We're a farm that homesteads as well as
farms, but our three primary enterprises here are pastured poultry—so meat chickens—and we
have pastured egg-mobiles producing eggs and a no-dig market garden. This farm is half forestry
and half pasture, so we run market gardens on fifteen hundred
square meters, we run about twelve hundred laying hens typically, and four
or five thousand meat chickens in the year. So a small mixed diverse farm where
we can start to close nutrient cycles and also provides full human diet which
has been really important to us. Well I went to agriculture school when I was 18 to
study organic horticulture and crop production in the UK at an agriculture
school there. And I left there with a lot more questions than answers, so I embarked
on a longer global trip looking for people that had different solutions.
It took quite some years to find really working examples and I found it very
hard to find people willing to share data, like numbers and facts and figures,
and so that's become a key part of this farm is creating a place that shares the
sort of data that I wish I had had access to when I was learning. Starting a farming business is perhaps
the hardest thing you could do. A lot of young people coming into this kind of
business, they're growing up in a world that missed a bunch from a few
generations ago. We really wanted to create a space that was open to people
to come and get engaged, so we've tended towards running really long term farmer
training, and quite hardcore, you know more like farm bootcamp. So we really
focus on choosing enterprises here that, A, are symbiotic, but, B, are things
that people can come and really learn about tangibly here, get enough
experience to then confidently go away and set up according to their own
context in their own country. So we're farming up here at 59 degrees
north, so in the summer months the season comes very quickly. Spring and autumn are
very short and it quickly transitions from dark cold winter to height of
summer, and it's quickly winter again, so frost-free dates here would be... like 6th of
June is safe, and 15th of September that frost is coming back, and that could move
a few weeks either direction, so it's a fast and furious growing season
here. So we work long hours in the summer, but we're also complimented with
six months of basically me here for one hour a day, you know collecting eggs,
feeding cattle, and that's my workload. We get up at 6 o'clock, got to open the
egg mobiles and they start laying eggs six o'clock because the sun's been up
since 4:00, we move the cows and sheep who cut the grass in front of the egg mobiles,
and we time their interactions so that they receive all the fly larvae
from the cow manure and follow them around the pasture like that.
Then we move all the boiler chickens and that's quite a big job, and then we
basically spend the rest of the day in the market garden. Market gardens take a lot
of hours, so that makes up the majority of the workload here. So the gardens here are a no dig set up,
so we put wood chips down between our beds, and big load
of compost in the beginning, these beds are built straight on top of pasture
with perennial weeds and things. We do no dig because it leads to less weeds,
less water, and using this wood chip for pathways it actually helps us soak
up excess water, and what we find is that means you're walking around in a clean
garden. It means we minimize washing of veg like salad mixes that we cut with The
Greens Harvester, we don't need to wash them because there's no dirt bouncing up
on the leaves. And anytime we can minimize washing, we're maximizing shelf
life, and it's part of a marketing thing too, like our farm looks beautiful, and is
presentable, and it's the first thing a customer sees when they come into the
farm. We are driving a very high level of
economy in a very small space, in a very short growing season,
in the middle of nowhere. We manage to shift about a
quarter of a million euros products in a six month production, which we then sell
throughout the year like meat products and eggs. We're able to turn over the
value... more than the value of the farm, and the investments we
put in the farm, every single six month season that we run. Having a broad product portfolio
really helps. Like when we have fresh chickens for sale in the
summer, it's much easier to sell vegetables. I remember those words of Joel Salatin, "It's much easier to find a hundred
customers that will spend a thousand dollars with you, than to find a thousand
customers that will spend a hundred dollars." And that's certainly my
experience of running a mixed diverse farm. We grow mescaline mix, spicy Asian greens,
and arugula. It's one of the most profitable crops we
grow. On a little 10 meter long bed that's 30 inches wide, we're getting 40
kilos in 42 days, so that's a net of about 500 euros on a tiny little bed, and
that used to be painstaking work. We would cut it with little serrated knives
on our hands and knees, and that takes 25 minutes to do well, and what we found
with The Greens Harvester is that takes about two minutes flat. That's definitely a
game changer for anyone growing greens or microgreens at any kind of scale. I'm really inspired to spend time in nature
watching the ecosystem here develop. I'm totally motivated by feeding my family
amazing food, that's why I wanted to build a farm, I decided that at about 15
years of age. I knew I wanted to bring up kids and raise the family
around amazing food. We've become a little island that
nature's moving back into because we're not sprayed and we're not bare ground.
We're creating a habitat whilst producing amazing, diverse food, and
that inspires me a lot when I wake up everyday.
What is the net? Knew a guy that grossed 150K off a few acre urban farm. Net was like -5K. You want to give real data, it should be Net income per acre.
Gross income is an intermediate earnings figure before all expenses are included, and net income is the final amount of profit or loss after all expenses are included. What are their expenses and costs? What is the real end income?
Richard Perkins and his channel is the best resource for anything sustainable farming. He's covered basically every topic in a detailed and how-to manner, and often goes into the logistics and economics of it all. So much info, and such a cool farm.
Any idea how much of it is EU subsidies? It was amazing (as a Canadian) talking to friends in the UK and Spain about how much the farming subsidies were.
Richard Perkins isn't the sort of name I would expect from a Swede