've really taken quite some bark off. Quite effective. So that's last night's roost and there's today's siding. So pretty wet today. Birds seem okay out on the. On the grass, but you see there's a few little holes in the pasture here. Soggy day, heavy rainstorm. Thunderstorms today. There's a little paper wasp.

Made his nest in the gooseberry bush.

That's going to make harvesting interesting.

Beautiful little structures they make.

Mr. P's hanging up with the birds. He loves having poultry around. He spends most of his days. He does like a morning walk up here and walks back down at night, but he spends most of the day hanging around near the chickens, I guess. Feathered friends. Birds doing well. A bit of overlap in the pens here, which means they have a little bit of soil ground on the edge. Able to keep dry enough. Got to go around the corner now. So the important thing is these pens Give wind protection on these sides primarily. So when we go around the corner, we have to move like so. Had a critical era a couple of years ago where someone turned the pen round into the predominant wind. Big storm that night and we lost thousands of euros of potential revenue. Obviously the birds haven't eaten so much. Their feed curve is exponential at this point. It didn't cost so much in losses, very unfortunate, but cost a lot in income that we can't replace in such a short season. So easily necessary, but all good on this rainy day. So I've been hearing from some of our old interns, just thinking about some of our old interns, because I'm hoping to pay them to Skype in with us and share their experience and in that way offer something back to them and get them to share, you know, how they've progressed, what they enjoyed about their time here, what they got out of it and what they've gone on to do. And I think that's a really valuable cross pollination that honours the old interns too. But something I've been hearing from a few people lately is just the difficulties some people have going off, starting on their own and just really missing the social side of how we run things.

Here, where we're, you know, we're not.

Just coming to work every day, we're.

All here in a learning environment. And whilst we work really hard a bunch of time, we're also sitting down chatting about things, developing ideas, working on people's plans. We have sauna together, we eat together, we play together, we go fishing, we go have barbecues. And I think that, you know, one layer for some of the people leaving here is they go off and set up on their own. And it's very challenging without that social element because you're just busy all day. So if you haven't got people around you in the working environment, then it's very hard to find time to socialise and you're often quite physically tired at the end of the day. So it's a challenge that I'm identifying as a pattern. Every year, certain patterns seem to pop up that are shared by many people. And last year was a really tough year due to the drought, and many people had tough spells in personal life, including ourselves. And this year seems to be the social element of things is a key theme for other people. That's something that goes really beautifully here because we have a lot of people from all over who bring all kinds of strengths, gifts and talents. And we have a more open schedule in some ways. I mean, we're all busy all the time, but there's crossover where people have, you know, social moments and build relationships that are really powerful. And it's. Yeah, it's on my mind, and I don't really know what I have to say about it, but something I'm thinking about a lot and something to think more and clarify thoughts on and talk and share about, because I think that it's. You know, one thing about our farm is that we're trying to show people a bit of everything and really educate them in design and planning to go off and be successful.

But it's.

I've always said this is not a farm that I would replicate anywhere else for a particular reason. It's like, hey, come here. Immerse yourself and learn and get exposed to a bunch of stuff in a small space. And primarily, part of the reason I set it up like this is like, I couldn't think of anywhere in my learning process where I could go and get exposed to all this stuff in one place in a coordinated way, in a functional farm led by professional educator with a lot of experience. And that's what people need, and it's what drives us on to the insane.

Schedule we've been holding. It's like, these places are needed and.

Many more places like this are needed. And I feel a high level of responsibility with that.

And.

Yeah, that, you know, it fuels a lot of my high workload in a way. I feel, like, driven to. I don't even feel driven. I feel like it's running through me in a way, if that makes any sense. It's. You know. Yeah, there's a lot I could say about that, but I think it's. It's super important that people have the opportunity to be exposed to a bunch of stuff. But if it was just Johanna and I trying to make a living on the side of a hill in the middle of Sweden, and we would only do a partial aspect of what we're doing here because we wouldn't need to do all this. You know, it wouldn't be necessary for us to have the quality of life we want. We don't need the income that this farm can generate that allows us, in reality, to create opportunities and to host people and take the risk of allowing people with no experience to take charge of, you know, thousands of euros of product and the welfare of animals. And I think that is really beautiful and valuable, if a little tiring and stressful, I gotta say. But another point, so one point I try and make to people is like, don't try and do too much at once. Don't copy what we're doing here. So take the bits from here. Check them. In your experience, are they things you're passionate about doing? You know, maybe some people come here and they want to be a market gardener and they leave and set up a boiler enterprise because it's just. It's hit them that this is fitting their context. But another thing about this place is there's a lot of people here and it draws a lot of people from all over. And we only take in a very small amount of the people that want to come here. But it's, you know, if you're setting up on your own and running a market garden, you've locked yourself into, you know, very hard work, long hours on the land, that it's very hard to balance life and have a social life and a relationship and all these things too. And, yeah, I'm just thinking about that a lot because it's. It's hard to get that across to people in any tangible way. Talking about it doesn't really hit home necessarily, but that's something going on on the mind is the. The realities of setting that on your own. And it's something I'll be talking a lot with the interns about in these coming weeks.

Okay, big day. We are moving up to the top. Paco and Luke have been watching handling videos and learning a bit about moving them along fence lines. Cows aren't the problem, but sheep might be. Today we've got the sheep and cows in the same paddock. We got four of these nets up and they've been fine. So we're gonna skip the forest setting that I mentioned in another video and try and drive them straight across the road into Nutfield and see if they can drive them along the fence line just by giving them pressure in the right space in their flight zone and take them calmly all the way to the top. Now, it could go any way. It's very probable that they'll just skit off and run in all directions, but it's a chance to see how the skills work in reality. And it's very. You know, we can't put netting across the road because of putting posts in the ground, so the sheep can't easily jump through this. So I need to get a fence down and move quickly to catch them up. So I'm not sure if I'll catch this on video, but we'll see and check in about it after. Regardless, Clovermay loves to lead the way. So hopefully if the sheep see the cows coming, that will encourage them to take the right path. Luke's trying to put pressure on them to keep them along the fence line, which looks like it's going really well. It's been a remarkable change since they came, but we just got to hope that there's no backtracking.

Hacker, see if you can stay. You want to keep them along the.

Fence now, like, don't let them go.

Off in the pond if you can help it. So sheep are inching forward. This is good. This is good. But they've seen the cows go through, so if you can keep them on the fence. I'm just hiding behind an oak tree, so I'm not blocking their potential pathway. Well, I'm following them up with speed fence, but I don't see any sheep on the road and I don't see any cows. The cows bolted off this way. I think they've got the sheep right where they want them. Pretty impressive. And they've been spending a bit of time every day. The sheep are right up there. I see them right at the top. That's amazing. So they've been spending time just really being with the sheep, which is really time well invested. And they've been watching some handling videos and just practicing a bit in the fence to see how, like, pressure zones or flight zones work, how the balance points out. But cows are going up now, too, so they basically got the animals exactly where they wanted. That's a wonderful job. So this is where we've been coming through, what, it must have been a month and a half ago now. So it's back up tall grass again. Okay. Brought the Shademobile up, but we're not giving it to them today. They've got shade in the trees for now, just getting their water sorted. We've got them just inside one of the quick fences again because it won't short out so easily in the tall grass. And then we're putting a net across for double safety. What we want to know is if we can keep them in this. Now, the first time we put the sheep in this, they just ran straight through it. So it's always good practice to just stomp down the grass with our foot. We never cut the grass. We always just lay it down with our feet and get the fence tester on and see how strong it is. But if we can get the cows and sheep together, which seems to have already happened, and we can get them running in different types of fencing, then, then our work has been very successful. Paco and Luke have done an exemplary job so we'll see this next week. Maybe down to where Luke's putting the fence across is the most secure place for us to do this training other than in an isolated forest paddock. But we decided not to move him up with the ram because we'd have to separate the ram with maybe metal fencing, like metal gates, just to ensure that he's not getting on the females. You see Clovermay's coat is super shiny. That's a sign of really good health. And her gut is full. You can see from the little triangle above her hip on the left, that's where the rumen is. The bull is short haired. We wondered if he was shaved initially. He's very short haired.

Yeah.

Sheep seem a little timid of the cows. They're keeping their distance. But it definitely helped seeing the cows go first and then they went pretty smoothly over the road. So big move, cows, bull, sheep all together in wires. And a great job for my team working with herding, learning about flight zones, pressuring animals and how to move them. And it's been great progression to have these sheep now movable and in with the cows and sheep. So as part of water layer, we've.

Been looking at different coefficients. This is a document put together by Darren Doherty summarizing K.D. nelson's seminal work about earth and dam design. So looking at valley coefficients and how you calculate the amount of soil moved and the amount of embankment made and then how to check different sites and propose which are more efficient for the amount of soil moved per water stored. And so just looking at those calculations, we've pulled up an idea on nutfield.

Sorry.

Moving the camera and looking at, well, how much water catches in this site and using specific measurements from the KML file I've sent them, like how much soil do we need to move to get a dam three and a half meters deep and a wall four meters tall. So they have to go up and observe and think about the coefficient for the valley shape. And then here we have seasonal stream. Well, spring. And I want to know how I would tap that and lead it to the dam and where I would consequently spill the dam over, whether it would be piped down to the river or into the ditch. Get their design brains thinking about things.

Northeast looks great. There's different ways you could do that.

You could kick it in as different fields or.

Yeah, it looks really like it is one. But I did every field separately.

And they join in.

Yeah, they kind of join.

Take it as one landscape. Yeah. What I found is if you take it as One landscape, this pattern goes off that you can actually, by doing.

That as an individual field, it works out.

You mean do these together and then this one?

No, just like my first glance, I.

Would always look at that as one land unit, as it were.

Yeah, yeah.

I tried that in the beginning, but it just.

It was too much. Satisfactory. Yeah.

Than what you can do individually.

Yeah, I did one in the beginning but it was just too much. So then I went down to doing a single one.

So what are potential weak spots?

Well, I was just now trying to fix this because there's a big sp. Like the next contour line would be exactly on the headland. So I was going to move them all up a little bit and kind of delete this one and then have a whole other rows of trees to.

Get more trees in.

Yeah, it's more useful. And then also it'll fit better with the pathway because it's coming up here and. And then this will be up higher here, so we have less trees crossing the pass pathway and then it's just more trees in general.

What about your valley lines? Mid summer.

Here on midsummer. And some things we just bought, like this is seal. It's herring, pickled herring. And you get many different spicings on them. So this one is a traditional spicing.

Cows and sheep are becoming friends and mainly it's when this one isn't antagonizing them. They're probably pretty chilled out with the other cows. Smoking chicken. So we're doing 10% brine. So I've got marked up 15 litres here. That's one and a half kilos of fine sea salt. Gonna use good sea salt smoking. Gonna try and get 12 birds in there. So birds in the chiller, they're coming out like this. They've been in 10% salt for 24 hours and I'm skewering them through the breast and out the back, putting on a string to hang them at equal height in the smoker.

So just doing 50 birds today and.

That'S gonna be beautiful. I'll be smoking tomorrow for the market garden course. We'll have them for lunch and sell some off the farm as well. Okay, 50 bears in, so we will get the smoker on. Beautiful. So fires turn to a glow.

Temperature is only up at about 40.

But that's the point.

I'm closing it up.

It's midday today, so I'm just going to turn the thermostat on. Paco's been making compost tea again for watering the trials again. We're doing that Once a week with BioFerts, compost teas, etc. We've got a problem because I need to plug this one in. The compost tea must be in also. The chickens take priority right now. Now we'll have to find a solution that's on so good tool. Tomorrow morning I'll open it up, let it cool in the smoke. Okay, double plug. But got to keep an eye on the fuses. It tends to blow out this fuse if there's too much power going on. So we'll keep an eye on that to make sure the temperature gets up. Then we're always monitoring around here to check that that the temperature is right. So this isn't a sealed door, it's insulated door but it just keeps bellowing gently out the top and sides as it smokes away. So I'll keep an eye on the temperature. That should get up to 75 or so. So basic hygiene procedure. We've foam down in here.

Now I've only had packed chickens in.

Here and then brine on the floor. So then it's be s so thorough with this one but I need to foam it. We used to always just use hot soapy water but we're paving this foaming unit because it's. It really helps dissolve any grease chicken obviously being very greasy and really helps with cleaning up the floor, etc. So any surfaces, etc. So let this soak in and then I'll be coming back and doing big mop down sweep out.

Okay folks, that's it for today. We are now going into market gardening training here on the internship and we've got Charles Dowding coming at the end of the week. So I'm hoping we'll get some videos with Charles while he's here. It's a brief flying visit through because he's busy in his season too. But thanks so much for watching our videos folks. Appreciate the likes and shares and comments and don't forget to hit subscribe if you haven't already. See you in the next video. T.