We are Hans B. Nolsøe, Pætur Bærentsen and Leif á Bøgarði. We are three friends who began growing vegetables in Kaldbak and Kaldbaksbotnur in 2020 and founded the company Vøkstur.
Through Vøkstur, we sell a variety of vegetables. Initially, we grew and sold white turnip, rutabaga, radish and potatoes, but we have since experimented with kale and pointed cabbage. We plan on expanding our selection in the years to come.
The vegetable farming project is new, but we all have experience and are educated in the agricultural field. Hans Petur is a trained agronomist from Voss Jordbruksskole, and Pætur and Leif both have attended horticultural classes at Búnaðarstovan in Kollafjórður. In 2002, at 22 years old, Hans Petur purchased 20 dairy cattle and started a dairy production. He kept the dairy cattle in Kaldbak until the year 2009 where he began constructing a new cowshed together with another farmer in Vatnaskarðar, Hoyvík. Hans Petur worked there until 2017 when he gave up dairy farming.
Today, we all have a full-time job in other industries, but sheep farming and vegetable farming still takes up a lot of our time. In addition, we all have copyhold land and help manage other outfields.
The workload varies. In the spring, we prepare the vegetable farming. We start with the seeds, which we either pre-sprout or plant directly into the soil. The spring is also lambing season, where it is necessary to monitor how the sheep are doing. During the summer, we begin harvesting the vegetables, and around the same time, we make and gather the hay. This is a hectic time for us. We harvest the vegetables when they are ready to be harvested throughout the summer and late into the winter. It is primarily the three of us who manage the vegetable farming, but family and friends help out occassionally. The children love to join us in the fields.
We very much enjoy doing various agricultural experiments. We have planted a variety of seeds and monitor how well they do. If the crop fails one year, we try something different the next. We must be self-sufficient in Faroese food. We are relatively new to vegetable farming, but taste and weight are essential in sheep farming,. For this reason, we feed the sheep during the winter and before the lambing season.
