Convalescing

Written to Chinatown by The Be Good Tanyas

Worth reading: Climate Change Deniers Without Borders

It has been a while since I last appeared in the blogosphere. Unfortunately my absence has had less to due with holiday downtime than the mother of all stomach bugs, one that has incapacitated Lone and me for the past week. Fortunately, we are on the mend, but according to Rosana, who was hit by the same bacteria/virus a couple of weeks before us, we can look forward to a very gradual recovery.

On a more positive note, Johannes arrived at Fazenda Alfheim on December 19th, his birthday, kindly agreeing to take a taxi from Aeroporto de Guarulhos to our dirt entrance road at km 66 on Rodovia Oswaldo Cruz in order to save his much-suffering parents a six-plus hour roundtrip. Johannes is in Brazil celebrating his first Christmas as a gainfully-employed Science teacher at New College Leicester. Needless to say, the rentz are thrilled to have him for a visit, if only a short one.

Prior to the onset of our personal plagues, Lone and I spent a day visiting Frigorífico Mantiqueira, a slaughterhouse in São Jose dos Campos. We were graciously hosted by Paulo Cesar, who spent two hours giving us a top-to-bottom tour of the facilities. All in all, very professionally run.

Other noteworthy events during my absence from the blogosphere:

• We enjoyed a visit from Katrine and Emil, the former the daughter of a friend of a dear friend of Lone.
  
• We planted our very own banana plantation containing almost 100 banana plants.
• We moved the hogs from Hogwood to Hog Hill. Interestingly, despite our initial, disastrous experience herding hogs, we have now discovered what appears to be a foolproof method. Seeing 2o-plus hogs moving in synch down a farm road en route to their new destination is indeed satisfying.
  

Finally, here at the dusk of 2009 it is worth remembering:

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.
- Epicurus

Alfheim & Son

Written to Graceland by Paul Simon

A father carries pictures where his money used to be.
- Author Unknown

Esben Hesketh agrees to join Fazenda Alfheim as Farm Manager

Vargem Grande, Brazil—December 10, 2009 —Fazenda Alfheim® today announced that Esben Hesketh, 21-year-old middle son of Rance Hesketh and Lone Blichert-Hansen, has agreed to join Fazenda Afheim as Farm Manager upon completion of his BSc (Hons) in Agricultural Management from Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester, UK, in June 2010.

“Esben is obviously doing a terrific job at RAC, having completed his first two years at the top of his class, and we look forward to his contributions as a member of the Fazenda Alfheim team,” said Rance Hesketh, Fazenda Alfheim's Minister of Mischief. “We think Esben’s insights and experience will be very valuable in helping to guide Fazenda Alheim in the years ahead.”

“Fazenda Alfheim is one of the organizations in the world that I most admire,” said Esben Hesketh. “I'm really looking forward to working with Rance and Lone and the Fazenda Alfheim team to help with all of the amazing things they are doing.”

Fazenda Alfheim ignited the organic piglet revolution in Brazil in 2009 with its IBD-certified Duroc/Large White/Landrace cross, and it continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning restuarant partnerships.

Yule begins...

Written to Bing Crosby Christmas Album by Bing Crosby

Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love. How on earth can you explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love? Put your hand on a stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with that special girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That's relativity.
- Albert Einstein

With this blog post the winter festival of Yule has officially -albeit unceremoniously- begun at Fazenda Alfheim. I know this to be true because...

1. Lone demanded that I obtain some Christmas music for her iPod shuffle, hence the Bing Crosby.
2. Lone dug out, from where I have no idea, our kalenderlys, a Danish tradition that involves the daily burning down of one day of this special candle, beginning on December 1st and finishing on December 24th.
3. We made/had our inaugural holiday visits: the first on Saturday, November 28th, to Fazenda Santa Helena, where Beto prepared half of an Alfheim piglet, which we thoroughly enjoyed together with Emmanuel, Filipa and Filipa's mother and brother, who were visiting; the second from Leonardo, his wife, Tâmora, and their daughter, Cecília, who visited our fazenda on Sunday, November 29th. In best Saint Nicholas fashion, our guests arrived laden with gifts, including a 220 volt toaster, a real lifesaver considering that we only have one 110 volt outlet in our house. They were able to find this toaster because their city, Jundiaí, unlike most of Brazil, is 100% 220 volt. So not only did we enjoy their wonderful company, but we will be reminded of their visit every day for the next many years!
4. Lone and I finished our Christmas shopping for the boys today...ho ho ho!
5. Under the heading it is better to receive than to give, Lavrale finally delivered my trailer. My Lego tractor now has a sidekick. Despite their diminutive size, the company's deliveryman estimates their towing capacity to be in excess of 1,500 kg. If that turns out to be true, I will win my two R$5.00 (€1.96 or $2.93) bets with Clair and Dirlei, i.e. that my Lego combo will be able to deliver 30 or more fence posts to the far field. 7-9-13! On a side note, even without the benefit of the additional 10 hectares of pasture that the far field comprises, our Nelore were all lying down and chewing their cuds for the first time ever! Márcio has always told me that it is a very good sign if cattle are chewing their cuds by 11:00, so needless to say I was quite pleased.
6. Finally, under the heading it is better to give than to receive, here is the heartening story, compliments of Pelle, of an ethics professor who has vowed to give away £1 million - more than half of his future earnings - in a bid to help fight poverty in the developing world.

Honestly priced food or irresponsibly priced food

Written to Dookie by Green Day

I asked Joel how he answers the charge that because food like his is more expensive, it is inherently elitist. “I don’t accept the premise,” he replied. “First off, those weren’t any ‘elitists’ you met on the farm this morning. We sell to all kinds of people. Second, whenever I hear people say clean food is expensive, I tell them it’s actually the cheapest food you can buy. That always gets their attention. Then I explain that, with our food, all of the costs are figured into the price. Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illnesses, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water—of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make cheap food seem cheap. No thinking person will tell you they don’t care about all that. I tell them the choice is simple: You can buy honestly priced food or you can buy irresponsibly priced food.”

The past two week's lunches at Fazenda Alfheim have been laden with pork and honestly-priced food. I returned from São Paulo last week with two exquisitely rotisseried pork quarters from one of the two-upscale São Paulo restaurant prospects. Ambrosial does not begin to do this meat justice. And judging from the feedback we received from two early taste testers, we are not alone in our assessment:

Caríssimo Rance, o leitão estava ótimo. Mais magro, com carne mais firme e saborosa.

Na terça só eu comi, o pessoal lá em casa já havia jantado. Comi a perna, excelente, ainda quente do forno. Aí o leitão repousou na geladeira até sexta no almoço, quando voltou ao forno de casa para aquecer e ser servido. Pedaços dele foram disputados “à tapa” pelos presentes, não sobrou nada, só um monte de ossinhos.

Fui intimado a voltar lá e comprar mais.
...

O leitão estava ótimo! Carne super magra…comemos à noite e foi super leve.

As an aside, pork is healthier than beef, about equal as a source of protein, but lower in total fat and saturated fat, and recently took the lead over its main competitor, chicken, in the battle to be the leanest white meat.

On Saturday, we decided to try our hand at preparing our pork, i.e. sans chef extraoridnaire. To that end Lone dug out my most-excellent apron, while I leafed through our new, not to mention only, pork cook book, Pork & Sons, by Stéphane Reynaud, to gather a sense of the possible, i.e. given the dearth of ingredients in the house. In fact, we were unable to muster the ingredients for any single dish, but after perusing a couple of recipes, I opted to roast the ham using an improvised basting sauce, which I threw together using a very, very, very cheap red wine, 5 liters for R$5.00 (€1.92 or $2.86), olive oil, mustard, thyme and basil from Provence, Lone's home-grown rosemary, sage, garlic and carrots, and salt and pepper to taste. I roasted the ham in the oven at 215 degrees Celsius for two hours, basting every 30 minutes, the first two times with fresh basting sauce and the last two with the sauce from the dish itself. While clearly biased, both Lone and I concluded that this dish ranked right up there with the pork prepared by Beto and our first São Paulo restaurant prospect, rare air indeed given the chops of the two chefs in question.

A couple of weeks ago we implemented a Friday afternoon planning session with the employees…a bit bookish, but it does give us a chance to review what we accomplish each week, our priorities for the week ahead and any other issues that might arise and/or require collective treatment. It also gives us all a little non-work face-time, and because we start at 14:00, we still finish early on Fridays, a practice that has been greatly appreciated given the relentless 34 °C daily scorching that we have experienced of late. When the temperature passes 30 °C, usually before 10:00, the daily chores really do becomes chores. The piglets certainly agree…and have taken to daily, collective jet cooling…resting until the late afternoon when they begin to act, well, piggish again.

This weekly exercise has also helped Lone and I gauge where we are and what's next. We have concluded that we need still more help if we are to meet our goals for the coming year. To that end, we have begun to look for a fourth employee, though one who commutes from Vargem Grande to Alfheim rather than lives at our fazenda. We have two potential candidates in our sights and have taken contact with the first. 7-9-13!

On Wednesday, November 25th, we gathered the cattle for their twice-annual hoof-and-mouth vaccinations. We also took this opportunity to treat them for berne or cattle grub (Dermatobia hominis). Given the sorry state of our corral (read: useless), the work required us to rope and wrestle the cattle to the ground. Once secured (my job given both my mass advantage over Clair and Dirlei and the fact that I couldn't lasso a barn door if it were two feet in front of me), we squeezed the berne from the animals' bodies (not for the feint of heart), treating them afterwards with neem, iodine and calendula cream. While tough, it was enormously satisfying to be able to take the time to treat the animals fully. Going forward we will try to spray them with neem every 21 days to reduce the number of parasites.

Finally, we had two unexpected visitors last week, the first extremely dangerous and the second quite benign -even cute. On Monday, Lone nearly ran into a cobra-coral or Brazilian Coral Snake (Micrurus decoratus), one of the most venomous snakes in Central and South America. Fortunately, Clair was nearby and he did what he does: grabbed a piece of wood and killed the snake. As this photo illustrates, this was the Mini-Me version, so naturally we couldn't help but wonder where momma snake is hiding…hopefully far, far away. In an effort to encourage her to stay away, the Head Witch of Eastwick burnt the snake, dynamized the ashes and will spread them around the farmhouse grounds. Our second visitor was a frog that somehow found its way into my underwear and sock basket in our bedroom. As I was preparing to hit the sack one evening, I found him staring back at me. While conceptually open to the idea of sharing my Alans, to paraphrase Samuel L. Jackson's character Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction, we'd have to be talkin' about one charming motherfucking frog.

Slaughterhouse-Five

Written to Bridge School Concerts, Vol. 1 by Various Artists

Makenna Goodman: In your opinion, what's the biggest problem with the food industry in the U.S.?

Joel Salatin: Wow, where do I start? Number one is that it destroys soil. Absolutely and completely. The soil is the only thread upon which civilization can exist, and it's such a narrow strip around the globe if a person could ever realize that our existence depends on literally inches of active aerobic microbial life on terra firma, we might begin to appreciate the ecological umbilical to which we are all still attached. The food industry, I'm convinced, actually believes we don't need soil to live. That we are more clever than that.

This week was dominated by two milestone events:

1. The holding of a joint, introductory training course in organic/biodynamic farming, led by Ana Maria Claro Paredes Silva, Méd. Veterinária, Instituto Oikos de Agroecologia, at Fazenda Santa Helena, Emmanuel and Filipa's hotel fazenda.
2. The slaughtering at Fazenda Alfheim of five piglets for commercial consumption (samples for a high-end São Paulo restaurant), led by Emmanuel's chef extraordinaire, Humberto Guimaraes, aka Beto.
   

On Wednesday, Lone departed Alfheim with Clair and Rosana at 06:30, picked up Direli in Vargem Grande (his house at Alfheim is an Elektro connection shy of being ready) and arrived at Fazenda Santa Helena at approx. 08:00. After meeting Ana Maria and their farm's traditional veterinarian, Milka Matos Bado Villani, who we know well from her work with our dogs, and who was keen to participate in the training day, the teams were introduced and Lone left to carry out sundry duties in nearby São Luiz do Paraitinga. I drew the short straw and stayed behind to take care of the daily chores at Alfheim. Our non-participation was by design. We wanted to allow our personnel to raise questions and concerns with Ana Maria unencumbered by the presence of the bosses. Ana Maria's approach was quite clever: she started by referencing the approach to farming taken by the previous generation, i.e. the parents of our respective employees. How they were able to grow almost all of their own food. How they used no fossil fuel-based fertilizers, herbicides or pesticides. How their soil was naturally healthy. How they collected their own seeds. Etc.

Ana Maria then contrasted these practices with how much today's rural population has to purchase in stores, the intensive use of fossil-fuel-based inputs (out of necessity rather than choice), et depletion of the soil and how most small farmers have to purchase their seeds because the hybrid varieties sold by the likes of Cargill and Monsanto cannot be saved and re-used the following season. In effect, the large agro-industrial giants have succeeded in turning seeds into the equivalent of disposable diapers or contact lens. As an aside, in high school and at university, I used the same pair of hard contact lenses for almost 10 years, only replacing them when I actually lost them! Today, I would need to build extra storage space in my bathroom to house even a month's supply of disposable contact lenses. Clearly, this is the dream of every consumer goods company: convert a one-time purchase into a recurring revenue, but as it relates to seeds the idea is abhorrent. A hybrid seed which cannot be saved is akin to a disposable wrist watch on which the time can only be read once.

According to Lone, who participated in this introductory session, the effect was very powerful. After that, the two teams, plus Alena, went on their walkabout.

Ana Maria's feedback as regards our employees was quite favorable: they appear to buy in to the organic approach and they are positive and open. In short, they have turned the corner.

Lone returned at the end of the day, playing the part of taxi chauffeur, first dropping Dirlei off in Vargem Grande and then ferrying Clair, Rosana and Alena back to Fazenda Alfheim.

Thursday was an equally inspiring day. With the help of Beto, who arrived at Fazenda Alfheim just after 09:00, and Dirlei, who it turns out has quite a bit of experience slaughtering piglets, we took the plunge into packaging our product. We started by catching five suitably large piglets, approx. 10-15 kg, and placing them in sacks, which we then placed in the shade under a tree. One by one, we killed, cleaned and butchered each piglet. We decided to produce a variety of samples for the first of the two upscale São Paulo restaurants which have expressed an interest in our leitões orgânicas. To facilitate the packaging of these samples, I had purchased a vacuum sealer from the Polishop store in Shopping Eldorado on my last visit to São Paulo, and we used this pillar of the TV shopping world to protect our valuable pork…very professional. I delivered the first of these samples, three piglets in all, halved, quartered and cut in sixths, on Sunday. Today, Tuesday, I will taste these samples together with the owner of the restaurant, an icon in the São Paulo restaurant world.

The remaining two piglets were divided between Clair and Rosana and Dirlei, half each, and Beto and us, again half each. Dirlei stopped at the market in Vargem Grande and weighed his half as we were all quite curious about the weight of the final product. Five kg without the head…probably 12 kg cleaned…a nice size in my opinion. The meat looks exquisite: firm and extremely lean. One can clearly see the difference between free-range and confined swine.

The day's other important takeaway were the lessons learned in terms of how we should build our open-air slaughterhouse:

• Construct a holding pen next to the slaughterhouse so the animals can roam freely pre-slaughter. When kept in sacks, even in the shade, some of the piglets flap about to such an extent that they end up damaging their skin.
• Construct a small, wood-burning stove to heat water, which is used to remove the piglet's hair. On this occasion we used the farm's extra stove, but it is neither effective or cost-effective out of door.
• Purchase insect-free netting, which can be placed around the piglets while they are hanging post-butchering.
• Purchase a stainless steel table to eliminate bacteria buildup.
• Purchase a top-of-the-line butchering set.
• Purchase a blow-torch to singe the hard-to-remove hair (this time around we entrusted this task to a couple of disposable Gillete razors).
  

Finally, in other far-related news:

• What Lone now refers to as my Lego tractor arrived on Friday.
• Clair finished cleaning pasture 5 (1, 2, 3, 4).
• The Head Witch of Eastwick spread he first locally-produced Horn Manure Preparation (500).
• The frogs they are a breeding.
• And Baixinho, one of the Saturday day laborers, began clearing our lagoa. Baixinho promised to return next Saturday with a team of three-four day laborers, so I expect that we will be discussing fish vs. ducks in two weeks time.

Back to the farm

Written to En Concert by Jack Johnson

A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people.
- Will Rogers

With the successful handover on October 26th of Santelisa Vale to its new majority shareholder, Louis Dreyfuss Commodites, I wrapped up what turned into a nine-month interim management engagement. While an extraordinarily satisfying experience, it is one that I am nonetheless most pleased to have squarely in my rear-view mirror, allowing me once again to turn my full attention to Fazenda Alfheim. To borrow two classic lines from Sleep 'n Eat, one of the main characters in Spike Lee's Bamboozled, having secured some income coming in, it was now time for some meantime in-between time, hence my week's absence from the blogosphere. During my mini-hiatus, I finished The Five People You Meet in Heaven (not particularly profound, but very well-written), by Mitch Albom, and started The Lost Symbol (very entertaining), by Dan Brown. When I picked up Dan Brown's latest thriller, I was reminded of another classic line, this one uttered by my dear friend and the world's most curious orthopedic surgeon, Tony Matan. Back in our glory days as California Golden Bears, I chanced across a photo of him chilling on a beach with a Jackie Collins (or was it a Barbara Cartland?) novel in hand. His nonchalant response to my ribbing: If you can't read trash, you can't read.

Aside from reading, this week at Fazenda Alfheim was dominated by an outbreak of various diseases produced by Staphylococcus aureus, a bacterium that is part of the normal flora on the skin and mucous membranes of food animals and poultry. Staphylococcus species are not thought to produce disease unless there is a breakdown in an environmental or immune system barrier.

In our case, we believe the breakdown in an environmental or immune system barrier was brought on by the dramatic weather we have experienced recently. More specifically, a couple of weeks of non-stop rain, including a two-day spell which offered up in excess of 200 ml of Adam's ale.

Interestingly, neither the larger hogs nor the unweaned piglets were affected, only the weaned piglets, who reside in a separate part of the fazenda, closer to our house. Even more interestingly, the bacterium almost exclusively affected the all-white piglets, of which we sadly lost 4-5. Neither the Corinthians nor the Durocs were affected in any significant way. Considering the fact that in all cases these piglets share the same father(s) and in many others a mother, this is odd. Fortunately, the worst appears to be over, and all of the surviving piglets appear both active and strong.

The diseases produced by this bacterium led me, aided by our traditional hog veterinarian, Paulo Basetto, to rethink our breeding strategy: we have decided to focus on improving the gene pool of our sows as a way of complementing our existing plan to strengthen the offspring's offspring with another Duroc (or other-suitably robust) cross. In brief, we will replace our weaker sows with their mothers, apparently a more robust group.

To this end, we spent Thursday afternoon earmarking the keeper sows (3 thus far) and gilts (6 thus far), an exciting afternoon that involved the entire Alfheim team, Lone, me, Clair, Rosana, Dirlei and Alena. Somewhat surprisingly, the sows got whipped into a frenzy, with Hannibela the Cannibal trying to go through our bones like butter. Quite feisty, that one. Needless to say she remained unmarked, and will be getting into my belly over the Christmas holidays. Pork-chops taste good!

As for the remaining, recently born and future swine offspring, a couple of upscale restaurants in São Paulo have expressed interest in purchasing our product. All very exciting. We plan to deliver samples in the second half of November. In preparation, we are planning the construction of an open-air slaughterhouse on site. This is a growing trend in the beyond organic community, differs dramatically from what were historically referred to as a shambles and simplifies many of the hygienic challenges that a traditional cottage slaughterhouse would face. We have also invited Beto, Emmanuel's pousada-chef extraordinaire, to Alfheim on Thursday, November 12th, to give us all a course in proper slaughtering techniques. Nothing like learning from a master.

The day before our slaughtering lesson, Lone and our employees will be spending the day at Fazenda Santa Helena, together with Emmanuel's employees, and Ana Maria Claro Paredes Silva, Méd. Veterinária, UNESP Botucatu, 1985. Ana Maria is a researcher at Instituto Oikos de Agroecologia, and has agreed to spend a day with our combined staffs, teaching them the basics of organic/biodynamic farming. The day has been designed as a walk-about, during which Ana-Maria will tour the facilities together with the employees answering their questions and using these as jumping off points to discuss the basics of organic/biodynamic farming. It has taken us several weeks to get all of the requisite ducks in a row for this day, and hopefully it will be the first of many shared learning days between our respective fazendas. In our minds this is a real milestone, and fortunately Clair, Rosana and Dirlei all seem quite excited about the prospect.

In other farm-related news:

• I purchased the Agrale 4100.4 tractor and an accompanying Lavrale trailer. Delivery has been promised by November 12th. Another very exciting milestone.
• I also bought the gorgeous, three-year-old, pure Gir bull that I saw at Fazenda Santana da Serra. The bull will be delivered to Fazenda Alfheim in the second half of November, after he receives his mandatory hoof-and-mouth vaccination.
• Hog Haven is growing back nicely after reseeding, and should be more than ready to support the big hogs when they rotate back around in approx. 12 months.
• Marcos and his compadre finished our churrasqueira.
• The latest incarnation of the Witches of Eastwick eagerly dug up the 50 cow horns that were buried last March (autumn equinox) and began preparing the Horn Manure Preparation (500).
• Based on their improved quality, we have extended our pasture rotations from one day to two days. Obviously, there is still a much work still to do to improve our seven working pastures, but the Nelore have never looked better.
  

Finally, some of you will have noticed the dearth of blog photos over the past several weeks. This was the regrettable result of the early, tragic death of my Nikon D80. In the interim I was relegated to using Lone's dated Sony Cyber-shot, which has held up remarkably well since we bought it 9-10 years ago. The Sony's longevity notwithstanding, I am now the happy owner of a Canon PowerShot SX200 IS. Same 12 megapixel clarity of the Nikon for one-third of the price. So far it has not disappointed.

Die grosse Überraschung

Written to Open Road by Oli Brown

My record royalties right now are four times stronger than when I was the Madonna of my day, ... Now it's over the top. I mean the records, they all hold up through the years.
- Tony Bennett

Wanting to avoid both the specter and the reality of rising at 01:30 and hitting the dirt road by 02:00 in order to arrive at São Paulo-Guarulhos International Airport in time to pick up Lone at 05:45 on Saturday morning, I chose instead to spend Friday night at Caesar Business Guarulhos. Fortunately, Lone's plane landed early, and, after a short wait, a moderately droopy-eyed Lone, sporting new Harry Potter glasses to match my own, emerged from the behind the glass international arrivals doors looking remarkably spry.

Four hours later, after a quick grocery run in São Luiz do Paraitinga, we arrived at Alfheim, floating in on our newly manicured entrance road. A combination of the leveler from Natividade da Serra and 34 truckloads of cascalha have transformed our previously-intimidating-for-non-four-wheel drive vehicles, 1.8 km entrance road into a buttery-smooth expressway. Total cost for this transformation: R$2,500 (€971 or $1,434). Best of all, we did not have to lift a finger.

On Monday we traveled to São Paulo for die grosse Überraschung (Lone's BIG surprise): an evening with Tony Bennett. Simply unforgettable. We should all be so lucky to be grooving like Anthony Dominick Benedetto when we are 83. What charisma…the consummate performer. It is easy to understand why Frank Sinatra named him “the best singer in the business.”

The next day I flew to Ribeirão Preto to finish up some business, while Lone returned to Alfheim with our new, German intern, Alena Profit, who will spend a month at our fazenda in order to gain experience with biodynamic agriculture before beginning her degree course in psychology at Leibniz Universität Hannover. Unfortunately, as it has been raining cats and dogs (> 120 ml), Lone was not comfortable crossing the partially washed-out bridge in front of the entrance to our fazenda, so she and Alena turned the car around and spent the night in Vargem Grande, at the home of Fatima, the night-school teacher and owner of the local Internet cafe. Emboldened by the light of day, they returned this morning and crossed the bridge without incident, though Lone decided against tempting fate by crossing the stone bridge on our property as the water was knee-deep.

Today Lone took pictures of our two groups of piglets: the older ones, which seem to be suffering from an as-yet-unidentified illness (a bacteria?), and the newborns, which look marvelous, so that we can send them to a couple of our veterinarian contacts for diagnosis.

My tasks for the week include purchasing the tractor and ordering more organic hog feed (a not altogether simple task as IBD does not distinguish between producers who produce and consume their crops and those who produce and sell their crops).

Finally, two giant shout-outs:

• to Emmanuel Rengade and Filipa, whose second child, Tomas Georges, was born on October 24th;
• and to Brazil's handsomest lawyer-cowboy, Márcio Cabral Magano, who celebrated his birthday on October 27th, and is now a day older, a day wiser and none the worse for the wear.