My Chat with Richard Perkins - Ridgedale Farm in Sweden

I've been at Ridgedale permaculture for about a week now and we're just at the tail end of a four-day workshop that I'm doing with Richard Perkins and for those of you who don't know Richard Perkins you should know who Richard Perkins is he wrote a book called making small farms work and he's demonstrating five or six I think six different types of regenerative agriculture systems here raising a variety of different types of animals he has a market garden and they're trying all kinds of stuff and it's a really cool farm because there's a lot to see here and it's kind of like a testing ground as well as an educational demonstration farm but as well as a production farm the farm makes money and so today I'm actually gonna sit down with Richard and there's been some questions that you guys have asked me to ask him so I'm gonna post some of those to him but we're also gonna have a conversation about some sort of broader subjects within this space and things that we seen and some trends that are happening so let's get into it Richard we just finished while we're just finishing our our four-day workshop before that we did one in Stockholm and we've got people from all over Europe here what kind of I mean we've got some people from Italy lots of Luxembourg Germany Norway the UK Australia Americans that's Hawaii that's right yeah pretty cool how do you think it's gone oh yeah I think it's been fantastic I think that's been a great synergy between our approaches we're both passionate about getting people started and our farms are very different obviously in our context of different but it's what excite me about the whole thing is the you know from micro urban all the way through the you know larger rural farms there's possibilities when we have solutions to make enterprises work so it's really great to see so many passionate people come out and be able to take them through like the nuts and bolts of what's going on in our operations and our approach to business and entrepreneurial ism - which is I think people have gotten a lot of value for money absolutely absolutely one thing I've enjoyed too is just seen I I think I think from like I'm looking at it through a student's perspective in that when they're here they're seen all these enterprises and quite a bit of detail yeah you know on your farm alone you've got what is it five different types of production in the sense that you've got a market garden you've got some cattle yeah you you've got broilers you've got egg layers you've got turkeys sometimes pigs so it's still scaling up like the the cows have we used to have fifty sheep last year for home stand for meat supply and we're making about ten thousand meals on the farm each year so providing our own food is a lot more than just a family's food mm-hmm the cows are now turning into a production slowly it's a multi-year thing as we start to breed beef animals onto this old heirloom Swedish breed and we have agroforestry systems that are a long-term thing that are gonna take over one day but these are all things that don't cashflow quickly so we've really focused on scaleable enterprises that can be started up with 20,000 euros on rented land and and we're really focused on exposing people to hey you know here's a whole bunch of stuff going on which bits fit your context what what land base have you got what resources have you got what skills do you have what doing your data look like and getting people familiar and it's been really interesting to get feedback from people who have come watched all of our videos read our books and there's been a few people giving feedback that just to like have your hands in the in that and to smell it to see it gives such a different sense absolutely and it makes things click for people which yeah I think it's really it's powerful you should always definitely go out and see places that inspire to get really in touch with in and get your hands involved in your senses engaged it's a different thing than just book learning or online learning eccentric exactly so as a farmer as a person running this operation when you started it because how many years is Ridgedale been this is their fifth season on this online but you've been into this stuff for quite a while yeah I went to tech school at 18 and it's organic crop production so I came into all of this through vegetable production field scale CSAs and things I used to run in the okay and I actually went fullcycle and left all the veg production and just found it grinding not well-paid and I wanted to look for better things and I wanted I've always been interested in animal based systems and perennial plant based system so I went on a big old trip and I've just come back round to the market gun that's not something we plan to turn into an enterprise here yeah and so that's kind of work what I want to ask is that you're talking before about what systems that are cash flowing into these longer-term systems the longer-term systems are obviously things like the cattle the agroforestry those things to have a longer return on investment out of all the enterprises that you have here are things that you know of what are the ones that cashflow the fast the fastest I'd say like they're fairly similar but they look different in their investment in day-to-day running so by far the the best cash flowing Enterprise I've come across is things like pastures meat beds boilers this is something you can scale up and down within the season instantly and start up at low cost we put twenty thousand euros into a startup that's including building a slaughtery so we have an on-farm slaughter facility and that means we get the revenue out of the birds like we're not handing anything off we're going from chick to feel pen to slaughter to a packaged product and that's an enterprise kicking out you know a hundred thousand euros a year so it's easily capable of paying off its debts and creating profit in the first year now we didn't start at the scale we're producing now but we're actually producing less than we used to do and we're smoking birds which doubles the revenue so we built a low cost smoker this year and so that's a way of us increasing revenue without actually doing more birds and giving us diverse work which is working out really well it's still in the early stages of that things like pasture turkeys is even more profitable but that's there's no market for it here in Sweden where I come from in the UK it's a much bigger you know Christmas turkeys is a big thing whereas here people eat ham and it's turkeys not so much in the culture right but layers less profitable and I would say like the way we've scaled it they're all of our main and is a producing similar revenue no market guns the layers and the boilers but what you see is that it required different time inputs and different resource inputs so the garden's take by far the greatest labor but they also have four months off in the winter so it's very different to like the egg layers which generate the same revenue with about a third of the work but then it's year-round every day seven days a week you don't get a day off and you need a couple of hectares of land so you know it's part of my role has been marrying people to their land base and oK you've got five hectares and you've got this desire to and this much money these are the sort of things you can do and these things need more land and these things you don't need that space for so what fits your your land base and the boilers again that's something that's very concentrated into the summer at six months only and so that one is capable of generating a family income on a couple of Hector's but six months on six months off and so you've got to then decide what your day looks like these are the both the pasture poultry and the prizes of part-time hours to produce the same revenue and it's basically down to like I like a diverse working day so I like to have a little of everything rather than just focusing in on one thing and that brings a bit of resilience to like in this drought year the gardens are not performing how they were planned to but we're okay because we can just allocate more birds for smoking and put some emphasis on that to get the revenue back and so why I mean I think I know the answer cuz it seems somewhat self-evident because I've seen the enterprises but is it that the egg layers are not quite as profitable as the broilers because you've got the bird that the egg Mobile's which are bigger infrastructure and they also require more constant work might require a bit more inputs in the winter opposed to the broilers the broiler like the broiler hens the Pens are quite simple you know stripped down and they're just like focus because it's like grow the bird and then kill it it's it's not that simple I mean eggs are sticky points so where I come from in the UK eggs are a very low price and I think all eggs underpriced I mean it's a very cheap source of protein when you think about it can animal proteins and here we get a decent wee peg our eggs with organic prices in the supermarket we're not certified organic but we feed only organic certified feed but eggs is so sensitive but it's a perfect gateway product people buy your eggs and they if you have really good pastured eggs and no one else does then they're always going to come back buy your eggs and that means you can easily tag on a turkey or smoked chicken in a vegetable box or whatever so it's a brilliant gateway enterprise it's very profitable still I mean it's it's definitely a great enterprise to run but the ecosystem services are far greater than with the boilers now we've radically transformed our pastures here and I think it's mostly down to the pasture layers because of the scarifying action and their constant work on the ground and that's why I've ended up I never even ate chicken until I was like in my 20s what and why is that well I just never I've never been exposed to chicken I had no interest to be a chicken farm it just turns out that for small farms things like poultry are far more profitable than larger animal enterprises but also they have far more impact on the land so if we're trying to build sold build our pastures fertility back then they can have far more impact than any larger animals like ruminants hmm but I think comparing boilers and layers for me they're they're similar in the sense that whilst the daily workload looks different I think the profitability of layers can't just be measured financially like their services on the land a worth is urine if it was less profitable right and so I'm really a big fan of layers it's one of my favourite enterprises and if it's done right it's it's really profitable I mean we're producing 30 tonnes of eggs here on three hectares and you mean you have to go get them a few times a day don't you twice a day ok yeah so quite a we're in a very short growing season 3 months without frost and that can vary a month either way so it can be a couple of months without frost on an extreme year so in the summer it's moving egg Mobile's we leave in two days in one place and move two of them we are three right now so we - one day one the next leg sir and we're picking eggs after breakfast and then at 3:31 we closed them up so it said two hours a day and the price and that's to pack a thousand eggs as well so it's pretty Swift but it is seven days a week there's no day off from that and then in the winter it's quite different the birds are indoors so they're asleep at four o'clock so right now we go at 11:30 at night to close the hens up in the middle of the summer so someone's got to be awake for that now you could obviously automate that kind of thing or whatever but in a winter it's the opposite so birds are asleep at 4 o'clock in the evening and you have to go pick eggs three times ravelin - because it's minus 30 in freezing so it's quite a different thing and it's a very light-sensitive enterprise and it's like everything here it's observational base well that's what I thought was interesting when I went and watched you and Toby do the layers yesterday you're talking about cuz you know we're in the northern hemisphere similar to where I am in Canada you're a bit further north but how you have to adjust when you move them based on the light cycles and after the summer solstice your days are diminishing quite exponentially and so in a month you're gonna be moot you said you're gonna be moving them at nine am opposed to right now you're moving them at about ten into six or something like we're gonna be closing them up at 9 9 p.m. so we'll always move them like the way we run our farm is we like to get all the main chores done before breakfast now moving cows after 2 o'clock is better for the cows people get 2 kilo milk increase just by moving animals after photosynthetic peak in the day but we don't you know there's lots of things we could do differently but for practical reasons we just move everything before breakfast ok ok all awake we're all checked in we know everything's good and it's just a simple practical way to run the farm but the times will change and the birds will get less frantic to get out it's a bit of a time pressure in the summer it's just where automation of opening and closing could help but we're always up anyway in our and the bouncer so you'll be doing that when it's dark in the father - ok certainly ok ok I thought it was a light thing that it had to be done because the chickens didn't want to come out until a certain time no later in in all so when you know September you'll come and open them up and they're not in any hurry to get out where's right now the Sun is coming up four o'clock in the morning so they're ready to come out at six o'clock when you wake up and so we're just trying to open them the latest we can that we get some good sleep too but this is how farming is in this latitude we have really long daylight hours in the summer it doesn't really go dark it gets dusky for a few hours and then it's the total office in winter it's not light till 9:30 4:00 to 10:00 and then dark pitch-black again at four o'clock in unison yeah is that's the northern climate we live in okay I want to ask one more question and then then I want to just pitch to you some of the questions that my youtube subscribers asked so one thing I observed and I could be wrong and tell me if this is the case but it seems like that out of the enterprises that you run the the Market Garden the pigs the chickens though the broilers the egg layers the what's the other one the pigs turkeys yeah yeah that the vegetable garden is a little less nuanced than that it seems like you have been able to delegate better to things in the Market Garden then you have the animals because when I've been watching you even with your crew with the animals it seems like your expertise and your knowledge of the little micro decisions that have to be made on which way to move a certain thing like what the layers the other day that's been more difficult for you to back away from because it's it's slightly more news would you say that that's sort of a crack correct observation whereas I haven't seen you work in the garden here no I you've been able to delegate that quite well but the animals are a little it seems like they're a little harder to scale because your expertise is so needed in there well it's it's difficult to I mean I could answer in many different ways I think it would depend on the season we every year we've been here we've faced extreme conditions dryer summer weather summer coldest spring now in the driest years since 1950 so it's it's challenging and I think a lot of people coming here not used to being at such high attitude and for example coming to the gardens this year like waters been an issues just dry but actually nearly every year is so wet that the wetness is the problem so someone coming here will start to think we need solutions for this thing but actually in the longer term we need solutions for this opposite thing and so I need to sort of balance the expectations or desires of a team who are only seeing a very partial window and only seeing a partial part of the enterprise's and so no one really has a full picture of the whole it's like our we need to invest money in this thing but just say well in the hole we can't because we have a bigger priority over here and this thing brings us more money and this thing is not working well this year so we're not putting any money into actually or whatever it happens to be but the gardens I actually wanted to be in the guns this year we we restructured how we do things and it's not worked out how I envisioned so we're in an interesting process where we're gonna restructure how things operate at the farm because it's all these enterprises we do a highly observational based we have amazing people coming here but unless they already have that patterned inability to really observe what they're looking at and taken on this alone it's it's a lot to manage here and that requires quite a bit of experience because don't you think that like the thing that seems quite obvious to me is that animals are a living and breathing and moving creature yeah whereas vegetables don't move so it seems like you can scale and delegate this kind of thing because it's it is a market gardening me from my experience it's quite simple compared to some of these other enterprises and that these this is more or less static in the sense that it's not gonna change much from day one to day two but the animals can experience predators can experience disease they can claw each other up there's more happening there that requires like your expertise is harder to get some of these people that are brand new it's hard to pass your knowledge off as quickly as you might here there's a bit of that but I think there's more going on than that too and I think that the trouble there's there's a welfare issue when you have animals like right now with roller boiler pens there's 25,000 euros of birds in there it's a lot of birds in a small space Randy it's there's a high risk but it's a risk I'm willing to take to look at innovative ways to adapt these models for better welfare and less work but if someone is is so when people come here I need to sit and learn about how they actually observe and work because people can say all kinds of things and have had all kinds of experiences but I need to know from my experience what are they seeing what are they missing with a vegetable garden I think it's a lower barrier to entry as it were it's like there is nothing moving and the worst that could happen is some plants get eaten or die mm-hmm but we have a lot of plants but with the chickens yeah we have a lot of chickens but they are living breathing things that we've put in a net or a cage and now they're welfare it's above your own if you put an animal in captivity you've gotta prioritize it above yourself and so we've been having this heatwave now where you know I'm looking very closely like these birds must have water at all times throughout the day and so if someone is just following a routine I've set them rather than thinking wow it's really hot today I'd better go an extra time and check then that can cause a severe loss of revenue and just yeah we had examples here where someone didn't open the nest box of the egg 'mobile and that killed 50 Birds who piled up behind the nest box like that now that's not just 50 Birds dying which is a horrific thing they have to deal with in the morning before breakfast but it's also 3,000 euros of eggs in there lay cycle so you can't replace that in the middle of the season right and likewise we have shelters on our boiler pens for our predominant winds that we turn around tree lanes in a very specific pattern and one day someone turned new birds around the opposite way and made a wind trap and we happen to have a storm and we lost you know thousands of euros of revenue that night so those sort of things take a little bit more observing and care than most of the processes that go on in the market garden it's like you could screw up a bed but that's fine we can't run another bit you can't replace 200 chickens that easily so they do require more care and they're complex in their nature vegetables grow on themselves so once the seeds are in as long as you water and keep them happy it's not too much it can go wrong in that way and you've got you know 200 beds here that we can catch up any errors or mistakes in a way whereas with livestock it does take a little more care and it certainly takes a little bit of experience to understand the physiology and psychology of an animal but yeah it's been unfortunate I wanted to be in the gardens a lot this year and I have pretty much been in the guns not at all so so now I've got some questions for from you guys dead I'm gonna ask Richard and I might have more here than we is really like are we gonna make this video an hour long probably not so ok as some of these I can skip I'll cut in here ok here's a specific one from Steve Fairbairn permaculture hops or polyculture hops and managing animals in them talk about the I guess they want to know like how are your the hops do I saw them down there by the well his the what has the drought been kind of harsh on those yeah the hops is a bit of a like we have a local boy in our village who gives us all his spent grain and he's given us massive amounts of pig food for free basically and he wanted us to test three types of hops that might be good for being making here and it's Sweden used to grow a lot of hops and it grows none any more so there's a big marketing point if you have local hops because it's the only thing that can't be produced here easily but to be honest they require a lot of work and in the beginning they were making a little plan for the revenue of it as it scaled up but I double checked in a year later and it's it's not profitable in any way that we could do it it needs to be done in a hop yard more intensively so I actually as I get more focused in on being on the farm and doing less stuff around I actually invited them to take the hops back and it's something that I kind of want to clear out the farm because I just don't have time to look after another thing so I matching the process of streamlining down a bit so I'm not an expert on hops but I think you need to grow them quite intensively in a hop yard if you want to have any decent amount of yield so okay so that I mean that I brings another question what are some things that you think you'd like to lean out in the operation going forward I think I would like one thing we've been doing we're and also in education site trying to expose people to things and it's that's very tiring and time-consuming and it's been amazing but now as we have kind of implemented the farm it's more about just managing the farm so it's a different type of person that we can really help one of our big aims is to facilitate more people going out and starting farming which a high percentage of our participants and core team go off and do which is really great but I want to get rid of some of the trainings I want to get rid of some of the things we do on the side for people's benefit they're not really for our benefit like for example we've had cows for milking and getting people used to handling big animals but to keep cows over the winter here and feed them over the winter it's very expensive way to have milk so now we're moving on to breeding sending more beef breed on to the cows and start selling grass-fed beef on a small scale but through the Ricoh rings that we sell as facebook managed selling groups connecting farmers to consumers you can sell an animal like that for 3000 euros of net profit so suddenly having 10 cows a year the sell is a nice sideline Enterprise which up till now has just been costing us money to expose people to handling animals so we're getting rid of processes like that we'll probably get rid of things like doing turkeys on the side and just focus in on the key enterprises but longer-term we have a different plan because as we pay off debt now and move into a place where we don't have such high financial needs we don't need to produce as much so the enterprises we've been doing in we've been scaling them it's the cash flow and pay off the farm in five years which is not something you have to do it's just something we set out today well cuz that that might get you a better quality of life - yeah yeah doing it cuz I mean i-i've been quite impressed with the crew you have which actually isn't really that big of a crew it's an awesome it's an awesome crew because we have 40-foot what how many people we have forty five people in our workshop right that's a lot of people for this kind of workshop and your crew are like helping with that as well as manage daily tasks so I mean props to the crew cuz it's pretty amazing here's an interesting question I thought I didn't she this woman ran out I asked three questions I think I can really only ask ones I'd like to try a couple others but she was asking if a teacher wanted to like brings young students children ya to your farm kids what do you think would be the your the enterprise that you're most enthusiastic to show kids about well for me I can't take any of these things apart like right asking you the corn part mentalizing it's kind of hard yeah yeah I'm interested in the whole like I would never move to Sweden and be a chicken farmer or be a vegetable farmer like I'm interested in the whole and what's going on here is quite special and it's the integration of all these things that excites me the diversity of things and they're learning about all of little ecosystem processes around me and so that's what I'm actually really passionate about and I think if a school group came here I mean kids are fascinated by animals and they're fascinated by vegetables that I would want to show them all of it how they work together yes you can't grow vegetables without animal manures that's right and you can't have animals in you know we're growing up in a country here where the school kids think the milk tank is coming to the farm to put milk in the cows and we have kids that don't know what a you know a zucchini plant looks like so I'm very passionate about trying to get school groups and kids here and they they have been coming here but I think they need to see the whole because you can't understand whole systems still they just get bashed out at school and university into thinking in linear compartmentalized siloed ways and yeah yeah so come bring him and I'll happily to around all day yeah that's that's a great answer okay one more real quick really simple one is my permaculture wants to know what you're feeding what's the feed you're giving your broilers and layers is it whole grain pellets mash crumble it's we buy organic feet and it's from Landon Menon it's a big feed company in Sweden and we feed pellets but with the boilers we substitutes so we use with boiler production you have high protein feed in the beginning a medium feed and in a finishing feet and so we because you're buying bulk feed for savings a couple of little silos that cost us 500 euros saves us 5,000 a year in bulk savings we decided to because we only have two we buy the start feed and then we've worked out a feed ration to mix it with straight grain from an organic grower lower and locally and that grain is a quarter of the price of the pellets and so we mix it up to 60% grain and that saves us a lot of money so we are able to feed a four and a half kilo boiler which will dress out a two and two point four that's worth about 30 euros it costs us four and a half years to produce but it's done very scientifically and we do restricted feed so we feed the bird several times a day and get them hungry in between which makes them forage better I know a lot of pasture poultry producers are just giving their Birds free access to food and that doesn't allow them to forage and express that natural ability because they'll just sit and eat carbohydrates and high-energy food right and with the layers we used to substitute up to 15% grain and no more because as you start to save feed cost you also lose egg production so that's the tipping point it's in my experience we've tried all kinds of feed ratios and we've worked out there's a numbers for you and so we use an organic layer pellet and you've got to be careful with these high production birds they are finely tuned machines if you could handle putting in in that crude way and so they need feeding the right fuel as it were you can't get away with feeding them berries and seeds and bits of this and that they need Papa feed all their production and performance and health will not be adequate all right now thanks for watching check out another video I did with Richard right after this one if you click up in the top right of the screen you're going to see a link to this video that's sort of a continued conversation with him and I alright guys thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Urban Farmer Curtis Stone

Views: 84,966

Rating: 4.8872519 out of 5

Keywords: gardening, how to, growing, urban farming, spin farming, vegetables, greens, growing better, high yield crops, get started, sustainable, soil, local, permaculture, off grid, homestead, kelowna, curtis stone, curtis, green city acres, profitable farming, the urban farmer, suburban farming, convert lawn to garden, bc, canada, urban agriculture, market gardening, ridgedale permaculture farm, ridgedale farm, richard perkins, making small farms work, sweden, europe

Id: ThjyUG5woCk

Length: 29min 55sec (1795 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 25 2018