Once was lost, but now am found

Written to Keb' Mo' by Keb' Mo'

"In the sky, there is no distinction of east and west; people create distinctions out of their own minds and then believe them to be true."

- Buddha

In addition to a collapsing bridge, 2011 started with a prison break of sorts. The 35 pigs we recently purchased from Mato Grosso do Sul disappeared…actually disappeared, vanished, absconded …for four days! Up until that point, they had routinely marched to the top of pasture 6, where the fencing is incomplete, i.e. missing additional mesh, and roamed to their hearts' content; however, they always returned in the afternoon around feeding time. Not this time. Interestingly not one of the 35 pigs stayed behind. All for one and one for all, I guess.

I spent half of Saturday searching far and wide, high and low to no avail. Needless to say this created a seriously deflated tone at Fazenda Alfheim. More than the lost investment, their loss would have set back significantly our efforts to increase our piglet supply to meet market demand. Given the gravity of the situation, Esben and I agreed that he and Clair would make a major effort on Monday to find and retrieve our wayward band.

Long story short, Esben and Clair found the pigs camped out at our neighbor's fazenda. Once discovered, they dutifully followed their apprehenders back home, where they were promptly locked up in the crazy ward, a highly secure pen, where we recently kept one of the sows who had a tendency to snack on her neighbor sow's piglets, a female Fat Bastard, if you will: " I'm bigger than you and higher up the food chain. Get in my belly."

All's well that ends well, but that was quite a scare. Needless to say we have done everything possible to accelerate the delivery of more mesh fencing, but the factory only recommenced production on January 10th. If all goes according to plan, and when does that ever happen, we will receive the fencing on Friday, January 14th.

In addition to his channeling his inner Elliot Ness, Esben, again together with Clair (João is on vacation until the second half of January, when Clair and Rosana will take two weeks of their 30-day vacation) also managed to harvest our crop of beans. They are now drying and we will weigh them in a week's time. This represents a milestone of sorts as it is the first real feed we have grown ourselves. Our corn harvest will follow in the months ahead.

On another positive note, we have had the pleasure of a visit from the volunteens, our moniker for Pierre and Sophie Deram's lovely children, Victor and Emilie. They have been a delight: hard-working, helpful, uncomplicated and polite. They will be sorely missed…but are, of course, welcome back anytime dad and mom need a break.

Continuing in the volunteer vein, we are gearing up for a busy period: four volunteers, three from US, Amanda, Jamie and Julie, and one from UK, Danni, who studied with Esben at the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester, will be spending all or part of the next five months at Fazenda Alfheim. Should be fun.

Fun, too, was this week's first-time visit from Kenny and Sara Geld, along with two of their duaghters, Erin (standing) and Camila (sitting in front of Esben).

Lone's raw, organic honey continues to win market share, one jar at a time. We are currently working on packaging and labeling…very exciting!

Finally, an excerpt from Buffett, Gates and The Story of Enough, a blog post written by Woody Tasch, the founder of Slow Money, an NGO that is catalyzing the flow of investment capital to local food systems.

In the 20th century, our food and our money became fast. Our farms became factories. The erosion of our soil accelerated, as did the erosion of our sense of connection to one another and our sense of collective purpose. Our money zoomed around the planet with ever accelerating speed, increasingly complex and abstract. We raised children who thought that food came from supermarkets and investors who thought that investments came from computer screens. We filled our land with chemicals, our portfolios with zeros and our heads with financial speculation. (“What will be the stock price of McDonalds on the day of the 10 billionth person?”) We ignored the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico—not the one caused by BP’s oil, but the one caused over decades by billions of tons of agricultural run-off coming down the Mississippi River.