Is that the setup? Because you seem to have loads of different

crops.

Yeah.

So basically for the last two or three years, I've been like, I'm a conventional farmer.

So we've got 500 acres and normally I have got some environmental.

I've got 30 acres of orchards, which is, are no input but not certified as organic and then i've got my peonies which we've got 10 acres now so and i've been learning from social media that i've been selling quite a lot of my peonies and my apples and i sold my christmas trees as well really quickly really fast so i've been earning all my money from like 10 of the land yeah and i've still got 400 and 90 acres of stuff which are either earning very little sometimes they make a bit but there's always crops in there that don't make any money or lose money and it seems like I'm banging my head against a brick wall and it's costing me a lot of money to do this so I haven't got enough money to go into something really big unless it works so I bought myself a small mill and it was partly funded by the local council and that And things take a long time in farming.

So if I want to change my system, I've already pretty much decided what we're going this year.

And I know there was a lot of ups and downs along the way.

First question would be, could you explain why that is, like maybe the economics of it and why you're actually losing money on it? And then second is, if it's so complicated to make money with these kind of crops, why continue doing it? Are you kind of locked into a system where you have to? What's the story?

yeah so i can grow anything i want um on this farm um but i need to pay the rent um to cambridge county council as we get kicked out um so sugar beet um we agree a price 12 months in advance for the following year and then um which is fine until you don't grow enough yield in order to um pay the all the costs associated with it so um it say it costs x amount to grow sugar beet you divide that by by the price that you're getting paid that's your break-even point of what yield you need um but we don't know what the weather's going to do and and on different soil types there's good there's good soils and there's not so good soils and i've got a bit of both um And I've got a five year average of what I know that I can grow sugar beet for, which is my good years and my bad years in one.

And that's my five year average.

So me personally, I take my five year average times that by the amount of money that they're going to pay.

And then that will determine...

And I already know my growing costs anyway, because they usually stay the same or get a little bit more, depending on if nothing major's happened and we've already bought the fertilizer and everything else.

So I know how much it's going to grow to cost, but I don't know how much yield I'm going to get.

You mentioned the orchard, we spoke about it a little bit, but there's one of the videos you posted also recently that I wanted to discuss is the fact you said you decided not to certify organic, your apples, even though you are organic.