Training new farmers at Heather Hill Farm, Ireland

Welcome to the beautiful snowy north, folks. This is a quick video to announce a regenerative agricultural design training that I'll be running June 18th to the 26th over in Ireland with my friend Cattle at Heather Hill Farm. And we've got cattle with us today, so I wanted to just tell you a little bit more about that. So Cathol's been running Heatherhill Farm the last few years and it's one of the beacons of regenerative agriculture over in Ireland. He's got a mixed diverse farm and he's got the same application of critical analytical thinking to his approach to farming, which I'm really inspired by and he's doing amazing work over there. Cattle, tell us a bit, what in a nutshell is Heatherhill Farm all about?

Hey Richard. Yeah. I'm super excited you're coming to the farm this summer. I've been working on this for a while and it's going to be absolutely epic. So yeah, Heatherhill Farm, I suppose we're a small scale regenerative farm. The core principles are that we are ecologically beneficial so that we're building good quality topsoil here, that we're producing quality food for our community and that we're doing that economically, that I can make a living doing it. That's Heather Hill Farm in a nutshell. Enterprises we run here on the farm, we run pastured layers, we run pastured broilers, we run pastured turkeys. And one of the kind of exciting things for me this year is we're building our own slaughtery this spring on the farm. So it's going to be really exciting to have that on the farm. Then other enterprises in the farm you can see behind me we've got goats which we're trying to build up a little micro dairy just at the early stages. We keep sheep here for grass fed lamb and that's our herbivores. Then we've got woodland raised pork. You can see in the woodlands behind me we keep pigs in the summer. Another interesting enterprise we've added onto the farm is agritourism. It's a really good enterprise and of course educational, something that we're passionate about here in the farm.

Super nice. Yeah, it's really impressive what you've been up to, cattle and it's a real pleasure and honour to be able to join you at your farm to run the training at your place. It's going to be super fun. I love it in Ireland and I know one thing that you don't have there as a commercial market garden. But for the modules on market gardening that we run during the course, I believe we're going to visit some of your friends who've got a really beautiful market garden, is that right?

Yes. So my good friends Rob and Sean run an absolutely epic market garden Knock Noray Farm. And it's just, it's actually maybe like 30 miles across the water from here. And we're going to go for the market garden aspect because we're not so much big in market gardening here. More to the fact that it's mainly me on the farm and it's a time issue and I prefer to spend my time working on enterprises with animals as opposed to market garden. So for that aspect, we're going to be heading down to the guys in knocking array and checking out Dirk.

Now, I believe cattle's got his hens in the polytunnel over the wintertime. And you might remember from the farm like a hero tour from other videos I put on YouTube. Cattle has actually worked on automating the ridgestile style eggmobile. And we actually used the control box that he's built to fit into our eggmobiles here at Ridgedale. It's amazing, brilliant thinking, simple, low cost, effective solutions. But I know, Kato, you're building another eggmobile this winter, so maybe you want to show us a bit about that.

Yeah. So I've been really inspired by your work and the work of Joel Salatin and the real pioneers in regenerative agriculture. And I feel it's really important to continue pushing forward and being innovative. And so I've actually designed my own eggmobile now, Heatherhull Farm. And you can see it here behind me. I'm still building it, but this eggmobile is going to be EU certified for 275 organic or almost 400 free range. And this is solar powered, self propelled, fully automated and remotely controlled from anywhere in the world. So I'm really fine tuning this and getting the system really dialed in. And this is built to last. This thing here is going to last 25, 30 years. So really looking forward to guys coming to the farm and seeing all this in action.

Super cool. Hey. It's really impressive what you're up to, Castle. And I've been impressed with your whole journey. It's amazing the mindset you bring to this, the analytical thinking, perseverance, the hard work running the farm mostly on your own. It's amazing what you've built up there. I am super stoked to be coming to run the training with you in Beautiful island and looking forward to meet A lot of people there tell us a bit. It's camping, I believe. And what sort of food are we going to be eating there?

Accommodation wise, we're going to have camping available at the farm and we'll have all amenities here in the farm for that. Showers, toilets, everything you need to have a comfortable stay on the farm. And for also for people that maybe aren't that keen on camping, we've got lots of B&Bs, Airbnbs locally, very big touristy area for this part of Ireland. So there's lots of accommodation available for anyone that maybe wants to look into that. Food wise on the farm we're going to be eating lots of awesome food, mostly produced on the farm here. We're going to have lamb, turkey, chicken, pork, all from the farm here. And for veggies and that, we'll be getting them from neighbouring farms and our friends. So it's going to be awesome organic food.

So there you have it. June 18th to the 26th, we've really got this training down to nine days. It's very fast paced. It's kind of like a year's worth of learning at university crammed into a long week. And we've done it this way so that people only need to take one week off work. It's been really, really effective. And then rather than doing joint design exercises around the farm, I do these Rapid Farm consults for people and that's been something that we used to do in our internship program and it's really effective in generating ideas and stimulating different thought trains. So that's the way we're going to do that. If you take the top link below, you'll see a link to Heatherhill Farms page where you can sign up if you're interested. And you can also read more about the course. You'll see an example schedule there of what the sort of topics are that we cover in the training. It's my signature training. It's one of three that I've scheduled for next year. I'll also be running a course here at Ridgedale. And then later in the year I'll be going with my friend Matt to Hembant Permaculture in Wales, a beautiful site there. And we'll be doing that training there. You can find out all about that on the ridgeddale Farm website and you can see in the link below the link to Cattle's training and that's the best place to sign up if you want to take a course with me in 2022 in beautiful Ireland. Thanks so much folks. Thanks, Cattle, for joining us and look forward to meeting many of you there. Ciao.