The €100,000 deadline...

So it's the 16th of December and that means the deadline has now passed for our Start Regenerative Agriculture competition that we put on in association with Ecosia, the search engine. Well, it's not much to give you in the way of backdrops because it's quiet and snow filled landscapes around here and not so much going on at the farm. As we take serious downtime to reorganize for next season, we're looking to bring back our internship program. The springboard platform that's kick started so many amazing projects in Europe and further afield as well. And a lot of people have been requesting that we bring back the internship, this being the first year that we didn't run that. So we're looking into that and I'll release details probably early in the new year about how we're going to structure our new season. But yeah, we've had some great applications from seven different countries, a bunch from Germany, France, England, Spain, Portugal, Romania, Hungary, and they're all up on the site that's in the links below there. So now we're in the long process of having a look through all of the applications. There's 14 there so far and the submission date has now closed, that closed yesterday. And a bunch of last minute submissions. So they're all online that I hope some of you will, watching this want to get engaged. The aim was to put up these projects in advance of the deadline so that we could have some feedback and discussion from myself and other people too to give people that are either looking to start up from scratch or to reinvigorate their current farm, give them some feedback on their ideas. And so I'm going to be looking now through the applications over the next couple of weeks. I'm going to be looking at several factors. One is the feasibility of what we see in the business plan proposed. People have been busy writing the holistic context and writing land plans and production plans as well as financial plans. And I haven't looked through them in any detail yet. And so I'm going to spend a lot of time really reading through and visualizing those projects to deem which I feel are potentially viable enterprises and check if I feel like the resource bases and skills are there to carry it out. Having a deep insight into all these different mixed Farm enterprises have got a good sense of what's doable and which ones fit in the doable category. And then we'll be looking at how much money people are looking to borrow. So you remember this isn't a loan that we're offering, although it will be paid back with some interest, it's more equity. I will be supporting those projects through mentorship and also visiting the projects that are selected in spring to be able to just go through plans more carefully and really look at the implementation strategies and, and business plans in more detail. But offering mentorship on Skype over the next year to try and get more successful farm projects going or the reinvigoration of existing farm projects. We're looking for things that build topsoil, things that are regenerative in the way that we defined on the platform page there. There are some videos that we put up and some basic loose definitions of what regenerative agriculture means to us. And it's been great to have Ecosia been so interested in supporting more regenerative agriculture. They've done amazing work planting millions of trees around the world, and yet there's so much more that can be done through agriculture to sequester carbon and to build local ecosystems and community too. So beyond the basic premise that projects need to be demonstrating an element of regenerative agriculture, we're looking for viable, tangible, practical, doable things. So that's where I'd like to invite you viewers to get involved. There's a discussion box at the bottom of each project that you find on the website there. It's quite a heavy page because there's so many documents embedded in there, so I've been having trouble loading it up. I'm not sure if you'll have the same where you are, but there's a space there for people to get engaged and to upload comments and feedback. And I'd ask people to take a bit of time and engage respectfully and clearly if you have experience, experience in some of the things that people are looking to do. I've, you know, just scanned through the documents submitted, but some great work. People have really put a lot of thought and time into this and I want to just go through really checking for, you know, whether I think these things are viable and give some pointers to people even if they're not selected. But we'll, we'll see. We have a hundred thousand euros that the way the competition was put out, it could all go to one project or it can be split up in any way we see fit between multiple projects. So we'll be looking at what people are looking to borrow and what they're looking to achieve with that and having some back and forth with ecosia on what we think is viable and what we want to see supported. So we're not sure how that will go yet. We're going to take some time to really digest it. But thank you so much everyone that's entered and made the effort to put that together. And I'd really like to invite people viewing this to to comment and share their thoughts and perspectives too, because that's part of the aim of the process, is that people can benefit even if they're not being selected for the competition. But I see there's a lot of mixed farms in there and that's great. I think I'm a great proponent of mixed farming. The benefits of diverse farms are so much greater than single enterprise farms for habitat reasons, for soil building, for nutrient cycling, etc. So I'm excited to take some time now and really have a look through so that's it. It's just a quick video to invite you to have a look through the entrance and you're welcome to comment as you see fit as well. And for those of you planning and working in market gardening and other enterprises in Europe, don't forget to look at the farmers tools.com we've been sending out caterpillar tunnels and greens harvesters and paper pot transplanters all over Europe now, so all that stuff is available on the Farmer's Tools in the links below. You also see links there to our book and our online training. And soon we'll be announcing all of the trainings, including workshop with JM Fordia next summer and possibly we'll have Curtis Stone back at the farm and hopefully bringing back our esteemed internship program that's so valuable for people getting a springboard into starting their own enterprises. So more of that to come soon. Thanks so much for watching. We'll see you in the next video.