191 Josh Heyneke - Small scale farmers going potentially bankrupt with regen duck eggs and fertiliser

A conversation with Josh Heyneke, founder of Parc Carreg  together with his partner Abigail, about buying 10 acres in Wales to farm, Back to the land movement, duck eggs, feed prices, black soldier flies, vermicompost, and the difficulties in the space. After 7 years of regenerative farming they might go bankrupt this month.

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It seems so idyllic, selling your apartment in London, quitting your well-paid job and starting farming. Farming isn’t easy, let alone profitably and ecologically sound.
If Parc Carreg makes it through the winter, they are planning to dramatically change their business and scale their impact.

More about this episode on https://investinginregenerativeagriculture.com/josh-heyneke.

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Chapters

• 5:08 “Why back to the land?”
• 25:21 Current emergency, going bankrupt in November
• 45:15 What does it take to help you through the winter?
• 1:03:22 Profitably carbon negative eggs
• 1:10:32 Super vermi compost

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

It seems so idyllic. Selling your apartment in London, quitting your well-paid jobs and buying 10 acres in Wales to farm. Back to the land, the good life, the simple life. Until you get punched in the face. Again, again and again. Farming isn't easy, let alone profitably and ecologically sound on a small scale. Don't let anybody tell you differently. Today's story unpacks one of those examples which after seven years of regen farming might go bankrupt this month. Learn all about duck egg feed prices, black soldier flies, vermicompost, back to the land, and if they make it through the winter, how they are planning to dramatically change their business and scale their impact. This is the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast, Investing as if the planet mattered, where we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Why my focus on soil and regeneration? Because so many of the pressing issues we face today have their roots in how we treat our land and our sea, grow our food, what we eat, wear and consume. And it's that we as investors, big and small, and consumers start paying much more attention to the dirt slash soil underneath our feet. To make it easy for fans to support our work, we launched our membership community. And so many of you have joined us as a member. Thank you. If our work created value for you, and if you have the means, and only if you have the means, consider joining us. Find out more on gumroad.com slash investing in regen ag. That is gumroad.com slash investing in regen ag. Or find the link below. Welcome to another episode, today with Josh of Park Carrack. Welcome, Josh. We're going to talk a lot about the current emergency, but I also want to know a lot about duck eggs, geese eggs, and what brings you to start a farm in Wales. So welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_00: 2:04

Thanks, Ken. It's really great to be here.

SPEAKER_01: 2:07

And... let's start i will put a beautiful video which is sort of a bit outdated now but still very very pretty in the show notes below if you want to see a visual overview of the farm you and your partner are running but just to give a bit of an intro because you didn't grow up in farming what brought you to literally what brought you to the land and start start a farm and then we'll get into recording this at the end of october 2022 and we'll get into the current situation and what you're doing about it and why you why you are in an emergency.

SPEAKER_00: 2:42

Yeah, thanks, Kun. Well, I'm actually South African and Abby, my partner, she's British. And before we moved back and moved to the land, we were living and working in London. And we were there for eight years working in the city. I was working in tech, in mobile software, actually. And we... I think after eight years in London, we just got incredibly itchy. I started wanting to get outside. I'm from, as I mentioned, from Cape Town, South Africa. I grew up in a very beautiful place. Are

SPEAKER_01: 3:25

you suggesting that London isn't very

SPEAKER_00: 3:29

beautiful? It's a bit of a concrete jungle. It was super exciting when I first got there, the bright lights and everything. But After about eight years there, I really started craving, you know, wanting to get out of the office, wanting to get outside. It's still a long time,

SPEAKER_01: 3:51

like eight years is a proper, it was definitely the shiny lights were nice for, that's a considerable amount of your career and your time.

SPEAKER_00: 4:02

Yeah, it was a slog, but I, you know, it was hard work. But I, and I did really enjoy it. I worked with some amazing people in London But, you know, it was something about being in a city with all those, you know, the constant noise, the sirens, the bright lights, the being in an office, an air conditioned space with not much fresh air. And, you know, I think over the years, I got quite a lot of anxiety being in that environment. I wanted to get outside. I wanted to do something with my hands. I wanted to be more physically active. I felt unhealthy. I didn't feel like I ever had time to do any physical exercise or anything. one day we just made this like really brash decision we were like you know what we're just we're just gonna we're gonna sell our little flats in london we're gonna quit our jobs and we're gonna go and start a farm and it was like we had no idea what we're about to get into and

SPEAKER_01: 5:06

and what do you remember what triggered that i mean i i know people have seen the biggest little farm but i don't think it was out there yet or maybe it was and and said they were going to do it but then the next day reality kicked in and they didn't sell their flat in london and they didn't quit their jobs and their lives basically and and you did was it like it was a very rainy i don't know february very cold or was it something like what was there a specific moment or what led up to it and then what made How did you actually do it?

SPEAKER_00: 5:33

There were a few things. One was health issues. Like both of us were experiencing health problems and I had gotten really far down the rabbit hole of diet and came to the conclusion that I needed to actually be more involved in my own food production in order to ensure that I was eating healthy, nutrient-dense food. And actually, I see a lot of people with a similar motivation in this space. So that was one reason. The other reason was I had this constant impending sense of doom. The world was about to come to an end, and I think a lot of that was just anxiety from living in the city. I felt helpless. I felt helpless about the climate disaster that's coming. I'm not someone who likes to, when I feel worried about something, I really want to get up and go and do something about it. Like I can't stand talking about stuff. And so, you know, agriculture is a huge issue and a contributor to climate change. And I really felt like I wanted to get out there and just have a go and just see if I could actively do something that might, you know, help make the world a better place. one day. And then the last contributing factor to us actually getting up and going and doing it was... I actually started working from home on the last project that I was doing. I left the company that I was working for and I started consulting and freelancing working from home. And that experience of working from home and having my own free time and space to think really just, I think it just tipped me over the edge into wanting to sort of detach myself from corporate life. And I think it's funny because a lot of people have gone through something similar in recent times with COVID when everyone was sort of forced to go back home and to start working from home. So

SPEAKER_01: 7:52

reconsidering home, like, oh, actually, it's not just a place I sleep. I should probably do something.

SPEAKER_00: 7:58

It was a very powerful experience. You know, all my meals were home cooked. I was no longer going down to the local shop to go and get a sandwich to suddenly just, scoffed on in front of my computer whilst I was banging out an email. You know, I was actually like going and preparing a meal for lunch and it was just, and it's still eating it as your

SPEAKER_01: 8:17

computer, but yeah, there was a big,

SPEAKER_00: 8:19

yeah, sometimes. Yeah. Um, but, but it's a powerful process. And I think a lot of people have, um, have experienced the same thing and really reevaluated where they're at in their life. And a lot of people have made some pretty big decisions as a result of it. So, um, yeah, so that was, that was the thing that one of the things that, um, that, tipped us over the edge and abby and i had always talked about um having a farm one day and the idea was we were going to go and you know do something in the city get rich retire buy a farm and then you know enjoy our lives and we talked a lot about this and exactly and uh i was sitting in a london bus one day and coming home from work and another bus sort of passed and there was this big ad on the bus I can't remember what the brand was or who the ad was for but it just had this line start where you want to go and I was like When people say

SPEAKER_01: 9:21

advertisement, advertisement doesn't have impact.

SPEAKER_00: 9:24

Yeah, well, it had a huge impact on me. But unfortunately, I don't think it increased sales for them very much because I can't even remember what the brand was. But I thought about that statement, start where you want to go. And I was like, why do you want to wait until you are possibly 60 years old and retired? Probably not, you know, as fit and active as you are now. Why do you want to wait until then to start farming if you really want to farm and you want to work outside and you want to enjoy that lifestyle then enjoy it while you're young and while you're still physically capable of doing it so I was like okay right how do we actually do this like could we actually could we actually sell our home and buy a farm how would we make this happen so it was and from there the process started basically

SPEAKER_01: 10:12

and I mean there's so much to unpack there and I want to get to the emergency but just as a sidestep for a second At that moment, did you make it deliberate or was it always part of the plan to farm, not just as a homestead for yourself? You were talking a lot about, of course, the... challenge of getting access to or more involved in your own food but there's a difference between your own food and food for others like was that from the beginning okay we need this it's not that I'm going to keep working maybe remotely or freelance for a day a week and with that we keep things going and the farm is mostly as a homestead for our own food or was it from the beginning the plan to actually farm and live off the farm as well in terms of let's say economically

SPEAKER_00: 11:50

Yeah, it's a good question. Actually, it started off with the idea of going off grid. And some of my colleagues, if they're my old colleagues, if they're listening to this, they'll remember I had this idea to actually create like a space for digital nomads to go off and come and work on an off grid farm. And that was going to be it is mostly going to be about self sufficiency, being off grid, and, you know, providing a space for people to escape to still

SPEAKER_01: 12:20

connected to the fiber optic cable, yeah. That

SPEAKER_00: 12:22

great. Connected to all the fiber and connected to my old digital, you know, my digital addictions. And so, and it did start off there. And then of course we got into permaculture hugely and we got into self-sufficiency and that whole, you know, that whole area. But we very quickly, as things sort of unraveled and as we started pursuing it, we very quickly realized that, OK, we need to figure out how we're going to make a living doing this realistically for long reasons. I won't get into this too much, but basically we were going to go to Spain because we thought that's the only place we could afford to buy land. And then Abby actually got diagnosed with MS. And it was a massive shock. It was literally as we left London, we had our camper van, we had all of our stuff in storage. We're on our journey about to go and find some land and go off to Spain. And then boom, Abby's legs started getting numb. And it was like, that's weird. What's going on? And long story short, we ended up in the hospital and we ended up with a diagnosis of MS. And we were just like, how are we going to go off to Spain and start this thing away from family, away from the NHS, when Abby's potentially got this completely debilitating disease moving forward? without going too much down that rabbit hole, we ended up deciding... The camper never went on the

SPEAKER_01: 13:53

ferry, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 13:54

Yeah, we decided, let's stay in the UK, let's stay close to family, let's try and figure out how to do this in the UK, although it is expensive. I

SPEAKER_01: 14:02

mean, close to family, you're from South Africa, but yeah, it's

SPEAKER_00: 14:05

never going to be close to family. Should I say, yeah, close to Abby's family, yeah. So Wales became a

SPEAKER_01: 14:13

very different climate.

SPEAKER_00: 14:14

And Wales it became, yeah. So we weren't going to do the digital nomad thing in Spain, but then we just were like, well, how are we going to make money doing this? Well, if you've got land, you can be farmers. Okay, cool. And also we felt this immense responsibility as potentially future land owners, people who are sitting on agricultural land. We felt this immense responsibility to actually be,

UNKNOWN: 14:40

you

SPEAKER_00: 14:41

more than just self-sufficient, but to be actual producers and food producers. To feed the

SPEAKER_01: 14:45

city,

SPEAKER_00: 14:47

yeah. And feed people because, you know, when you take this idea of self-sufficiency, you can't scale that up. It doesn't work. You can't give everybody a 10, 20 acre plot of land and tell them to be self-sufficient. It doesn't work. So we felt it was our responsibility. I'm sorry if some dreams

SPEAKER_01: 15:04

of listeners have been shattered now. No, I don't think anybody listening to this is in that mindset. But yeah, no, that's physically geography, and probably mentally not a good idea to do that with everyone.

SPEAKER_00: 15:16

Yeah. It doesn't work when you scale it up. And so that very quickly led us on to regenerative agriculture. So we went from sort of permaculture to regenerative agriculture. And

SPEAKER_01: 15:29

when you say we went from, what's our... I wouldn't say the big differences, but what, what do you say? What, what in your mind is that step from permaculture to, to regenerate? Why is that a step? And why is not, is it not the same thing?

SPEAKER_00: 15:44

Yeah, it's not the, I don't see it as the same thing because, um, you know, I, I, I love the design principles in permaculture and I think you can apply them to not just, um, all forms of agriculture, but, um, you know, many aspects of life actually. Um, but, When you go and look at the permaculture influences or content out there, it is generally much smaller scale, more focused on self-sufficiency and And it's not really focused on productive, large-scale food production. So, you know, things are very much, they're not in neat rows. They're not in an organized fashion. They're not designed necessarily for commercial production or efficiency. So, I mean, you can, you can translate it into that form, but most of the influences in space are not doing that.

SPEAKER_01: 16:46

The current examples we see mostly, I'm going to get emails about this for sure, are the smaller scale homesteading, not necessarily commercial scale. That doesn't mean it cannot be done, but we just haven't seen it yet. It hasn't formed in that way or expressed itself in that way, let's say. And so you went to, we need to feed people, so we need to be farming. And then how did you land on... I mean, you landed on a number of acres probably because you could afford them. And then the journey into, and then I promise we'll get into the emergency, but how did you land in the current form, let's say, of the farm? And what, we're now at the end of October, what emergency are you in?

SPEAKER_00: 17:35

Well, without going into too much detail about why we chose Wales, we ended up in Wales and we were keen to start. You know, we were like, actually we, what's quite unique about what we did and possibly a bit stupid is we didn't go and do any, we didn't really go and do any courses. We did one very little permaculture course, which to be honest, it doesn't really apply to what we've actually ended up doing. But

UNKNOWN: 18:05

Bye.

SPEAKER_00: 18:06

We didn't go and volunteer on any farms. We didn't go roofing. We didn't go and do any real workshops or education or courses or anything like that. We had read lots of books. We had watched all the YouTube videos. I mean, you could call us YouTube farmers.

SPEAKER_01: 18:25

There's a difference. And I've seen in my notes, because Josh sent some nice notes over, the steepest learning curve in the world. Like, I want to know about that.

SPEAKER_00: 18:33

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was an immense learning curve. And so we We just jumped straight in. We ended up in Wales. The first place we looked at happened to be great. I mean, it's not like it was a mistake purchase. It was a great purchase, but it was the first place we looked at and we bought it. We just said, okay, we're going to start. And we were actually going to try and get planning permission to build a home, an eco home on the land, which is very difficult to do because it's agricultural land. but we decided that we didn't want to get distracted with building a house. And so we actually, we found a derelict little cottage a few minutes up the road and we were really lucky. So we bought that and we just started squatting in this, in this old Welsh cottage that was very much in a state and needed a lot of work. Um, and we got

SPEAKER_01: 19:28

distracted with, with building a house, but you had to rebuild another one basically.

SPEAKER_00: 19:32

Exactly. Yeah. But at least we had a roof over our heads, you know, we are out of the wind and the rain and a lot of people start this journey in a caravan in a field and actually

SPEAKER_01: 19:42

we

SPEAKER_00: 19:44

did live in a caravan on our field for three months and that was interesting and quite exciting but not something I wanted to do long term but yeah so we were squatting in this little cottage and we just got to work on the land and we're like right it was the most threatening thing honestly like to look at 10 acres of pasture and and trying, okay, right, now let's build a diverse and profitable and ecologically sound regenerative farm, go. It was like, you know, imagine a writer staring at a blank page with a writer's block. It was like, oh my God, what are we gonna do? So, yeah, we just- And when you

SPEAKER_01: 20:28

start, like what's the first, like not with a spreadsheet, but like what's the-

SPEAKER_00: 20:33

Lots of spreadsheets, lots of spreadsheets, but it was very much like we were you know everything was a guess everything was just based on ideas and no practical experience um so we had lots of spreadsheets we had where we actually practically started was um on on the the project that we thought was going to take the longest so we needed to start first which was our perennial crops so the blueberries so the first thing we once we had decided roughly what how we were going to earn our income we decided right let's first get the blueberries in the ground because we know they're going to take many years to actually become productive and then let's take it from there and build around that because we knew we wanted to do blueberries they're a high value crop we had acidic soil we knew of a neighbor who was successfully growing them so we thought right that's a good it's a good first step let's do that so we started with the blueberries then we realized oh my goodness there's this problem of having too much grass which we didn't even think about um the grass just grows it

SPEAKER_01: 21:36

rains it rains yeah

SPEAKER_00: 21:38

Yeah, we've got the best, some of the best grass growth in the world. The grass just grows and you think, okay, well, either I lose my productive land to scrub and I rewild it or I mow it or I get some animals. So we're like, right, well, we're going to do the sensible thing and get some sheep, which may or may not have been sensible. Actually, I love them and I'm, you know, I would never regret getting them, but we got our sheep next um and then it's kind of long story short

SPEAKER_01: 22:13

on youtube

SPEAKER_00: 22:15

yeah yeah yeah watching all the youtubers actually to be honest i did start connecting with local um more conventional farmers quite early on i really wanted to sort of bridge the gap between what did

SPEAKER_01: 22:28

they think of you like typical back to the landers that are gonna

SPEAKER_00: 22:33

hit typical back to the landers

SPEAKER_01: 22:35

the let's say the fence because they're in times burn them touch the electric like yeah but they still you still wanted to connect with them yeah

SPEAKER_00: 22:45

i basically just i i basically just went and got really drunk with one of them or a few of them actually a bunch of them um and that was the best way to do it honestly before

SPEAKER_01: 22:55

you had a child yeah

SPEAKER_00: 22:57

yeah before i had a child yeah um abby still remembers the night i came home and it was but it's it's

SPEAKER_01: 23:02

investment in like networking and it's your your right of passage on the local community

SPEAKER_00: 23:08

Yeah, I think I connected with people, some of the local farmers really well like that. And, you know, a lot of barriers were dropped and a lot of, you know, they could see what my intentions were and that I wasn't like completely off my rocker because there's a huge cultural gap between rural folk and city folk. I mean, there's just such a huge divide there. And, you know, they looked at us and we were just, We were just a classic example of Taiwanese that had money and wanted to come and buy some land and live the good life. And yeah, as I said in one of my YouTube videos recently, which you watched, I was told by several different farmers, there's a saying around here, they arrive in their fancy cars and they leave on their bicycles. And it's because they have seen it many times. And it's actually, I talk about the back to the land movement that we were very much a part of the most recent wave, which I think it seems like quite a few people started on this journey around 2015-ish. It seems like around here, there was this big sudden surge of people moving into the area, trying to do this sort of alternative stuff. But there's been many of these waves before. And I've been told by a few locals that it happened, I think it happened back in the 60s, and I think again in the 80s. I can't remember the exact dates, but it's happened on several occasions. And most of the time it ends in tears, in divorce, in debt and financial ruin. Honestly, I mean, it tears people apart because there's this ideal and there's this expectation of the good life and what it is and what it means. And then there's the reality of mother nature and farming and how tough it is. And so-

SPEAKER_01: 25:14

Let's double click on that. I mean, not the divorce part because that's not the case, but the debt part might be, shouldn't be the case, but we are in the toughness now. Where do you find yourself now? So you planted the blueberries, you have some sheep, but I don't think that's a huge part of, I think the flock is 20 or so, or maybe even less now. But the main part is duck eggs, which you figured out is an interesting market, but now you're being hit by input costs, by feed costs, which We in the regen movement always say, oh, but the input cost doesn't really reach us too much. But of course, if you buy organic grains and it arrives from somewhere or Ukraine this year, you're going to be hit. Even if you don't get it from Ukraine, like prices have gone through the roof. Any energy intensive sector is being hit right now. Even if you get your green electricity from somewhere, it's connected to the gas price and it explodes. So what situation do you find yourself now in? I will put the YouTube videos you're documenting this story as it goes every week which I highly recommend people to watch I'll put it below but where do you find yourself now and then we'll unpack a lot of the back to the land movement and the potential future of that because that wave is going to repeat itself I'm not too worried about that but the question is what do we do with it and how do we make some impact on the land but where do you find yourself now and why are we recording now because this was going to happen but it wasn't necessarily scheduled for the end of October 2022

SPEAKER_00: 26:44

right so I mean, to cut to the chase, our farm is about to go bankrupt and we've pretty much just got November. Like our cash flows tells us that you reach the end of November and unless you figure something out, that's game over. And so I decided to start a little series on YouTube called How to Fail at Farming. And I did that because I thought, right, if we're going to go under, if this is going to be it, I have to extract some value out of this failure. You know, I have to take something good away from it. And I want to help educate people about the realities of small-scale agriculture and agriculture in general and how tough it is. And I want to share our learnings with people. I want to share what I think we've done wrong, what we could have done better, how we're going to potentially get out of this. And I, yeah, I just want to say thank you. decided I'd like to document the process because no matter what happens I think that that will be of value to the community moving forward and so yeah I mean the main thing that nailed us or is nailing us is these rising is the rising cost of feeds linked to Russia and Ukraine and the global and just to give us an idea like

SPEAKER_01: 28:09

what yeah what what kind of percentages are you looking at now or what kind of money like cash flow going out basically um yeah i mean every month just to to see how yeah how tight or how negative it got

SPEAKER_00: 28:24

yeah i mean um our costs have increased um by more than 50 percent um since since i installed our new feed bin so our feed silo that we've got which was last year um early last year we installed that feed bin so that we could benefit from bulk feed prices you know before then I was buying bagged feed and I was hauling it by hand and So our prices have gone up by more than 50% when you factor in all the other inflation across all of the other costs in our business. And, you know, it's hard to, even though they should know, retailers, it's hard to get them to understand the speed at which you have to put your prices up. And I have now the supply, our main supply, our main customer that we're with now has agreed to a very steep price increase with us. And it remains to be seen what exactly, how that will impact the demand for our eggs. But luckily, we've got some very, very good customers who really care. So I think we'll be supported in that way. But our business, you know, we have to, our feed bill every month is thousands. And for such a small business like us, that is massive. Now, people who've watched the YouTube series so far we've done part one and part two will know that we've just recently culled a large portion of our flock and that's to help reduce our feed bill and I think that the other thing that I do want to make people I really want to emphasize that is Although the feed bill has really been the nail in the coffin, I think that it's important that we take responsibility for the fact that there are other factors at play here, other reasons why we're in trouble. And, you know, a lot of that is due to the fact that we are inexperienced farmers, you know, that we spent the first sort of five years figuring out exactly how this whole farming thing really works, yeah, and separating the, you know, myths from actual, you know, facts from fiction, the fiction that you see on YouTube from the actual facts on the ground for people who are trying to earn a living full-time farming. And we also have certain ideals, you know, ideals about how we want to run the farm, how we want to keep our animals. And those ideals make it very difficult, make it more difficult to be profitable. And there is a reason why farmers do things the way they do um and we're learning the hard way so um so so that those are sort of some of the part those are some of the reasons as to why we're in the situation we're in but the businesses um as i said you know it's crunch time for us um uh this is a this is a cash flow issue for us um and it's happened very quickly um and i i think the other thing to to mention is that there's you know i've been contacted by quite a few people since releasing those videos saying you know they don't fully understand um the mechanics of poultry businesses. Like, you know, they think, for example, that our ducks could potentially forage more land or that potentially we're not managing our grassland properly in order to help feed the animals or that we should be somehow growing our own food or feed for the poultry for our ducks. And I think it's because regenerative agriculture is generally, a lot of the focus is on ruminants, on grazing animals. And with poultry, it's a whole different story. They need grain or they need some nutrient-dense food. They don't have that ability to turn grass into nutrition. Except for geese, right? If I understand correct.

SPEAKER_01: 32:37

Except for geese, yeah. Why did you go for ducks, not for geese? Because you talk in that video that I mentioned at the beginning. They have this unique opportunity or unique capability, sorry, of actually foraging and still create high nutrient-dense protein in the shape of eggs and meat. Was geese even more difficult than ducks to find? Are geese eggs even more difficult to sell than duck eggs? Or is that a future thought or idea to find one poultry species, in this case geese, that actually can forage and doesn't need all of that or maybe even none of it in terms of outside, very expensive at the moment, feed?

SPEAKER_00: 33:19

It's a really good question. a question and I've put so much thought into geese and I really love the theory behind it. What's the practice? We've had geese. We actually recently got rid of our geese because over the years we've just realized, simplify, simplify, simplify, focus, focus, focus on what you're good at and what you're doing. And the geese were really creating some issues for us specifically when we had to lock down the birds during avian flu. So So we decided to simplify things there. But with geese, they're amazing. They have that ability to turn forage and grass into actual meat. You wouldn't really keep your geese for eggs. They produce maybe 30 eggs a year compared to a Kaki Campbell that does roughly 300 eggs a year. You would really be keeping the geese for the meat. what we in the UK at least would have eaten for Christmas dinner, you know, much more commonly than say Turkey. Um, so it was, it was really a traditional Christmas roast. Um, the meat is delicious. There's lots of fat on it. It's much more moist than Turkey is. Although I know a lot of people say you just got to cook the Turkey, right. Which I've never managed to do, but, um, geese is geese is absolutely delicious. Um,

SPEAKER_01: 34:48

uh, if we were going to say,

SPEAKER_00: 34:50

yeah, they're, they're, Yeah, there's no methane as far as I know, which I find really amazing because they don't really use, from what I understand, they don't use fermentation to actually digest the grass. It's their unique gizzard, which actually does that breaking down. And they have to eat constantly. And there's actually quite a lot of waste. When it comes out, the grasses, you know, they have these really big green poos, which look almost like unprocessed grass. But they manage to do it by just constantly eating.

SPEAKER_01: 35:20

Which is, is it good for the land? Like, is that a, is it a good grazer, quote unquote?

SPEAKER_00: 35:27

Yeah, they're very good lawnmowers. They, they are. They're very good lawnmowers. Sorry, I

SPEAKER_01: 35:32

was interrupting you. You were saying if we would, like what, what, is there a future place for geese on the farm? If like a year from

SPEAKER_00: 35:39

now, we talk in the farm. Yeah. If, if, if we were going to get into geese, it would be for the meat. And, um, and you know, this is another example of, of, um, I, I have, I take issue with minute scale agriculture very small scale agriculture and this is one of the reasons is because you know they talk a lot about diversity and stacking enterprises and so geese was one of those examples which we were trying to add into the mix but if we were going to process geese for meat to do that effectively it would be another capital investment that we'd have to make because we'd need that abattoir we'd need to be able to process the birds which means you

SPEAKER_01: 36:19

need a few thousand birds at least a year, probably more.

SPEAKER_00: 36:22

Yeah, you need enough birds to justify it. You need the correct equipment. Processing geese is actually very difficult. Processing chickens, easiest. Ducks is the next step up in terms of difficulty because of all they're down and how hard it is to pluck. And then geese are even further up there. So they're very difficult to process. They're also very seasonal. People tend to only want them during Christmas or sort of around wintertime. They take quite long to grow and finish. And so you've got a large portion of the year where you're working on growing these geese and then a very small window of time to sell. So you have to sort of sell

SPEAKER_01: 37:07

all of them pre-sale? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 37:11

So

SPEAKER_01: 37:11

that's a very different, it's not a business you can just easily stack on top and just make a bit of extra money left and right. No, you need to do this full time and almost

SPEAKER_00: 37:21

only do this. If I was doing a meat business with, say, some chickens or ducks already and I already had the processing facility and the license and everything, sure, I don't think, I think it would make a lot of sense to add geese into the mix. But as an egg producer, primarily as an egg producer It's just a whole nother level of investment for us. So another loan, you know, and yeah. So coming back to the feed issue with ducks is that, you know, you can't, you can't rely on acreage to feed your ducks. You have to rely on ghost acreage. You know, you have to rely on arable grain producers to help you feed your ducks or your chickens or whatever poultry you might have. And, you know, people say, well, then you shouldn't have poultry or they're not. Well, on 10 acres, you can't keep ruminants and make a business. It's just not possible. You know, Can you do like a small

SPEAKER_01: 38:25

scale dairy or something? I'm joking.

SPEAKER_00: 38:29

You

SPEAKER_01: 38:30

could, but you're not going to make any money.

SPEAKER_00: 38:33

You could try. You're not going to make enough money, basically. And so when you've got 10 acres, you've got limited options. I mean, I basically put it down to two options. You've got poultry, if you want to do livestock, or you've got market gardening. The market gardening thing, I've tried both. I haven't tried market gardening at the same level of intensity as the ducks because that was our primary focus. We did a bit of market gardening alongside the poultry. But the problem is locally here, there isn't that easy to access market to go and do a veg box scheme, really. We've already got some very well-established market gardeners slash wholesalers in the area who do a great job. We also have a lot of really small family-run retailers who buy in from the local wholesaler. And people have that community. They have those little high streets and the place where they go and they buy their veg. And it's not like maybe a city where all of it's supermarket veg and you want to maybe come and disrupt things and you want to say hey don't go to the supermarket come to me buy the veg directly and buy a veg box and you know I don't really want to go and say hey stop buying from your local family small retailer on the high street and come and buy directly from

SPEAKER_01: 40:08

me directly from us yeah so in our context it leaves poultry basically

SPEAKER_00: 40:13

so it leaves poultry if you really and I should also clarify because our goals from the start And this was a bit too idealistic, really. And this is one of my lessons that I've learned. Our goals from the start was we were going to be 100% farmers on the farm, no side hustles, no other income. And that was our goal. And I was warned by the other farmers, the real farmers. 10

SPEAKER_01: 40:40

acres. I

SPEAKER_00: 40:42

was warned, Josh, you're not going to be able to do that. And being the type of person I am, I dug my heels in and I said, no, I'm going to show you that on 10 acres, I'm going to be a farmer producing nothing other than food, and I'm going to make it work. And that was too idealistic. And so a lot of the time you see other people making small-scale farming sort of work. I'm doing

SPEAKER_01: 41:10

quotes. Yeah, quote, unquote, yeah. With Airbnb, tourism, courses, experiences, dinner. I mean, anything else than selling pure food, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 41:21

Yeah, yeah. A job on the

SPEAKER_01: 41:22

side. I think 90 plus, I'm getting the numbers wrong. Lauren is going to, Manning is going to kill me. But I think even in the US on large scale commercial farms, the majority, I'm going to say somewhere in 80, 90% has an off-farm job. That's right, yeah. For sure, also for medical reasons, for healthcare reasons and insurance reasons, other reasons just to pure cash. But even there at that scale, most farmers or most farming families have an off-site job. farm job to keep the lights on which is very scary if you think about it

SPEAKER_00: 41:56

it's very scary and you know i mean the real farmers around here um they not only do they have a a job on the side like hgv driving which pays pretty well actually especially these days um or contracting using the kit that they've got um the tractors and whatnot but they they also tend to have hundreds of acres and they are claiming subsidies on that acreage so in our case we were not even commercially

SPEAKER_01: 42:25

farming if you think about

SPEAKER_00: 42:27

it yeah yeah i mean you know they don't get me wrong they're putting a lot of hours in and they're working hard that's something else i just want to say is since arriving here i have never met a people or um and in like a community of people that work as hard as farmers i mean they are hard we just put out an

SPEAKER_01: 42:47

interview like this week of the laziest farmer of the uk and

SPEAKER_00: 42:50

this and sort of math that's right yeah

SPEAKER_01: 42:52

and it's interesting that the whole definition of I have to work until like I have to burn the midnight oil and in summer I have to be on my tractor until midnight and it's very interesting it's probably a lot of that is needed but also a lot of that is part of that and he said yeah I'm too lazy to farm against nature like if we the conventional extractive system is also extremely hour intensive and does not sustainably mentally like you cannot do that forever and hope that that's fine and if you're not making like if you do it for a few years and your farm is getting off the ground and your system is starting to work etc no it's a slow hill like it's a downhill slowly or fastly and I can only imagine the level of stress I think the farmer suicide rates everywhere in the world are way it's like one of the most dangerous jobs and accidents suicides

SPEAKER_00: 43:45

it's crazy I believe farming is the highest suicide rate of any other industry from what I understand stand. There was another

SPEAKER_01: 43:52

reason you went there. From the city, you wanted to be outside, work a lot, deal with your anxiety. It's probably not the combination you want to bring to farming.

SPEAKER_00: 44:03

I'll say that farmers, multi-generation farmers, not really first generation farmers like myself, but guys and girls who've been in this business for many generations and grown up with it, they are cut from a different cloth I mean, they work hard and they work in rough conditions and for very little pay. And it never ceases to amaze me and it's just incredible. But, you know, our situation, as I was saying, not only were we trying to do it without a job on the side or a non-agricultural related enterprise like Airbnb, which we now do have because we realized, but we were also just, we don't even qualify for subsidies you can't get any subsidies on 10 acres you have to be slightly bigger and even then you know basically the more acreage you have the more farm subsidies you can claim so it is a case of size helps a lot so let's talk about

SPEAKER_01: 45:42

November yeah let's talk about November what needs to happen now to get you through the winter and I want to hear your future vision you're going to do a massive Airbnb experience with fiber optic cable and remote working or something else on the farm farming side but what needs to happen now and what are you going to do to basically solve not solve but yeah solve the cash flow issue and get you through the winter and is that enough because are you like expecting that that feed cost will come down or what happens after the winter

SPEAKER_00: 46:12

um yeah first of all we're definitely not going to do any more than one airbnb um and i'll talk why it's also a lot of work um uh yeah when you work it out per hour pays a hell of a lot better than farming But I still have ideals about being primarily a food producer, and I don't want to turn it into a big campsite. I think it's great having one Airbnb there. People need to be able to come visit the farm. It's a good extra bit of income, but I definitely don't want to turn it into a big campsite. Where we are now is, as I said, end of November, if we don't generate around about£5,000 is the minimum that we need to see. us through the winter. And so the plan is actually to run a crowdfunding campaign to help generate that cash. Now, actually, when I started the YouTube channel, that wasn't our intention. We only did it because, first of all, my best friend from South Africa rang me up and he was like, Josh, man, you've been doing this for seven years. You can't just let this whole thing fall apart. You need to do a crowdfunder. And he said that and then I started getting a lot of comments on the video like I would support you I would do a GoFundMe whatever so I and we were very reluctant because I you know because you're making it

SPEAKER_01: 47:36

work

SPEAKER_00: 47:37

yeah yeah we see that even more as failure and you know we are we see ourselves as a commercial business not a not a charity but so we've actually we've come up with an idea for we're going to do a crowd funder but there will be rewards that people get back and there'll be very real things that they can get in return so we're not just going to ship eggs to

SPEAKER_01: 47:58

South Africa

SPEAKER_00: 48:01

no I happen to know from experience they ship very badly you can only

SPEAKER_01: 48:06

imagine the mess

SPEAKER_00: 48:08

yeah but yeah so we're going to do

SPEAKER_01: 48:11

crowdfunding with rewards and for about 5k which sounds possible I mean it depends on your crowd obviously and let's hope some of the crowd is listening to this because that would be already let's say for the space to see the transition to make sure you make it and then enable you to go through a transition would be very interesting not that next year you'll be in the same issue and have to keep that I think is your reluctance not wanting to keep asking the crowd to keep going and thus not being financially stable

SPEAKER_00: 48:45

no so one thing you know we've had to think very hard about this because one thing we do not want to do is we do not want to just limp along we don't we don't want to take you know five grand and then sort of get to next year use this emergency

SPEAKER_01: 48:58

to to fit yeah to to get to reinvent ourselves or to go down or get to the next level yeah

SPEAKER_00: 49:05

yeah yeah we need to we need to um either we need to fail fast or we need to and and and just and just no depth you know change our lives and do something else or we need to actually figure out how we're going to sustainably move this forward on 10 acres you can sell the

SPEAKER_01: 49:20

farm to the next back to the land movement that's probably happening like every seven years. I mean, if they study this, they've already seen it's like some kind of cycle.

SPEAKER_00: 49:28

There are plenty of people out there who want to have a go, just like we did. And I would just tell them, go for it, but just don't quit your day job, basically. So, you know, we've actually got some very interesting opportunities on the horizon. We've got, I guess, without, for confidentiality reasons, without talking about it, in great detail. There is a farm in Europe that wants to buy hatching eggs from us. And that being fertilized duck eggs, which they can then incubate, and then they can basically get our genetics of khaki camels onto their farm. Then

SPEAKER_01: 50:13

suddenly your 10 acres, let's say, multiplies. The whole seed thing is very interesting. We're going to do another episode on that and the nutrient density and the genetics and selling to others. It's an input, but it's not really an input. Then suddenly with 10 acres, I'm imagining, I don't know how that works in duck eggs, but you can, let's say, touch a lot more hectares and acres and touch a lot more people.

SPEAKER_00: 50:38

Yeah, exactly. I mean, hatching eggs are... incredibly more valuable than table eggs, like immensely so. What is immensely? 10x, 50x, 100x? Like, you know, you're talking sort of 40 pence an egg table eggs compared to, which is, we are very, by the way, anyone listening should know, we are not failing because we're not niche enough and we're not premium enough, okay? We are the UK's only organic duck egg producer and talking about a niche and we yeah and we sell our eggs I mean I imagine our eggs are probably the most expensive in the UK so that's not why we're failing but yes our eggs are about 40 pence each and you know hatching egg depending on the volumes you're selling it but at small volumes you're selling it at£2.50 an egg you know so it's many times greater and it makes a huge difference to our business. And is that

SPEAKER_01: 51:45

easy to do? Probably not. Otherwise, they wouldn't be searching for you. They would be trying to find somebody on the continent.

SPEAKER_00: 51:51

It's not hard to do. You know, you ultimately just have to set up a breeding group and you have to. But the thing is, you need the right genetics. And so which is when it comes. Yeah. When it comes to khaki camels and the ducks that we keep, which is a

SPEAKER_01: 52:07

type of ducks just for people to. Yeah. Yeah. So we keep specific genetics that

SPEAKER_00: 52:12

we keep camels. Campbell breeds, all focused on egg laying, and the three breeds we've got are dark Campbells, khaki Campbells, and Welsh Harlequins, which are also actually Campbells. And you've been

SPEAKER_01: 52:25

selecting that for years, obviously, on quality, like on laying, on easiness. Exactly. I mean, you've been selecting and now maybe in a position to start selling.

SPEAKER_00: 52:35

Exactly. So those duck breeds are pretty rare. First of all, just the fact that there are very few duck egg producers in the uk let alone actually organic certified duck egg producers so you don't get many farms who have that sort of volume, those population numbers like we do to select from, you know, you've got lots of backyard people with ducks, but they've got small populations and those populations are coming from other places, which are not breeding in the same way that we're breeding. So I actually, I look at our breeding program as a regenerative breeding program, which the way we go about it is, is, you know, we are breeding for every generation to be better than the previous one. And we're doing that by brutally selecting out birds that don't meet our requirements. We're withholding as much, how do I say, we're modicoddling and care and we're giving them a natural environment and we're saying, we're not gonna give you all the additional medication and parasite wormers we're not going to basically see who

SPEAKER_01: 54:30

makes the toughies yeah

SPEAKER_00: 54:33

yeah it's survival of the fittest and we're not going to try and optimize your performance through inputs you know if a bird if there's an animal welfare issue and we do the same process with our sheep and i'm really stoked about where we've got to with our flock of sheep but if there's an animal welfare issue we immediately treat them we sort them out we make sure they're happy but they get a black mark and they do not move into the next flock and our criteria that we that we have when selecting are much stricter than what people usually have. Like for example, with our sheep, if a sheep has to be, if a sheep gives birth and we have to pull that lamb, we're not happy because we got a big lamb. We're really annoyed because we had to pull the lamb. We want sheep that, and that is very common amongst farming community is, you know, they're proud about how many lambs they've pulled and how big the lamb was when it came out. So how

SPEAKER_01: 55:26

unique is that approach? genetic approach also in sheep because I sense that there's another opportunity there as well to get these genetics right on low input low input also in terms of time and resources and having to pull sheep or having to medicate ducks which for sure is not easy like how unique is that approach to creating the toughies

SPEAKER_00: 55:50

I think it's I think it's quite unique actually like even if people say that they you know everyone says that they're selecting the best of the flock for the next

SPEAKER_01: 55:59

generation. Yeah, but in this case, best means something else.

SPEAKER_00: 56:02

But in this case, it's like, okay, you're saying you selected the best, but how much attention, how much resources did you give that flock through the year? How many inputs and resources did you get to get that animal to look like that and perform like that? And so we've been, from the very beginning, giving, we call it minimal intervention, and that is we give give them as little as possible and we see how they do and if there's an issue we treat it and then they don't get bred from and we have lots of criteria that we score them against and then from and then we select them for breeding so regenerative

SPEAKER_01: 56:44

mark shepherd calls it like what is it stun sheer yeah sheer total out of neglect that's right yeah

SPEAKER_00: 56:50

yeah i don't

SPEAKER_01: 56:51

know maybe it's a bit tricky but yeah you get the idea

SPEAKER_00: 56:54

yeah i don't i don't utterly neglect them um But, you know, and he uses that principle with plants, right? And we've actually done the same thing with our blueberry patch, which is a whole nother story. But so, yeah, regenerative breeding. So our genetics, we also happen to get our Khaki Campbells came from a farm. They're called a family called the Court Langs, and they have a farm. And I don't know exactly how many generations. Someone said to me, they've been breeding in khaki campbells for seven generations and i'm i'm not sure if that number is

SPEAKER_01: 57:33

but the family

SPEAKER_00: 57:35

yeah that the yeah the family have been breeding khaki campbell ducks how many

SPEAKER_01: 57:40

generations of ducks that's

SPEAKER_00: 57:41

generations oh many yeah yeah so i and i i say seven you know people don't it could be less but they've been doing it pretty much the longest of anyone and and they're actually known all around the world for for their um genetics. Now, that's where our original Khaki Campbell genetics came from. And then in 2020, when COVID kicked off, very last minute, I found out that Peter Kortlang, who was the last member of that family, or sort of the last member who still wanted to farm, he decided to retire and no one else wanted to take over the family business. So he sold it on to someone else. That other person seems to not be doing a hell of a lot with the flock that he got. And we were like, well, we're sitting on 200 ducks right now that came from Peter. And we need to breed our own. Basically, we were like, we got to start breeding our own ducks. So we got into that. So the genetics that we've got are already special. Did

SPEAKER_01: 58:44

you make an attempt to buy the other one or

SPEAKER_00: 58:47

no? Did we make an attempt? Before Peter returned? No, by the time we heard from Peter, it was already, he had already found a buyer and sold all of his incubators and everything so but it made you

SPEAKER_01: 59:00

aware like okay we need to there's not going to be a place anymore to buy our future flock so we need to do it ourselves

SPEAKER_00: 59:07

yeah and certainly not the quality that we were expecting so we had a really good stock to begin with and we built up from there and then we've applied our regenerative breeding principles to that and so we've got these so coming right back to your original question sort of and what um how are we going to get through the winter and what's next so One of the potential options for us in the future is to really sell our genetics and to take the role of a leading breeder in that space for Khaki Campbell ducks. And this farm in Europe wants hatching eggs from us. And the very unique thing is they want quite a lot of hatching eggs from us. And it'll be a long period of supplying them hatching eggs because they want to build up their flock. They want to build up a flock of Khaki Campbells and they don't have access to them. So that's one opportunity on the horizon, but it's not guaranteed. It's sitting there to kick off in March, but it's not 100%. A lot of things can

SPEAKER_01: 1:00:14

happen until March, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:16

Yeah, and we are very close. We've been through a long process of getting an export license with DEFRA. And as far as I know, they are crossing eyes and dotting the T's, dotting the and crossing the T's. And we should have our export license pretty soon to do that. So that's an opportunity on the horizon. And then there are other aspects too. So there's another opportunity there, which is obviously the Airbnb will kick off next year because it'll be season again. And we were just too late for that this year. So our Airbnb was only ready at the end of the season. So the Airbnb will help next year. the next really big opportunity for us and what I'm very excited about is essentially to produce a super compost from our duck manure. And so we have these aspirations for the farm moving forward. If we can get through the winter, if we can get over this hump and we can survive where we want to ultimately take the business on our 10 acres, we need to be profitable and we need to be comfortably we need to be more resilient and we just you know we are suffering right now with the feed price increase because we're just not resilient enough and we admit that and so moving forward we need to be more profitable and more resilient and we have this vision for two things apart from the genetics one is to to produce a carbon negative duck egg and And... I've got a lot of work to actually call. I want it to be calculated and I want it to be calculated properly. You know, I don't, I don't want to greenwash this. I want this to be proper. Some, maybe we can only get to carbon neutral and that'll be fine too. But if we could get to carbon negative, I'd be very happy. Um, so we want to produce, um, carbon negative. So that work

SPEAKER_01: 1:02:24

is going to be on the, the, the ghost acreage basically, um, on the grain side or what, what, Where do you see the work that needs to be done? Because it sounds like on the farm itself, at least on the grazing of the ducks, which obviously don't graze a lot, there's a limit there that you've already reached or will reach pretty quickly, even though all the YouTube commenters are saying you should grow your own feed, et cetera, et cetera. How are you going to get to a carbon positive or neutral or negative, whatever the right direction is? Let's say, one, you get the picture. How do you get to

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:57

that kind of thing? Yeah, it's a very good question. And when we rely on so many ghost acres, how are we going to get to carbon negative or neutral? And the way I see us doing that is, first of all, we need to get off the soy as quick as possible. And that is the big sticking point for all poultry producers, is how do you get off the soy train? We want to move over to black soldier fly larvae production. And I've talked about this.

SPEAKER_01: 1:03:29

YouTube community. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:03:32

Yeah. So there are technologies coming out there. You know, a lot of people are like, Oh, why don't you just do black soldier flies in your polytunnel or like

SPEAKER_01: 1:03:40

everybody that says that I've seen the first factories from the inside. We've done due diligence at a fund I used to work with. Yeah. And it's fascinating, very possible, but not easy at all. Talking about genetics of flies, good luck. This is something you need to do. This is not something you can do on the side in a room you have left over.

SPEAKER_00: 1:04:04

Exactly. The other thing is, black soldier fly loves are native to the UK, so they don't survive through the winters here, although climate change might change

SPEAKER_01: 1:04:17

that. That's always the point everybody raises. Don't worry if they escape. I've seen rooms full of these flies. Don't worry if they escape anyway down in the winter. Yeah, or if the winters get warmer, we might get into other licensee issues.

SPEAKER_00: 1:04:30

Yeah. So it doesn't come without its complications. How much would that fix?

SPEAKER_01: 1:04:35

How much would that help you? Because they are able to, and some other insects, but this specifically, to turn low-grade food waste, brewery waste, or any kind of sludge, basically, into protein, into insects. And I've seen living examples like living insects feeding them to poultry is very interesting for the poultry because they it triggers something compared to pellets they get or compared to grain but how much would that be like the protein thing would that fix a lot of your issues and or would it just fit a small percentage of feed issue and you still have to buy 80 somewhere else

SPEAKER_00: 1:05:12

it's um it only fixes part of um it only gets us part of the way to carbon neutral or negative egg um but it is a huge part of that i mean i don't i don't know in percentage terms, and I haven't got the exact numbers, but I know that our biggest impact by far is in the soy that we consume as a farm. So moving the poultry over to black soldier flies by taking local food waste and then converting that into insects and then feeding that to the ducks, you know, you're hitting on multiple things. First of all, you're helping redirect food waste away from landfill, and that creates a lot of meat ethane production and that's pretty bad in itself and then you're turning it into protein and then you're foregoing your soya consumption which comes from another part of the world and potentially is involved in deforestation etc so there's a massive improvement there by switching over to black soldier flies does it do anything for

SPEAKER_01: 1:06:13

the taste and nutrient density of the eggs

SPEAKER_00: 1:06:16

oh yeah I mean on that point of view that's the other thing is like we really carbon

SPEAKER_01: 1:06:21

negative and the most healthy egg in the Yeah, the

SPEAKER_00: 1:06:24

most nutrient-dense egg, because, by the way, duck eggs are a lot more nutritious than chicken eggs, and I'm a big fan of duck eggs in general. So, you know, we could potentially move towards being one of the most nutrient-dense eggs in the world as well. Okay. But I'm imagining this is

SPEAKER_01: 1:06:40

like a massive undertaking. Like, does it make sense on 10 acres?

SPEAKER_00: 1:06:45

Yeah, so I've actually had a conversation with a gentleman from a different company that do black soldier fly larvae, like a lot of people have seen in my video. as I referenced, um, uh, better origin. Um, and I don't know what the other one called now. Anyway. Yeah. The container

SPEAKER_01: 1:07:01

size you buy your plug, plug and play and it should work.

SPEAKER_00: 1:07:06

They, they won't, they won't talk to me. I'm, um, I'm too small scale and it wouldn't be realistic, but this other guy that I've spoken with, um, we had a, we had a chat and it sounds like, um, if I could get the flock up to a thousand ducks where we're, you know, we've been sitting at 500 if I could get the flock up to a thousand ducks it would make commercial sense I would match the current cost of feed by renting his shipping container because that has a monthly cost that goes out and then I source the local food

SPEAKER_01: 1:07:39

waste and he manages the shipping

SPEAKER_00: 1:07:41

container no I manage it it's on the farm I source local food waste I blend that food waste I feed it into this container in a tube and the soldier flies eat that and then I feed the flies to the or should I say the larvae to the ducks. So I need to-

SPEAKER_01: 1:07:59

Alive, which fixes a huge issue for processing these because that's a massive- Alive. Alive is the key. I'm going to say a warning. It sounds really nice on YouTube videos, but yeah, it's the blending it, getting the right feed mix, I think, as always, like garbage in, garbage out. But it's fascinating too. Okay, so you need to make any commercial sense. It needs to be double the flock and then you can do it a big yeah but let me just say you get a lot of you get a lot of fertilizer out of it as well that's the big thing with soldier flies actually it's not necessarily yes the protein it's what they what they shit basically which makes it yeah potentially even more interesting from a from a cash flow perspective

SPEAKER_00: 1:08:38

yeah so I just want to say this is a pretty you know this is a big idea and and to make this happen is is not going to be easy but it is the future of poultry and possibly pig production is going there. Like we are, I can see that this is, there are no other, as far as I can see, there are no other real better options. I mean, people will talk about why don't you feed the ducks sort of legumes or beans or, you know, other sort of high protein grains. And, you know, we've looked into it. People have tried it. There's all sorts of complexities around the anti-nutrients that come with those beans. And the conclusion, or overall has been soya is the ultimate protein for poultry. And that's why we use it for very good reason. But this really is going to be the future. And it's very early days, but that's where the world is moving. And if we carry on, I want to be on that train as very, as soon as possible, because we need

SPEAKER_02: 1:09:42

to.

SPEAKER_00: 1:09:43

Now the other part, there's another piece. Yeah. And then the other piece is, is, OK, so we'll have to source some carbohydrate locally, and that's going to be possibly wheat or barley. Now, there's going to be some sort of carbon cost to that, but we can't really do much about that. So that wheat or barley that comes in, it's got to be sourced locally, and it's just something we can't get around. The other side to the business is, as well as using the black soldier fly as the insect production, is I want to combine the poultry with short rotation coppice on the farm. So I want to reduce my grazing pasture. I want to reduce my pasture, my strict pasture only. I'd still have ruminants on there, but in very specific parts of the farm. But primarily, I want to grow large blocks of short rotation coppice that produces biomass that we can then cut, chip, and then include in the bedding for the ducks, which eventually becomes the compost that we produce. And the ducks will also be rotated around that coppice. And we're talking about a very densely stocked coppice of very fast growing biomass, like willow, poplar. In our case, gray alder grows incredibly well on our fields. So we would rotate the bird amongst that. They obviously do their thing and fertilize the ground underneath there. That helps with the biomass. So there's no waste there. Anything you're feeding the ducks, that ultimately gets pooped down beneath the trees. The trees use that. They grow. The trees provide the shade and the shelter for the poultry. We have a rotation of cutting that biomass. We chip it up and we include it into our bedding and then ultimately the compost that we produce. Now the compost that we produce is going to be We've been experimenting a lot with vermicompost and with farming worms specifically. So we come back to insects. We come back to insects again. And actually the reason why we started experimenting with worms was because I thought originally, ah, I can produce worms to feed to the ducks as their protein. But no, no, no, big no, no, because A, there's a very small loop there. There's a very small cycle between the duck manure, which the worms feed on, and then the ducks feeding on the worms. That loop is too small and frowned upon generally. So for that reason, it's no good. But also the practicalities of producing the quantity of worms in a consistent supply to feed to the ducks, logistically, it's just not doable. So what I realized was, no, no, no, the worms are, we want to keep the worms as little workers on the farm who basically take the manure and the waste from the ducks and turn it into a super compost basically and there's a lot of established science on the benefits of vermicompost and the differences between aerated compost and actual vermicompost so vermicompost is much more nutrient dense and it's much richer and it's much stronger so there are a lot of benefits to vermicompost and there's just a lot of

SPEAKER_01: 1:13:14

benefits to raising worms it's niche you've done that before with duck eggs I'm not so scared about that but is there maybe a benefit from the current input prices that there's more people are more searching for the non heavy fossil fuel chemical fertilizer because it went whatever percentage up it went in your local co-op where you have to buy it. I'm imagining a lot of alternative, quote unquote, alternative input companies are getting a lot of calls this year. Do you see that as well? Like, okay, we have this political situation, which is pushing our input prices up, but actually we might use it as a stepping stone to a system where we're going to produce a lot of inputs for other people that don't have this huge political and environmental cost to it.

SPEAKER_00: 1:14:05

Exactly. So when all of this stuff kicked off, I was like, well, it's negatively impacting the feed price, but but actually fertilizer prices are skyrocketing. You see now every farmer around here, they were just spreading their muck like crazy. They were using every last scrap of muck they had. And all of a sudden the local growers who usually, you know, get muck for free.

SPEAKER_01: 1:14:29

What is muck?

SPEAKER_00: 1:14:30

Oh, sorry. Muck being manure, animal manure, farmyard manure. And, you know, usually the local growers and stuff are pretty much getting the stuff free as a waste product. from farmers. And now they can't get hold of any because everybody's making use of every last drop of manure that they've got or crumb. And so, yes, our duck manure becomes a lot more valuable. And the interesting thing about ducks is their manure is very rich. It's like chicken manure. Everyone knows that chicken manure is the most potent of all animal manures, but ducks manure is equally as potent, but it actually has much less ammonia in it. And ammonia is what burns plants. So you have to be careful with chicken manure because you can quite easily burn your plants if you apply it too much. And with duck manure, it's much more gentle, but it's still potent. And ducks produce a lot of waste. I read there was a study that had been done which I read. How true this is, I don't know. But apparently, according to them, ducks actually produce more manure per kilo of body weight than any other livestock or any other farmed livestock, should I say. So ducks produce a lot of manure. It's good quality manure. Which is an issue

SPEAKER_01: 1:16:04

if you're living off duck eggs, but it's an opportunity if you're selling manure.

SPEAKER_00: 1:16:08

Yeah. And on top of that, we're using... a lot of bedding in the house. We used to use straw. We now use this wood chip sawdust stuff that we get from a biomass boiler pellet manufacturer. And they have a byproduct that comes out of that process, which is like a dust that they can't actually use. So we actually use that now in our house for bedding. But we apply a lot of bedding, more bedding than you would normally do with other livestock because ducks are ground nesting birds and you can't get them to lay in a raised up nest box so in order to reduce the labor on the washing side because you really do have to layer and layer you just throw as much bedding as you can at it because then your eggs come out cleaner so as a result we've got a lot of manure a lot of carbon in bedding and a lot of nitrogen so you're feeding

SPEAKER_01: 1:17:04

that through the worms and then it's ready to to sell

SPEAKER_00: 1:17:08

feeding it through the worms and it's been shown that when um so when that material moves through a worm's gut it comes out the other end at a perfect ph it's it's it's neutral spot on and um they also kill a lot of the pathogens and and bad bacteria and at the same time they inoculate those castings what comes out the other end is actually like

SPEAKER_01: 1:17:34

love the fact it's called castings yeah i remember from it's called yeah yeah

SPEAKER_00: 1:17:38

so it's um the probiotics that come out, the beneficial bacteria that come out of the worm's gut the other end, didn't exist before it went in the other side. Have you been selling that already

SPEAKER_01: 1:17:52

or not? No, not yet. That's one of the pieces to get started.

SPEAKER_00: 1:17:57

Yeah. I've produced some on the farm and I've tested it with some of our stuff that we were growing in the polytunnel and I was just amazed by how good it was. I used some stuff that I grew winter squash in it one year. And winter squash is a very hungry crop. You know, you produce these really big fruits. And then the next year, I took some of that beautiful black gold that we had produced and had already produced the squash. And I went and I grew tomatoes in it, which is another very hungry crop.

SPEAKER_01: 1:18:34

And

SPEAKER_00: 1:18:36

next to the tomatoes, I had some locally produced organics certified compost that is generally well considered. And I put some tomatoes in that compost and some of the tomatoes in my compost, which was a year old already. And I left it in the polytunnel and ended up being too busy to manage the plants, you know, dealing with the farm. And I actually, in the beginning, I was like, oh, there's no difference. They're both growing the same. Okay, so nothing. Which already would

SPEAKER_01: 1:19:10

be an interesting thing.

SPEAKER_00: 1:19:11

Yeah, which already I was like, oh, well, okay. Yeah, I was like, at least, you know, we're matching, at least matching this compost. And then I just totally left the tomatoes because I was like crazy busy. And I came back later on, the polytunnel's all like overgrown and crazy and it's just been neglected. And there are these tomatoes and the ones that are sitting in our vermicompost still lush and green. And the ones that are sitting in the commercially, the local compost that we were all yellowing and dying. And clearly I had, they were root bound and I took the plants out of the pots and I looked and, you know, the roots were rack hurling around and they'd been sitting in those pots way too long and they hadn't been watered. And I, And I was just like, wow. Okay. So even despite the fact, so somehow this vermicompost is really just giving it a lot of steam and helping it get through despite the neglect that it received. So I was really convinced when I saw that. And I was like, wow, imagine when we start selling fresh vermicompost that isn't, that hasn't been grown in for a year already. Um, and so that's the product that we want to produce. Um, you know, it's a very, it's a product that you apply in much smaller volumes. Um, And generally, vermicompost is worth roughly 10 times the price. If you go and look at prices of compost online, you'll see standard compost versus vermicompost. Pretty consistently, the vermicompost is 10 times the value per liter is what they sell it in to regular compost. So when I look at the economics of a duck or duckonomics, you know, there's two... The

SPEAKER_01: 1:20:52

genetics and the output. Yeah, it's not the egg.

SPEAKER_00: 1:20:56

There's the genetics... It's not the

SPEAKER_01: 1:20:58

table egg.

SPEAKER_00: 1:20:59

Yeah, there's two primary outputs. It's an egg and it's some poop. And it's kind of ironic that the situation we're in is that actually, do you know what, that egg, unless it's the genetics and the fertile egg, that egg as a table egg is worth much less than the poop that comes out the other side.

SPEAKER_01: 1:21:18

And how did the black soldier fly fertilizer come into that? Are you going to mix that through as well? Or that's just a separate piece And let's see.

SPEAKER_00: 1:21:28

Do you know what? I don't know yet. I mean, what happens when you mix that with vermicompost? I mean, you're talking about some serious rocket fuel. Maybe it's better to sell it as its own product. But, you know, I think that if we're talking realistically, the compost business is much closer in terms of feasibility. The black soldier flies are a bit further out because we have to scale up. to 1,000 ducks to make that work as a minimum. And you have

SPEAKER_01: 1:22:00

to manage that facility and get all the issues out. I mean, that's going to take a few generations of soldier flies before you get that to an optimum. Plus, you have to haul stuff onto the farm first, which is not easy. And the mixing and blending, yeah, no, that's

SPEAKER_00: 1:22:18

of course a big question. We have a lot of capex. I say a lot. In the greater scheme of things, it's not that much money, but... we need to get a few things set up on the farm in order to scale the ducks up to a thousand and to get one of these shipping containers set up. So that's further out in the future. What's closer in the future is the short rotation coppers, the biomass production, the compost and the vermicomposting. That can happen. I'm already producing vermicompost now in preparation for spring next year. So that's kind of where we want the farm to go, but you know cash cash is king cash flow is super important and it doesn't really matter what kind of dream you have for the future if you can't if you can't sort the cash flow out then you can't get there and you know there's a really I love the saying as Mike Tyson once said everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the face and we've just been punched in the face multiple times many many times over the last seven years and I feel like we're starting to learn. We're starting to learn how to duck and weave a little bit, the punches. Pun

SPEAKER_01: 1:23:34

intended,

SPEAKER_00: 1:23:36

yeah. Yeah. So that's the idea behind the crowdfunding campaign. And if we can get through the winter, then hopefully we can level Park Harrog up and make ourselves more resilient and adapt to this future that we offer I

SPEAKER_01: 1:23:59

think it's a gazillion other questions I want to ask and there's a whole other chapter I want to go into in terms of your vision for small but most importantly large scale agriculture and regenerative future but I also want to be conscious of your time and I think we'll leave it at that this is the current moment the end of October 2022 is now and hopefully we'll see you through the winter like you go through the winter you make it and then we can sit and explore first of all we're going to talk a lot about compost at the time for sure and because you would have learned a lot you would have sold for sure already and you would be way further down the line with black soldier flies or other flies and but also to hear your vision and what you've learned in this everything needs to be small scale but actually the future might be larger and what your vision is there that would be I think a part two so I want to leave it at that and you probably have some, some final words to share.

SPEAKER_00: 1:25:00

Thank you. Yeah. I mean, just the last point to say is on the YouTube channel, you know, like, um, if, if there are people out there listening to this, um, yeah, if there are people out there listening to this thinking, well, I, I had plans to do this sort of really small scale, hyper diversified, um, lean, agile farm. And, and that was, you know, I think if there are people out there that want to do that, I really, I want to encourage them to do that. them to follow us on YouTube and watch this process unfold because we had all the same ideas and we've read the same books as you and we've watched the same influencers on YouTube as you. And then you

SPEAKER_01: 1:25:40

got punched in the face.

SPEAKER_00: 1:25:41

We got punched in the face multiple times and we've done the diversification, the stacking the enterprises, we've done the niche products, the premium products, we've done the no dig, we've done the agroforestry stuff. It's not like we haven't tried the stuff and I think that there's a lot of problems with this idea of small-scale agriculture being the future. My belief is that we need large-scale regenerative agriculture and that is really the future and what is going to get us out of this mess that we face. So before you go and spend your money on a little parcel of land and start trying to change the world like we did, just take care and perhaps watch how things unfold for us because it's very tough. And I think it's important to say that there are influences out there that have a very different context. On the surface, it looks like they're making it work, but there's a lot of other things at play. And so your specific context is always really important. But that's all I'll say and yeah please do follow us on YouTube and no matter what happens you know whether we make it or not I think I'd like to share our journey with people so thanks for having me on

SPEAKER_01: 1:27:13

and thank you for that because it's been refreshing extremely needed and very interesting to see obviously unfolding and we'll be rooting and of course whenever we the crowdfunding will go live we'll put it in the description below as well, but definitely follow the YouTube channel and the social media channels of Josh to see how this story unfolds over the next month, because that's what we're talking about. This is not a long, I mean, it hopefully will be a long-term story, but this is at the moment a short-term story.

SPEAKER_00: 1:27:42

Fingers crossed, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:27:45

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00: 1:27:46

Thank you, Ken.

SPEAKER_01: 1:27:53

Thanks again and see you next time.