The sons of his seed and his blood

Written to Guitararama by Stephen Dale Petit

And now we come to the Grail, the Quest. I think it is true that any man...when he comes to maturity has a very deep sense that he will not win the Quest. He knows his failings, his shortcoming and particularly his memories of sins of cruelty, of thoughtlessness, of disloyalty, of adultery, and these will not permit him to win the Grail...Lancelot could not see the Grail because of his faults and sins of Malory himself. He knows he has fallen short and all his excellences, his courage, his courtesy, in his own mind cannot balance his vices and errors, his stupidities.

I think this happens to every man who has ever lived...But there is an answer ready to hand for every man...The self-character cannot win the Quest, but his son can, his spotless son of his seed and his blood who has his virtues but not his faults. And so Galahad is able to win the Quest, the dear son, the unspoiled son, and because he is the seed of Lancelot and the seed of Malory, Malory-Lancelot has in a sense won the Quest and in his issue broken through to the glory which his own faults have forbidden him.
- John Steinbeck, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights

Our three Galahads have each won a Quest in June:

Johannes, now 22 years old, graduated from Imperial College London, ranked 6th overall in the Times Higher Education - QS World University Rankings of the world's top 100 universities in 2008, with his BSc in Physics -and he was informed last Friday that he achieved a 2:1 -approx. 3.5 G.P.A. He will begin working for Teach First, an independent charity launched in 2002 to bring excellent teachers into challenged secondary schools across the UK. Johannes will teach Science at New College in Leicester, the birthplace of my father, who passed away two years ago.

Not to be outdone, Esben, 20, completed his second year at the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester as the top student in his year...for the second straight year.

And last but by no means least, Pelle, 19, finished his first year at the University of Leicester, University of the Year 2008/9 in UK, as the 9th best student in his Geography class of more than 100.

Alfheim's own Malory-Lancelot feel as though they have in a sense won a Quest.

Other Quests won this week:

• Chiquina has been repatriated to the hog pen, though we still have to feed her four times a day. Looking at these 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 photos, there can be little doubt that Lone enjoys this work.
• Gilt 8, gave birth -in the open air- to seven healthy piglets. We just released the next four expectant gilts from the hog pen. 7-9-13!
• The Saturday fencers finished pasture 6...and the cattle are now grazing on virgin pasture.
• Lone harvested her first crop of Capim Limão or Lemon Grass...and decided to dry it in our living room. 23 years teaches one patience.
• Marcos and his father completed Clair's and Rosana's carport.
• We broke ground on our churasqueira...BBQ'd beef, pork and poultry coming soon!
• I reached an agreement with the individual who had been renting a portion of our fazenda, and we now have access to the last mandioca field...approx. 10 hectares is my best guess.
  

In last week's blog post, Me love you long time, I mentioned our new book shelves. Unfortunately, the photo did not do justice to the fine work done by Marcos' father...consider that mistake corrected.

Finally, as also mentioned in last week's blog post, Esben, his friend Brian, and Pelle, will be arriving on Thursday, July 2nd. Pasture 7 awaits, i.e. approx. 500 mourões or fence posts need moving -the 220 cm variety rather than the shorter, lighter 130 cm variety. It goes without saying that I will be supervising everything.

Me love you long time

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.
- William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act i. Sc. 1.

Written to Live from Madison Square Garden by Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood

Lone and I celebrated our 23rd wedding anniversary on Sunday! I am not sure if the phrase "Me love you long time" was originally concocted to cover such reverable events, but it certainly seems appropriate under the circumstances. Parabéns para nos! Among other activities, we enjoyed a sumptuous lunch at Dois. Highly recommended...simply exquisite, and very reasonably priced for an upscale culinary experience.

Back at Alfheim, we finally received some good news on the hog front: gilt 7, one of the two which we let out of the pen, gave birth to eight piglets in the high grass behind the orchard. No pictures yet, but both sow and piglets are doing well.

Our new house guest, Chiquina, is doing well, too. She even gets out a bit to stretch her tiny legs -or not. Over the course of this week we will slowly be introducing her back into the hog pen. The first test runs have all gone smoothly.

Two more hens are brooding. When their eggs hatch, we should be pretty close to having 100 cabeças of poultry. As soon as Marcos and his father finish our churasqueira in the next couple of weeks, we will begin BBQ'ing some of the roosters and cockerels. To paraphrase Vincent Vega in the I Don't Dig On Swine scene from Pulp Fiction: Chicken tastes good.

Sandra continues to complement the brooding hens.

Marcos' father finished our book shelves...wonderful to finally get our books out of their boxes. Our living room has grown exponentially as a result.

Marcos completed the outbuilding for our telephone...nicest building at Alfheim. We joke that we would move in if we were smaller.

Marcos found three more fencers from Paraibuna. They will work from Mondays through Fridays, while the local fencing crew continue on Saturdays. At last we should be able to build the momentum necessary to complete all of the pastures and hog pens.

Finally, Esben, Esben's friend, Brian, and Pelle will be arriving next Thursday, July 2nd...the rentz can't wait!

Working on hard enough problems

Written to The Best of Santana by Santana

If you don't make mistakes, you're not working on hard enough problems. And that's a big mistake.
- F. Wikzek

It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something.
- Ornette Coleman

While I am mostly convinced that we have avoided making major mistakes with respect to the rearing of our hogs, the events of the past couple of weeks, our research into the issue of savaging -as well as that of many readers- and the many comments that last week's posting generated have all convinced me that we are working on a very complex problem. As our virtual veterinarian-in-waiting and sometime orthopedic surgeon, Tony Matan, correctly concluded, there clearly is no consensus on how to totally prevent this problem. Nor is there even agreement on the frequency of the problem: Tony's research suggests that the percentage of savaging is 3%, while an article in New Scientist sent to me by my mother suggests that One in eight piglets born alive is fatally mauled by its mother.

And the complexities do not stop there: this past week saw another case of mass cannibalization, while Hannibela 3 is now nursing sow #1's piglets. Go figure!

Our latest strategy, which was generated after a Sunday evening meeting with Clair and Rosana to discuss the importance of taking a constructive approach to these very disturbing events, is to let the two most-likely-to-give-birth-soon gilts out of the pen. We did so on Monday, June 15th, and they are now roaming free at Alfheim. Interestingly, one of them has gone dark, presumably, or perhaps more accurately, hopefully, to build her nest.

Our rationale for taking this approach was based on the following observation from the New Scientist article:

In the wild, sows spend time and effort building elaborate nests of twigs and branches in preparation for their offspring. But their nesting activities were severely curtailed within the confines of a crate. And the pigs that went on to savage their offspring left it far later to start nest-building activities such as snuffling at the floor and bars and pushing straw around. They were still active four hours before the birth, while more peaceful sows were lying quietly on their sides.

At the very least, under these conditions the gilts should have more time to build their nests undisturbed by the other hogs. Worst case: if they do savage their young, their behavior should not impact the other expectant mothers. 7-9-13!

In other, less-sobering news, our shipment of 250 sacks of organic corn arrived from Fruto do Sol. Fortunately, I was away the day it arrived, so I escaped the corporal punishment that is moving 250 60-70 kg sacks of anything. Amazingly, this load made nary a dent in our new storage room.

Also, for the past two Saturdays we have been working with a new team of fencers, three-four day workers from the team of mandioca harvesters that work at our fazenda each Monday. They are all from Vargem Grande, and all have worked previously with Clair. Thus far the experience has been excellent. Unfortunately, Wilson, our most recent fencer, from Paraibuna, proved too unreliable. Unfortunate because we liked him and his work was solid, but he had an annoying habit of taking entire days and/or weeks off -wreaking havoc with our pasture planning. This coming Saturday we will inaugurate pasture 6, a huge deal as it will finally allow us to implement a proper, albeit nascent, system of grazing management. I say nascent because Most rotational grazing systems utilize ten or more paddocks to best achieve the benefits of the system. We have plans to open another four pastures over the coming two months. Remarkably, under this type of system grazing cattle will return 70 to 85 percent of the nutrients consumed back to the pasture. If that does not qualify as the definitive argument for sustained cattle production, I have no idea what does.

In a case of what goes around comes around, I had to move 65 fence posts (my punishment for missing the offloading of the corn) last Saturday from the staging area next to our house over to the bottom of pasture 6, where Castanha and Gargalo brought them up the hill. Most impressive work by the horses.

Finally, the one surviving, abandoned piglet has taken up residence in our kitchen, and she is doing wonderfully. Quite the character and an immediate favorite of one and all at Alfheim. We hope to reintegrate her into the herd (litter #3) over the next couple of weeks.

The problem of pain

Written to Coba Coba by Novalima

Our greatest challenge today...is to couple conviction with doubt. By conviction, I mean some pragmatically developed faith, trust, or centeredness; and by doubt I mean openness to the ongoing changeability, mystery, and fallibility of the conviction.
- Kirk Schneider, 1999, The Paradoxical Self, p. 7

This week was more about fallibility than conviction. We continue to have problems with the gilts savaging and cannibalizing their piglets in an incomprehensibly heartbreaking fashion. This behavior, which tears at the very core of our conviction, seems to fly in the face of Mark Twain's quote that 'nature knows no indecencies'.

The locals, i.e. the residents of Vargem Grande, are convinced that this is happening because our hogs are hungry, which hardly explains why only the mothers are cannibalizing their piglets, nor how the 'good' mothers are nursing their young outside the maternity houses, in plain view of the purportedly 'hungry' hogs, none of whom show more than a passing, good-neighborly interest in the new, smaller denizens of Hog Haven. For his part, Clair has decided that there are too many hogs in our pen, this in spite of the fact that said pen is approx. two hectares in size, considerably more space than the 51.75 m2 that a similar number of hogs would have access to in a confined feeding operation. In a confined feeding operation, each hog would reside in a grand total of 2.25 m2, including piglets. Also, if inexperience is the culprit, it is more than a little odd that things went haywire after the first two successful births, i.e. the Hannibelas (as in Lecter) had two perfect role models after which to pattern their maternal behavior. Furthermore, after gilt #3 savaged and cannibalized her five piglets, gilt #4 gave birth and was nursing her six piglets in the perfect image of motherhood before suddenly, without explanation, she, too, began to savage and cannibalize her young. Fortunately, we managed to save four of the six, which we placed with sow #1. Two of these four piglets are still alive. And as if to complete the maddening incongruity gilt #5 passed on the secure confines of a maternity house and broke the sequence of death by giving birth to five healthy piglets in the open air. In the same way that the well-known Christian scholar, C.S. Lewis, once called the “problem of pain,” atheism's most potent weapon against the Christian faith, the disconsolate truth of this phenomenon is that it defies any form of logic or attempt at explanation. At this point all we can do is either trust our conviction or accept its fallibility -and treasure the 17 healthy piglets that have survived thus far.

Finally, in a positive example of nature's enduring struggle, we were informed this week by the Polícia Militar Ambiental, who visited our fazenda in their continuing battle against poachers who illegally chop down between 5,000 and 10,000 acaí palm trees each week, that they had spotted a very rare, at least for our region, bird, the Lesser Seed-finch, most probably the Chestnut-bellied Seed-finch, or Curio in Portuguese, at Alfheim.

This little piggy...

Written to Afro by Novalima

The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes

Our first litter of eight (organic) piglets was born on May 27th. A day later, another litter of two piglets was born. Unfortunately, the third birthing went haywire, and the gilt savaged and cannibalized her piglets. Apparently, this is not an entirely uncommon phenomenon:

Occasionally sows will attack their own piglets – usually soon after birth – causing injury or death. In extreme cases, where feasible, outright cannibalism will occur and the sow will eat the piglets. The development of this behaviour is often complex and difficult to stop and can cause significant losses.

Savaging of piglets most commonly occurs in gilt litters (but is not always restricted to them). This tends to mean that major problems are restricted to new herds where all farrowings are gilts. There are a number of particular factors that may trigger gilts to savage.

Based on the articles' recommendations, there does not appear to be a whole lot we could have done to avoid this tragedy.

1. Adopt a quiet approach to management of farrowing houses
   
2. Ensure gilts are crated 3 or more days prior to farrowing
3. Provide bran as a substitute to high level compound feed prior to farrowing
4. Induce and supervise farrowing and box piglets away during the farrowing process
5. Cull any sow which savages more than one litter
6. Avoid cross fostering litters on to gilts
   

To be honest I was more than a little surprised to learn that the National Animal Disease Information Service (NADIS) in UK only recommends culling sows which savage more than one litter. One has to be extremely careful about reacting too strongly without sufficient data, particularly with an issue that is this emotionally charged. Lone and I speculated about what we would have done had the first litter rather than the third gone wrong. Thankfully, that did not happen and Esben, our virtual Assistant Farm Manager, was able to research the issue and send us the very helpful article referenced above.

I am happy to report that the first two litters are doing splendidly, eight and two piglets, respectively.

In non-hog-related news, we finally received our Carta de Certificação – Produção vegetal Ref.: CC 5076 and our Notificação de Não-Conformidade – Ref.:NNC 269. These documents are the formal report from the inspection undertaken at Fazenda Alfheim on February 6th by IBD, the Instituto Biodinâmico for Rural Development. In sum, the Carta de Certificação – Produção vegetal specified 11 non-conformities, all minor, while the Carta de Certificação – Produção animal listed eight non-conformities, one major and seven minor. We have one month to document appropriate corrective actions. On the whole we are very pleased with this starting point, i.e. only one major non-conformity, the absence of individual identification of the animals, which, thankfully, is easily corrected. In fact, in the case of our cattle, we have already taken corrective action. The hogs are next. 7-9-13!

Since we first began down the road to organic certification, a process which has been anything but smooth, Lone and I have struggled to reconcile our view of organic with that of the certification organizations. One aspect of our discomfort stems from the current, more limited definition of the word organic:

But the word "organic" around 1970 connoted a great deal more than a technique for growing vegetables. The movement's pioneers set out to create not just an alternative mode of production (the farms) but of distribution (the co-ops and health-food stores) and even consumption. A "countercuisine" based on whole grains and unprocessed ingredients rose up to challenge conventional industrial "white bread" food. ("Plastic food" was an epithet you heard a lot.)

This difference of approach is best illustrated by a theoretical debate which took place in the 1990s and engulfed the organic food world as it grew from a movement into an industry: Could a Twinkie be certified organic?

One group of industry-minded partisans argued, "yes." If the ingredients were produced organically then the Twinkie - or anything else - could be organic. Others, who looked to organic food as inherently whole and nutritious, argued, "no." Even if the ingredients were organic, the Twinkie would be so far from what "organic food" meant that the product would render the word meaningless. So who was right? Technically, the first camp. If a food manufacturer could substitute organic ingredients for the conventional ones in a Twinkie, then indeed the Twinkie could qualify for the USDA Organic label.

Our other principle misgiving relates to the missing local element in today's definition of organic, a position articulated in a new book, Why Your World Is About To Get A Whole Lot Smaller, by Jeff Rubin.

First the fish is taken to port in Norway, where it is frozen and transferred to another vessel, which will take it to a larger port, probably Hamburg or Rotterdam, where it will be transferred to another ship and schlepped to China — most likely Qingdao, on the Shandong Peninsula, China's fish-processing capital. There the whole salmon will be thawed and processed on a sprawling, neonlit factory floor where squads of young women with nimble fingers skin, debone and fillet the fish. It will then be refrozen, packaged, stowed on another container ship and sent to a supermarket in Europe or North America. Two months after it was caught, the salmon will be thawed, displayed on crushed ice under gleaming halogen lamps and sold as "fresh."

Since my last blog post we also acquired another horse, Gargalo or Bottleneck, from Márcio Magano. R$400 (€144.95 or $205.88)...a bargain for a very solid, albeit elderly, 7/8 quarter horse. We took advantage of Gargalo's arrival to have all of the horses shoed. Makes all the difference when riding on still-muddy-after-the-recent-rains trails.

Finally, Marcos and his father are making beautiful progress on the extension to our storage rooms. The week-on-week advancement, outside and inside, is very encouraging.

Helianthus annuus

Written to Sweet Baby James by James Taylor

Mathematics are well and good but nature keeps dragging us around by the nose.
- Albert Einstein

This week we harvested our first home-grown hog feed...girasol or sunflowers. This is a huge accomplishment, one that was more than a little in doubt for quite some time. Our first foray into feed, soja perene, was anything but successful, and our second, feijão-guandu, likewise a flop. While we have long known that our girasol were developing well, we had no idea about the size of the harvest. When one looks at the field, and the too-far distance between each girasol plant, one could easily draw the conclusion that while healthy, the entire field would not produce more than a few meals for the hogs. Thankfully, this is not the case. A wheelbarrow full of girasol flowers translates into approx. 10 kg of girasol. Mixed with the organic wheat, it makes both yummy and nutritious feed for the hogs. Girasol are very high in protein, something that neither corn or wheat provide much of. I estimate that our field will produce somewhere in the neighborhood of two months of rations for the hogs -when mixed with the organic wheat and the organic corn that will be arriving soon, 260 60 kg sacks in all.

While on the subject of sunflowers, I stumbled across this fascinating text, entitled How Nature does its sums, which sums up some of the ideas of Ian Stewart, one of Britain's most prominent mathematicians, who has recently become interested in a new area of research at the frontier between biology and mathematics:

Physics and mathematics are capable of producing intricate patterns in non-organic constructions (for example, snowflakes and sand dunes). They can offer a range of patterns which will emerge spontaneously, given the correct starting conditions. The theory which is currently gaining support says that life operates by using DNA to create the right starting conditions, and thereafter physics and maths do all the rest, DNA is not the secret of life - hence the title of the book (Life's Other Secret: The New Mathematics of the Living World - Ian Stewart).

The strange case of the fascinating pineapple begins with the observation that its surface is covered in diamonds, which form two sets of spirals, twisting in opposite directions. There are 8 sloping to the left, and 13 sloping to the right. These numbers are special because they are part of the Fibonacci sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55...), in which the next number in the series is generated by adding the two previous numbers, ie 1+1=2 and 1+2=3, and so on.

The sequence crops up in many other plants, such as in the arrangement of seeds in the head of a sunflower which usually has 34 spirals going clockwise, and 55 going anti-clockwise. So far, this is just an observation, but biomathematics seeks to find an explanation. An elegant argument in Ian Stewart's book explains that evolution encourages as many seeds as possible, physics provides the mechanism for packing them in most tightly, and mathematics leads to the Fibonacci sequence.

On Friday we had our first visit from our homeopathic veterinarian, Leslie Almeida. Fantastic: knowledgeable, practical, nonsensical and inspirational. She walked the fazenda with us and examined the chickens, hogs, cattle and horses. At every turn she had helpful, practical advice. An examples: mix pine needles, which happen to grow on our property, into barbecue salt and heat the concoction until the pine oil is absorbed into the salt. Next, mix this with the mineral salt, in a ratio of 1:5, and feed it to the cattle three times per month to prevent ticks. Furthermore, Dra. Leslie provided us with an initial list of items to help us begin stocking our own homeopathic pharmacy, specifically:

• Calendula ointment, pot marigold
  
• Zinc oxide
• Oil of Citronella
  
• Arnica montana 6cH
  
• Tincture of iodine

With these ingredients, we should be able to treat the most common animal maladies.

And speaking of animals:

• I mentioned last week that the sows (incidentally the moniker for a female badger or bear as well as a pig) were beginning to show themselves from their maternal side...literally. To illustrate this point, I have included 1, 2, 3, 4 photos. Piglets just around the corner.
• We purchased two more horses, Baronesa and Mônica, from Márcio Magano, bringing Alfheim's equine total to four.
• Elle 2's eggs hatched recently. Can you tell Who's Your Daddy? Is it rooster #1, #2 or #3?
• Lone replenished our collection of guineafowl, a development which met was met with particular satisfaction by one member of our menagerie.
• Muninn is now officially the largest dog on the fazenda -and not even five months old
• And our ex-stray kittens have definitively been tamed and are even mixing with their feathered friends.
  

Finally, if you have not read The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan, which was recommended independently to me by two very good friends, Jon Ziarnik and Melissa Mann, it is a must read.

Tonight we're gonna party like it's 2009!

Written to Californication by Red Hot Chili Peppers

If I were invited to a dinner party with my characters, I wouldn't show up.
- Dr Seuss

Admittedly, it could well appear as though Lone and I are doing less farm work these days, and I had to laugh when our oldest son, Johannes, recently commented -in fairness while studying for his final, pre-graduation exams at Imperial College London (BSc in Physics), that the rentz, as presently configured, have more of a life than he does. Objectively speaking, we do...or rather we certainly have had over the past several weeks. As if to add insult to his injury, this past week we were able to carry the momentum from our dovetailing birthdays into a weekend party at our friends', Emmanuel Rengade and his wife, Filipa, fazenda, Fazenda Santa Helena. Lone and I showed up expecting a do, but nothing could have prepared us for the extravaganza (notice the pineapple parrot) we experienced.

The day started at noon with drinks and appetizers by the pool and then moved down to the outdoor riding ring for a sort of Festas de Cavalhadas, the commemoration of the medieval victory of Iberian Christian knights over the Moors.

The Festas de Cavalhadas feature a parade beginning with a bugle fanfare announcing the knight's pages, then the mounted knights displaying their colors.

24 riders are divided into two groups to play the old fight. The men in red represent the Moors, the blue represent the Christians. Among the combatants, there are the characters of the king, the ambassador and the warriors.

Ironically, this historic victory over the Moors in many ways marked the culmination of the “the great age of translation”, the revival of Renaissance Humanism, where the intellect of Greece reemerged from the culture of those who had preserved it, the Arabs.

The transfer of Greek works from the Byzantines to the Latin West took place in two main stages:

The first occurred in Babylon, when Greek works were translated into Arabic in the 8th and 9th century during Abbasid rule.

One night in Baghdad, the 9th century Caliph Al-Mamun was visited by a dream. The philosopher Aristotle appeared to him, saying that the reason of the Greeks and the revelation of Islam were not opposed. On waking, the Caliph demanded that all of Aristotle’s works be translated into Arabic. And they were. And it wasn’t just Aristotle. Over the next 200 years Greek philosophy, medicine, engineering and maths were all poured and sometimes squeezed into Arabic. It was a translation movement of extraordinary depth and scope so that, hundreds of years before Aristotle reached the West, the intellect of Greece was woven into the tapestry of Arab thought.

The second is “the great age of translation” in the 12th and 13th centuries as Europeans conquered formerly Islamic territories in Spain and Sicily. Scholars came from all over Europe to benefit from Arab learning and culture. About the same period, after the Fourth Crusade, scholars such as William of Moerbeke gained access to the original Greek texts that had been preserved in the Byzantine empire, and translated them directly into Latin.[6] There was a later stage when Western knowledge of Greek began to revive in Renaissance Humanism, and especially after the Fall of Constantinople when there was an influx of refugee Greek scholars in the Renaissance.

The Cavalhadas was followed by a barbecue...not a US-style barbecue, or even by a Brazilian churrasqueira...but a B * B * Q (vegetarian readers are herewith warned). More precisely, a whole cow was slaughtered and cooked over an open fire for 24 hours before the party. Lone, not surprisingly, was first in line to taste the exquisite beef, displaying her Viking roots, though she was quickly followed by about 200 other guests.

The guests included the Prefeita of São Luiz do Paraitinga, Ana Lúcia Bilard Sicherle, a city run by women (Mayor, City Council President, Judge, Prosecutor, Commissioner and Captain of Military Police) and affectionately referred to by its inhabitants as the 'pink city'.

Paraitinga tem prefeita, presidente da Câmara Municipal, juíza, promotora (são as únicas da cidade), delegada, capitã da Polícia Militar, assessoras de secretarias municipais (como são chamadas as titulares das pastas), gerentes de banco, donas de pousada, de lojas e por aí vai. Os moradores brincam que é a "cidade cor-de-rosa".

In farm-related news, the Nelore appear to be enjoying pasture 5...pasture 6 is on its way and will hopefully be finished by the end of next week.

Also, we had to purchase six cubic meters of stones to shore up our entry road after the many rains...the first three truckloadfuls arrived this week. We also bought two more horses from Márcio; the latter arrived today.

Finally, many of the hogs are looking VERY pregnant...we hope to have big news soon.