Friday, January 29, 2010

A travel letter from the Lazy Tourist

Written by Anne E. Holm aka the Lazy Tourist

Being a lazy tourist is tough:
  • One has to concentrate on doing absolutely nothing for several days in a row – which can be quite exhausting if one is taking a break from a life where one is used to doing something all the time.
  • It takes a lot of effort to constantly ignore the fact that there are people, non-tourists, around you who are actually trying to live their life and do their jobs.

Fortunately, the circumstances under which one is practicing the lazy tourist life are such that, after a whole day of not doing anything at all – and energetically ignoring those who are doing something – one is in a position to enjoy a good night’s rest. Considering all of this, one must say that Fazenda Alfheim is an almost perfect place to be a lazy tourist.

First, there are numerous spots – like the churrasqueira – where one can sit and do nothing for hours, not being interrupted by anything other than three itchy dogs that prefer lying on top of your toes (as all dogs do), nine pigs on the run searching for something to eat (which obviously must be buried under at least a half meter of soil...pigs are really pigs when it comes to eating), a duck mother with her 17 ducklings walking by ("Look, here my little ducklings...this is grass...yes, you can eat that. Oh, you found a worm, well, just eat that, too."), 25 chickens and a hideous rooster with a shoddy toupee on its otherwise naked, red head, and four guineafowl who are strutting along, extremely satisfied with themselves – a fact which they communicate to the world (just in case we hadn’t discovered this) by crying constantly, sounding like an old, squeaky bicycle passing by.

Second, there are numerous people working who one can spend quite a lot of time ignoring.
Rance is feeding the pigs, moving the cattle, patting the dogs (and Lone), driving to Vargem Grande for supplies and giving instructions to the employees. Lone is alternately busy chasing the pigs out of the storage room (where the corn is stored), trying to get the hens to lay on their eggs (as opposed to their neighbors' eggs) , planning the kitchen garden, walking the dogs, cooking, doing the wash and getting up much to early in the morning to practice yoga. And then of course there is Clair, Rosanna, Dirlei and João, who are all busy digging in the garden(s), building fences, slaughtering piglets and hens and ducks and cleaning the house.

All in all there are lots of things for a lazy tourist to do at Fazenda Alfheim...one doesn’t easily run out of tasks.

And as one sits in the churrasqueira -being as lazy as best one can, watching the sun shine from a clear blue sky onto the green, green grass, or onto the crown of dark-green jungle on top of a hill, or gazing at the flowering trees and the many-colored birds and butterflies, or tracking the mist as it comes crawling down the hillsides as day enters on night- one can’t help but think that the Good and Almighty Gardener must have had a pretty good day the day he decided to create this little piece of heaven on earth.

It may not be perfect –there are a few too many bugs, mosquitoes, flies, parasites and other bloodthirsty creatures jumping and flying around if you ask this tourist– but it comes close. And what an ingenious idea to place it somewhere where it on one not-too-rainy day could be bought by a Canadian executive and his lovely, Danish wife, who had a dream of turning this piece of pure nature into a piece of pure, producing nature...that later could be visited by one lazy Danish tourist and her husband, who insist on doing nothing –except maybe the dishes.

You see, this is really the lazy tourist's dilemma: on top of all of the aforementioned trials and tribulations, one has to work extra hard to persuade oneself not to feel obliged to do at least something to help somebody.

And I must admit, our self discipline faltered at times: we have been caught washing up on several occassions, baking breads, boiling eggs, making coffee and carrying as many as two buckets of water during the slaughtering of four piglets. As punishment for our lack of discipline, we spent two days by the coast at Pousada Picinguaba doing nothing more than saying "no" or "yes" when one of the staff kindly asked us if we wanted anything –adding "please put it on the bill" if the answer was ”yes”, thereby upgrading ourselves from lazy tourists to lazy, rich tourists.

Well, on Friday evening the fun is over, and we will be downgraded again –from lazy tourists to monkey class. We are going home, back to Denmark, back to work and in all likelihood back to snow and sub-zero temperatures.

And what have we learned:

  • Happy pigs do indeed have long, curly tails.
  • There is no chance of Dennis and I going native peasant like our friends in Brazil; we are much too happy living our suburban life in Birkerød. That said we would definitely like to come back and enjoy another farmhouse holiday with Loni and Hansi, settlers on the edge of the jungle (but please, remove the pigs from the garden first).

Thursday, January 21, 2010

When the levee breaks (2)...

Written to For Everyman by Jackson Browne

Into each life some rain must fall.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Last Friday Dennis and Anne arrived from Denmark via Zurich, none the worse for wear, that is until we subjected them to a four-five hour car ride in a very, very cramped Ford Ecosport 4WD 2.0 16v, stopping along the way from São Paulo-Guarulhos International Airport to Fazenda Alfheim to assess the damage in São Luiz do Paraitinga (gut-wrenching: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13), check for mail (arriving intermittently via a temporary, mobile post office established at the home of one of the São Luiz do Paraitinga postal workers), pick-up milk and purchase a Queijo Minas from our neighbor, João. Admirably, the people of São Luiz do Paraitinga are getting themselves back on their feet. We stopped and spoke with the owner of the feed store that we frequent, and he was busy cleaning the empty shell of his building. During our brief chat, he informed us that he expected to be up and running in another 20 days. Also, while walking the streets of the town, we happened across the driver from Depósito Cursino, where we purchase all of our building supplies. He told us that they lost 50% of their inventory, but that Nazaré, the brains behind the operation, had already moved into one of their deposits and everything was pretty much business as usual. He insisted that we should not hesitate to order anything at all. Funnily, just a few days before Lone and I had discussed the probability that Nazaré would be the first business person to bounce back from the floods. This is the same woman who once told one of her employees that os mortos não pagam (the dead don't pay) when asked if it mattered whether a certain customer paid his invoice (from which I surmised that the gentleman in question was no spring chicken).

Back at Alfheim, Dennis and Anne relaxed, ate well and read to the hearts' content…all of which led to a speedy recovery from their arduous journey.

On Sunday we continued our new tradition of walking the fazenda. We inspected our lagoa, fed the chickens on pastures 3, 4 and 5, walked the fence line of the new, and still as-yet unnamed, hog area and fed the hogs and inspected the piglets. All 22 are doing well, and the feeding octagon is a big success, though the sows are pretty upset that they are prohibited access.

On Monday we ear-tagged 5 of the 15 sows that have yet to give birth for a second time. The first three were lassoed and tagged in less than 20 minutes, the last two took us more than an hour. Clearly hogs are capable of learning. We agreed to divide the tagging over three (or more) days...7-9-13!

On Tuesday we spent the day in Taubaté shopping for odds and ends, e.g. tractor motor oil, a bicycle pump (for the wheelbarrow tires), aluminum siding (for hog and chicken houses) and also registering our Fazenda Alfheim at the local Casa da Agricultura. All in all a productive day.

Finally, I wrote this blog post in the car on the Marginal Tietê (Lone was driving)…after spending four and one-half hours stuck on the NovaDutra. The traffic jam was the result of a particularly heavy rain which hit São Paulo on Wednesday, January 20th, killing at least eight people. Mother Nature seems to have awoken in 2010 in a foul mood.

Thursday, January 14, 2010

When the levee breaks...


New Year's Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.
- James Agate quotes

Following the deluge at the turn of the year, the weather has taken a turn for the better, albeit we did suffer another 36 hours without power this week following a brief but ferocious storm featuring some of the most awe-inspiring (even a bit terrifying) lightning I have ever experienced anywhere. Lone pointed out that we have suffered more grid down time in the first 13 days of 2010 than in all of 2009. Hopefully this trend will not continue. Otherwise, the days have been lovely: a gentle warming from 20 °C at 07:00 to 30 °C by midday, followed by a tempest of limited duration sometime after 16:00. Rainfall during these weather hissy fits has ranged from 3 to 16 mm. Despite the paucity of rain, the fazenda's rivers and streams are still flush, and with the temperature daily topping 30 °C, Lone and I have taken every opportunity to enjoy a quick, refreshing dip in our favorite stream to cool off -even doing so one evening at 20:00. I realize that this may sound like blasphemy to our family and friends in the Northern Hemisphere, but as with all tough jobs, someone has to do them. Only somewhat tongue in cheek, we will be doing our part to redress the climactic injustices by hosting our good friends from Denmark, Anne and Dennis, for the next two weeks. The only downside with their visit is the fact that eles falam totalmente enrolado (they speak jibberish, i.e. no Portuguese), as Rosana so eloquently put it last week.

In addition to an improvement in the weather, 2010 brought with it two new workers to Fazenda Alfheim, or rather the confirmation that Dirlei would stay after a furious round of negotiations to thwart the recruitment efforts by his (and Clair's) former employer, Paulo, Vargem Grande's local patron, and the locking down of João, another of Paulo's employees. João was an interesting case: after hearing that João planned to accept our job offer, Paulo cut off his credit at his (Paulo's) grocery store, one of two in Vargem Grande, and refused to sell João the motorcycle that he had financed for him. Clearly this more-than-a-little heavy-handed approach required a considerably more creative remuneration package than I had originally envisioned, but in the end good once again triumphed over meanness, and the balance of power in our local backwater took another step toward equity.

With four full-time employees, our plans are being realized with a hitherto-unseen facility, and while there are undeniably more people management issues to manage, on the whole our four workers are remarkably low maintenance...and very conscientious. Without a doubt we are now positioned to bite off much chunkier chews of farm work. Over the past two weeks, we have begun fencing a new three hectare hog area, thus far sans nome, but certain to follow in the fine tradition of Hog Haven, Hog Hill and Hogwood, seeding the pasture at the fundo of the fazenda, and constructed our second proprietary piglet octagon (which in fact generally takes the shape of a quadrilateral), i.e. a cage of sorts with a Mini-me-sized entrance and sides of pig wire attached with fence staples to fence-posts that have been dug down with a fixedness matched only by the The Sword in the Stone of King Arthur's legend, allowing the piglets to enter and feed undisturbed by the otherwise dominant behavior of the sows. This should hasten both their growth and allow the sows to stop lactating sooner and therefore return to the boars more quickly. The preliminary trial of our prototype feeding octogon yielded impressive results, but as we've all heard before, the plural of anecdote is not data, so we will have to replicate our early results until we are able to determine that this method works unequivocally. If it does, the piglets should reach slaughter weight, approx. 13 kg clean, i.e. without head or feet, within 60 days.

We still haven't solved the mystery of the damp floors in Dirlei's house, but we did take a step in the right direction by landscaping the ground surrounding the house so that it falls away from the house and then building a sidewalk on two sides of the house. It seems to have helped, but we will not know if we have implemented the definitive solution for another week or two. Cement floors take approx. 21 days to dry, so if we only recently succeeded in redirecting the source of the humidity, then the 21-day countdown only just started.

Last Sunday Lone and I began a structured, weekly walk of the fazenda in order to better assess the progress of the many jobs currently underway...and also to help us prioritize the team's time. The first weekly foot tour was a goldmine of input into our planning process, and also left a little time to enjoy nature's grandness -and also to cool off…once again.

Finally, a former colleague and current high-flier at Claro, Jacques Magalhaes Benain, assisted me in restructuring my mobile voice/data plan in such a way that Lone acquired a BlackBerry 8500 for free (hitherto we had been sharing a BlackBerry Bold 9000) and we reduced our monthly spend by 20%! Lone is thrilled to have her own BlackBerry (despite her hardy denials, Lone is a prototypical CrackBerry), and when we are off farm, she can be reached on +55 11 9206-3862.

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Water, water, every where

Written to Rocket Man: Number Ones by Elton John

Nothing in the world is more flexible and yielding than water. Yet when it attacks the firm and the strong, none can withstand it, because they have no way to change it. So the flexible overcome the adamant, the yielding overcome the forceful. Everyone knows this, but no one can do it.
- Lao Tzu quotes

This holiday season was dominated by water…a great deal of it, in fact. December 21st marked one year to the day that Lone began collecting weather readings, i.e. temperature, humidity and rainfall, each morning at 07:00. Armed with a year's worth of data, the Imperial College physicist and his numerically-sympathetic father sat down to crunch numbers. On average, it rains 7.8 mm per day at Fazenda Alfheim, with last year's low being 0 mm and its high 138 mm -and 16 days measuring in excess of 50 mm of rain. Knowing both the circumference of the rain collection unit and the size of our fazenda, it was a hop, skip and a jump to calculate the total annual rainfall. In sum, 832,274,413 liters of water fell within Fazenda Alfheim's borders last year, the equivalent of 333 Olympic-sized swimming pools (50 m * 25 m * 2 m) or almost one Olympic-sized swimming pool of rain per day.

While Albert Szent-Gyorgyi was correct when he noted that "Water is life's mater and matrix, mother and medium", there is also a downside: we lost nine newborn piglets when it rained 188 mm between New Year's Day and January 2nd. Very, very sad, but the remaining 22 newborns seem healthy, more are on the way and the 22 existing piglets from the first round of births are flourishing. Interestingly, this second round of births illustrated with total clarity that our data set is far from complete: Betty's mother, who gave birth to a mere two piglets the first time around, produced nine in her second effort, eight of which have survived. Using any industrial benchmark, she would have been culled after her first under-performing pregnancy. Clearly, we need to improve the timing and spacing of the births to avoid the worst of the rainy season and to more evenly distribute our product. Easier said than done -a bit like timing the stock market- but without a doubt we can improve on our performance to-date. Also, we have decided to test a group of Duroc sows alongside a new group of F1 sows that we will purchase soon from Topigs in order to determine which offspring is more robust.

While on the subject of testing, I have plowed my way through most of Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine, by Edzard Ernst and Simon Singh. Highly recommended for anyone with even a passing interest in alternative medicine. This holiday season has also found me giggling my way through Riotous Assembly, by the always witty Tom Sharpe, and consuming Cesar's Way: The Natural, Everyday Guide to Understanding and Correcting Common Dog Problems, by Cesar Millan, star of the National Geographic Channel's Dog Whisperer, and Melissa Jo Peltier.

Less dramatic than the death of nine newborn piglets, the deluge left us without power for more than 72 hours beginning on New Year's Day. While inconvenient, we suffered far less than the town of São Luiz do Paraitinga, whence our electricity comes. Compared to their travails, we fared well.

On a more positive note, Johannes visit was the cat's meow, albeit shorter than either Lone or I would have liked. Aside from the daily farm chores, in which Johannes participated fully, we all managed to relax a great deal: Johannes, me, Lone, Muninn, Layla and the older piglets. A most enjoyable 10 days!

Finally, in a toss up for fauna of the week: we caught up with the real Spider Man a couple of nights back and the new ducklings held their coming out party.