Road trippin

Written to Duane Allman: An Anthology

“To travel is to live” (At rejse er at leve)
Hans Christian Andersen (1805 - 1875)

Using Hans Christian Andersen's philosophy and favorite phrase as a yardstick, we lived a lot last week: 1,568 km in five days! Fortunately, we had some well-timed and thoroughly enjoyable downtime in between each of our three destinations.

Our road trip began in earnest on Wednesday, when we departed São Paulo at approx. 17:15. We arrived three hours later in Jaboticabal, near Ribeirão Preto, where we were met by Paulo Basetto, our friendly neighborhood veterinarian (seen here together with Sr. Antonio, a fixture on the hog farm we visited for the past 45 years), who had very generously arranged the first leg of our road trip. Following a quick but enjoyable dinner and a visit to an estimable local ice cream parlor, we checked into the Hotel Municipal, a charming, old hotel in the center of town. Our twin room cost R$80.00 (€26.09 or $34.30) for the night, including a scrumptious breakfast.

The next morning we drove a short distance to a local hog farm, which, unlike most modern confinement productions, still allows visitors and each adult hog has access to a grass paddock.

Confinement hog production consists of raising hogs in closed buildings with concrete floors. The floors had special slots in them so that urine and feces could drain down into a pit below. All this liquid manure had to be pumped out and disposed of. Such a system was bad for the stressed-out animals (they fought each other and required lots of antibiotics) and the environment (liquid manure often finds its way into waterways), as well as members of the Frantzen family (they had to work in facilities full of dust and toxic gases). In short, says Frantzen, this system treated animals as machines, manure as waste, and farmers as barnyard janitors.

We were very fortunate to be given the guided tour of the hog farm by Edson Gazoto, the son of the owner. Edson was an extraordinarily gracious host, who spent several hours with us patiently answering all of our many questions. His family's hog farm consists of approx. 450 sows and can best be described as a hybrid production. Their farm is extremely well-organized and clean and the animals very well-cared for; remarkably (given the size of the operation) we saw only two animals with small injuries during our nearly four-hour visit. Being able to spend so much time viewing the animals and infrastructure at close quarters will prove invaluable as we ramp up Alfheim's hog production from its current level of 20 gilts to 100 and finally 200 sows.

The most striking feature of the animals was the sheer size of the mature hogs...ENORMOUS...some weighing in at close to 200 kg! It is one thing to intellectually acknowledge, as we have from the beginning, that our hogs will reach this size, quite another to appreciate this in the flesh, so to speak. What surprised me most was how tall they are. A lot of bacon! Fortunately, we will only have to deal with approx. 200 animals of this size. It was also both interesting and helpful to obtain real-world figures for how much feed hogs consume: approx. 1.8 kg once daily per mature hog and up to 6 kg daily for nursing sows (nursing lasts between 14 and 56 days).

News flash: Today we learned that Edson and his father have agreed to sell us two Duroc boars...one just over a year old and the other approx. six months old! Breeding to commence shortly at Alfheim.

A final, fluky factoid from our visit to the hog farm, where we also encountered a handful of water buffalo grazing peacefully. To produce one kilogram of cheese requires approx. eight liters of milk from a dairy cow but only four from a water buffalo (mozzarella di bufala).

We departed the hog farm just after noon on Thursday and drove eight and one-half hours until we arrived in Rio de Janeiro, aided in the final half kilometer by a kindly taxi driver who drove ahead of us at no charge, leading us with certainty to the hitherto elusive Rua Carlos Góis on Leblon -the best beach in Rio de Janeiro- where we spent the next two nights at the lovely home of my very good friend, Artur Hintze, and his wife, Alessandra, and their two young sons, Guilherme and Rodrigo. To say that their apartment is close to the beach is like saying that America is moderately excited about the inauguration of Barack Obama. On Friday morning I managed to squeeze in a run on the beach, and later that evening Lone and I found time to go to the cinema, where we saw The Curious Case of BENJAMIN BUTTON, which we both enjoyed thoroughly.

On Saturday morning we traveled two hours west of Rio de Janeiro to Brejal, where we visited Provence Pousada & Restaurante, a herb farm owned by Joaquim Aurelio Nabuco, whose great grandfather, Joaquim Aurelio Nabuco de Araujo (1849-1910) was a Brazilian abolitionist, statesman, and author, and his wife, Maria Lúcia, a pioneer in her own right, who started producing fresh herbs back in 1976. As if this wasn't enough, we were joined at Provence by our very good friends, Márcio and Heather Magano, and Márcio's mother, Marlene.

We left Provence at noon on Sunday, full of inspiration, insight and abundant stomachs. Between our New Year in Maresias and our visit to Provence, the time is ripe for a few weeks of intense farm work to burn off our excesses.

Five and one-half hours later, we arrived at Alfheim, where "The air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise...so great, that I thought I was in a dream."
- Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 1, Ch. 7