Regenerative Farm in Denmark: A Family’s Success Story | Full Documentary

We moved to Friland with the intention of starting our own place and designing our place from scratch. And that was one of the ideals of being able to move to a plot without anything. So it was basically just a barren field that had just been sown with grass. And previously it had just been grown conventionally with all that entails. So pesticide usage, herbicides, fungicides, whatever sides you can imagine in a field. It was grain, it was corn. And when we got there 12 years ago now, it was a dead soil without any life in it. We barely found an earthworm, which is a very sad indication of degraded soil. So everything from then on was about building, rebuilding, re-establishing, re-generating the soil. And it's been a blast. It's been fabulous because everything we've done has just been a dance with nature. We've had trees growing, we've had bushes growing, we've had perennial vegetables growing. And today we have a small farm on four hectares where we're mimicking everything that we started around our house. So today we have a farm that sustains our family with everything from meat, eggs, vegetables, fruit, nuts and berries. So pretty much a complete diet. So we started designing our plot using permaculture principles. We put our house in the very center of the 920 square meters. To the south of the house, we have our vegetable garden, so a normal kitchen garden. We have a greenhouse and we have a small plant nursery. To the north of our house, we have our forest garden. And the forest garden is located on 300 square meters. The idea with a forest garden is to have trees, bushes and an understory of plants that you can eat. So it's basically mimicking a young forest, not this thick, dense forest with beech and large trees that prevent an understory of plants growing. It's the young forest where apples, hawthorn, plums, all those young trees or in the successional state young trees exist. They allow enough air and light to enter so that berry bushes can also be grown. And then beneath that, we then grow vegetables. And all of those vegetables that we grow in this setting are perennials. So they grow on the same location year after year after year after year. And we don't have to sow them again. We don't have to plant them out when they're first established. Some of our plants grow from between 5 to 20, if not 30 years. And we can harvest from them every year. And the harvest season of those plants begin in March, sometimes end of February, depending on how the winter's been. And then ends in November or December. Basically on those 920 square meters, we've been able to more or less give us everything we wanted. So a few years after our home was established, our garden was established, the forest garden was up running and the trees were growing, we started seeing life coming back. All of a sudden there were birds being able to land, there were insects coming. We made a small pond, and just 10, 12 days after we built this little pond, catching rainwater from the greenhouse roof, we saw the first salamander swim. And that was quite a blessing, because when you come on this degraded soil and you don't see any life, and then to see this little amphibian paddle around, that was showing us that we were on the right track. A few years after we saw this happening, we started looking for more land. Not to grow necessarily food for us as a family, but to grow food for a larger group of people. So we wanted to produce food for others, produce food that we could sell, and also to show an example of how can we actually upscale the forest garden principles to a productive landscape, what we call aquaforestry. So on four hectares today, we grow trees in rows, spaced with 14 meters from row to row, and that's north-south. So that allows enough space, enough light in between the rows to grow more sun-demanding vegetables and plants. All annual vegetables are grown in permanent beds, and we practice a no-till system, so we rarely ever seed the soil, only when we pull up carrots or harvest potatoes. Everything is grown in beds where we add compost, composted horse manure, every year. We started growing the vegetables out here because we wanted to grow food for people. But we were also very concerned with how to distribute it, how to bring it to people. There's this box scheme that is widely spread among organic consumers and producers, which works really well, where people get a box delivered once a week with vegetables. But for us, that was not ideal. We didn't want that, because practically it means that we have to spend probably about 50% of the time growing the vegetable, with harvesting, selecting, taking out the bad ones, like if there's a worm in a carrot, it's no good, no customer will want to receive that in a box. So we really didn't want that. Also with having to export it from here, we would have to use packaging. Actually we couldn't avoid plastic. We decided to have this YouPick subscription system, so every January, people subscribe to the following year's vegetable. And that means that we receive payment for the whole year's worth of harvest. And whenever the season starts, our customers are invited to come to the field, to the vegetable beds and harvest what they can, what they like. So we've created this ownership, I think, at least it seems like, where people have already paid, they don't have to consider how much they bring with them home in their basket when they leave. They just have to consider whether they like what they've harvested or not. So that way we don't have the same amount of waste. I think there's something happening when you pull this carrot up and it looks a little crooked. You don't care if you harvested it yourself. But if you had it delivered in a box, you would be a little more critical about it being perfect. So at least I think there's very, very little waste in people's kitchens, because they only bring what they want to eat from here. If there's something that's not harvested by our customers, we use it as food for our animals. So it's an integrated farm with lots of different animals, simply because we want to mimic an ecosystem. This farm is an ecosystem, but it's us that steer it. A little bit like the forest garden, we've decided in the forest garden what grows where, but there's room enough for wildlife, such as insects, birds, larger mammals to enter. The same on the aquaforestry. Out here, everything is designed by us, but there's room for other things than us. But there's not enough to mow the lawn naturally. We need animals to do that. So where we have paths, we have animals that take care of that, and we use rabbits. So we have rabbits in these movable houses, and we simply move them around every day, if not twice a day, depending on how many babies the rabbits have in each house. We also have goats, dairy goats, or milk goats, that we milk every morning. And that's for purely self-sufficiency. We are absolutely fans of goat milk. It's wonderful. We make kefir out of the milk that we use in our smoothies, and we make cheese, and then we also have the milk that we use in porridge and things like that. So it's just a bonus of having to have the animals. We get these byproducts from them just by having them. The goats are managed in a holistically gracing system. So we move their pen or their paddock every three or four days, so they have new pasture very regularly, and that's to improve the soil fertility. It's also to minimize the impact of the animals on the land. If an animal like a goat, or a cow, or a horse, or a sheep are allowed to graze on the same area all the time, the plants that they like the most will disappear because they overgrazed. So we have to move the animals and mimic what would happen in a natural setting where they wander. Like, animals walk around. All the big herbivores want to walk away from their own dung. So we try, with limited space, we have to do that with fences. So we have this mobile electric fence that we simply move around. And that mostly happens in our less intensive area of the farm. So we have the fruit trees and nut trees with our vegetables, and the further away we get from our zone zero or one and two of the farm, so where we enter the farm, we see extensive gracing systems around also fruit and nut trees, but here there are no vegetables grown. And it's for very practical reasons. One is irrigation. We have irrigation possibilities closer to the road, closer to the access point. And so it wouldn't work having vegetables far away where we can't get water to it, because we are dependent on being able to irrigate. So the animals out in zone three and four, like further away on the farm, and they do their business out there. So we use the goats and actually also two horses to graze on our chestnut savanna. We have about a hectare of chestnuts that are spaced with 14 meters from tree to tree. So it's solitary trees. And the design on that field means that when the trees reach full size, there'll still be enough sunlight reaching the grass so that we can benefit from the animals grazing, getting a harvest from the animals in either meat or milk or whatever it is we get from them, and some crop from the trees, such as nuts in this case, because it's chestnuts. So we have that system. We are on very sandy soil here, and we decided to have chestnuts because chestnuts are very adapted to our climate and our soil conditions. We also have ducks, Indian runner ducks and Muscovy ducks. We have those two species because they complement each other quite well. The Indian runner duck runs a lot. It covers a large area. It's a very good slug control. The Muscovy duck is a little more slow in its movement and a little more calm. Also a fabulous slug eater and a very good meat breed. So we have those for meat, and we do sell the meat of that. We also sell the meat of rabbits and geese and goats. And we even have a lot of sheep as well, but they are not integrated in the aquaforester setting here. They are on an additional field that we have. We have another 18 hectares. We have 65 sheep that are grazed in a holistic system there. So we do sell meat as well. And that's partly because, well, one thing is to show that animals belong outside. They don't belong in stables. Animals need to be where they're integrated in the whole growing system. We need their manure to grow vegetables. We need their meat in order to sustain healthy bodies. So we want to show how we can have animals that are happy. And we also want to show our customers that animals are needed in order to grow even vegetables. I think right now there's a tendency towards thinking that vegetables can be grown in a vegan way. Sorry, but it can't. You are dependent on animals in the system. You can choose whether you want to eat them or not. That's fine. But let's at least have animals that sustain and that benefit an area. And then we can eat that amount of meat that's produced and not more than that. Our big vision with this landscape that we are creating is to have it as an example for how farms, how future farms can be. My big dream is for this to be standard, for this to be normal, for this to be something that we can't even teach at courses because everybody knows it. That would be my dream scenario, that this is obviously the way to do it. Our neighbor is a cornfield that is sprayed like a cornfield is sprayed. Most of the country is not looking like this, but there are more and more people out there that become interested in regenerative farming. So I hope they can get some inspiration by visiting our farm and by visiting some of the other farms that are arising around.