Bees in my Bonnet

Written to Catch a Fire by Bob Marley & Wailers

There is no fire like passion

No crime like hatred,

No sorrow like separation,

No sickness like hunger,

And no joy like the joy of freedom.

- Buddha

Where to begin…a lot has transpired in the past couple of weeks. We have had a myriad of visits, by Jeff and Suzanna on a couple of occasions, once with their friends, Patty and her younger brother Jonathan, and again to help with the honey harvest, and also from Márcio and Heather.

Nonetheless, it probably makes sense to start with our stomachs, which have been treated to a series of delights from our very own chef-in-residence, Jamie, Paxton, not Oliver, though the latter has nothing on the former. Jamie is nothing short of brilliant. We have consumed a figurative ton of our own piglets and chickens recently...very yummy! And best of all, Jamie's culinary skills run the gamut from entrees to main courses to deserts.

Not wanting to keep Jamie locked in the kitchen all of the time (actually, we did, but our better judgement got the better of us), Esben and the volunteers spent a day at the modestly well-known Carnaval in São Luiz do Paraitinga, where they met up with Jeff and Suzanna. That there even was a Carnaval 2011 in São Luiz do Paraitinga is remarkable when one remembers that it was only slightly more than a year ago in January 2010 that the town was devastated by floods. Amazing! A testament to the great leadership and management of the town's all-female cadre of executive civil servants.

In spite of all of the festivities, we have actually made a fair amount of progress with our farming. Esben has been working hard with the team, and although at times it can seem like one step forward and two back, the fact of the matter is we are really getting close to breaking through. We will be selling our first chickens this week…at R$30.00 (€13.10 or $18.08) a pop! On average, the chickens weigh between 1.4 - 1.8 kg cleaned. To put this in perspective, if we sell 20 chickens per week, we will generate enough revenue to cover nearly all of our workers' salaries, or pay for two-thirds of the organic corn we still purchase from third parties. Add in the revenue from a handful of piglets, which are always in demand and typically cost R$180.00 (€78.59 or $108.47) per head, and we are getting close to operational break-even. Most importantly in this regard, our piglet production is showing signs of reaching the tipping point: we are currently fattening up close to 50 piglets and have 12 pregnant sows in the queue.

No doubt we still have a ways to go, but a bit of shoulder slapping is also in order.

Before that can happen in completely good conscious though, we have to see if we can't cure what ails Noel, the youngest of our calves. She is beautiful but also weak. Diagnosis undetermined at this point, despite a great deal of back and forth with the vet.

We also have to avoid mistakes like the one we made during our recent honey harvest: we forgot to close the boxes after retrieving the honey, and the bees took back approx. 75% of the harvest. Chalk this up as the kind of mistake one only makes once. Pretty sure no one at Fazenda Alfheim will be forgetting this lesson anytime soon. The good news: we still managed to harvest approx. 20 kg. of Lone's amber-hued raw, organic honey. Can't wait to taste it.

For my part, I learned that my zen approach to bee-human co-existence only works with bees that are not pissed off because their honey is being stolen. Needless to say, I learned this the hard way. On Saturday, I was on my way to my favorite watering hole for a cool dip when Esben was passing by with a bee box full of honey (and bees). In his defense, he did warn me to leave, but being __________ (fill in the blank) I thought I would slip by unnoticed by remaining calm while Esben passed by a few meters away. Big mistake! Not able to take their aggression out on the protective-suited Esben, the bees turned their attention to me, first attacking my head, then my ears, then my neck. Despite the frenzy, I managed to remain pretty calm and decided to head for the water, an emergency plan that I had cooked up when we first acquired bees. As I made a break for the stream, I fell into an overgrown ant hole that Clair and I dug out during our first year at Fazenda Alfheim. Thankfully there were no ants inside (and even more thankfully I didn't break my leg), but considering that the hole is more than a meter deep, it took me more time than the bees needed to intensify their brutalizing of yours truly to climb out and continue towards destination agua. When I finally reached the stream, still accompanied by a swarm of now festering, seemingly insatiably angry bees, I dived straight into the water, believing, falsely it would turn out, that my misery would subside as my head submerged. Not so. The bees simply waited until I came up for air to continue their vengeful attack. Again and again I dipped under, only to find them waiting for me each time I came up for air. Inglorious bastards! After five-six deep dives, I finally decided that I would have to make a run for the house, and that I did, first tying my wet towel around my head. During my dash to safety, I am pretty certain I resembled something akin to the best cartoon characters from Disney's Golden Age of Feature Animation. Long story short, I made it to safety, drank a boatload of water, took a couple of 6 mg antihistamines, rested quietly for the remainder of the day and was basically myself by the end of the day. Remarkable...and good to know that I am not allergic to bees…though this, too, is a lesson I will not soon forget.

And finally, I would like to pay tribute to my lovely Hobbit Lone, who has mastered a myriad of new skills over the past year plus that it is worth taking a moment to recap. After less than 18 months at Fazenda Alfheim, Lone has learned how to (in no particular order):

• Butcher a piglet
• Butcher a chicken
• Make guava jam
• Raise bees and harvest honey
• Grow vegetables in the tropics
• Treat sick piglets
• Plant, harvest and produce roselle (makes very yummy jam)
• Milk dairy cows
• Work with jussara
• Make yogurt
• Not to mention growing what has to be the world's largest sweet potato , teaching Clair & Rosana's youngest son to knit and even finding time to make Christmas handicrafts

This partial list amounts to adding a completely new skill to her repertoire every six to eight weeks….remarkable! So while I am tempted to quip that this only proves that you can teach an old Hobbit new tricks, I will close instead by saluting Frankie Four Fingers from Fazenda Alfheim.

Order restored

Written to Mozart: Ave Verum Corpus - Exsultate Jubilate - Coronation Mass by Camerata Academica Salzburg

Bill O'Reilly: Let me be very bold and fresh again, do you believe that you are smart enough, incisive enough, intellectual enough to handle the most powerful job in the world?

Sarah Palin: I believe that I am because I have common sense and I have I believe the values that I think are reflective of so many other American values, and I believe that what Americans are seeking is not the elitism, the uhm, the ah, a kind of spineless, spinelessness that perhaps is made up for that with some kind of elite, Ivy league education and, and a fat resume that is based on anything but hard work and private sector, free enterprise principles. Americans are could be seeking something like that in positive change in their leadership, I'm not saying that that has to be me.

Enough said!

Fazenda Alfheim's testosterone war has ended (or at the very least been reduced to an uneasy cease fire), Esben has returned from a well-deserved four-day break in São Paulo and life at the fazenda is slowly rounding back to normal.

The Sorocaba/Monteiro boars and their many, many ladies have been moved to a new maximum security pen, albeit one with bountiful space and vegetation. A far cry from the Administrative Maximum (ADX) facility in Florence, Colorado. Who would have thought that so much chaos would ensue just from lowering the boar:sow ratio from approx. 1:15 to 1:10. Can't learn this stuff from books.

Farm Manager extraordinaire Esben is back, with a smile on his face and a bounce in his step.

Jamie arrived as planned, a little worse for wear, or rather she came down with a nasty flu-like illness upon arrival. Thankfully she seems better now and is back at work.

Jamie and Julie's (pictures forthcoming) arrival necessitated us moving all of the volunteers to the third house closest to the entrance to the fazenda. Good to finally put that wonderful house to proper use. And again thanks to Pierre and Sophie for furnishing our house with some of the surplus from their recent move to an apartment in Jardins.

And speaking of Sophie, our PhD-toting friend also turns out to possess a dominant sales gene. She quickly became the single largest distributor of Lone's raw, organic honey on the planet, moving several cases to the French community in São Paulo in a matter of days. We will be dropping off the last few jars of December's harvest to her this week. If any of you would like to purchase some of Lone's golden syrup, please shout oui now or forever hold your peace -at least until March, when we will harvest another 100-plus kg.

We have also started delivering samples of our inconceivably delicious free-range chickens to our São Paulo restaurant customers. These chickens have to be tasted to be believed, and even then it is hard to reconcile: tender, succulent and bursting with flavors our taste buds have not been programmed to associate with even the highest-quality store-bought chicken. Delightful, and a treat that we will happily share with any and all guests to the fazenda.

Finally, in a tragic reminder of the real, human cost of financial malfeasance and poor education (personal finance is the only subject we are not taught in school), the Wall Street Journal recently ran a data-filled article entitled Retiring Boomers Find 401(k) Plans Fall Short:

The difficulties have been worsened by the 2007-2009 financial crisis. Since the housing and financial markets began to collapse, about 39% of all Americans have been foreclosed upon, unemployed, underwater on a mortgage or behind more than two months on a mortgage, says Michael Hurd, director of the Rand Corporation's Center for the Study of Aging.

Hog hazing gone wild!

Written to Live at the Aquarius Theatre: The Second Performance by The Doors

"Pol Pot - he rounded up anybody he thought was intellectual and had them executed. And how he told someone was intellectual or not was whether they wore glasses. If they're that clever, take them off when they see him coming!"

- Ricky Gervais

The first of our 2011 volunteers, Amanda Moropoulos, departed recently after three weeks at fazenda Alfheim. She was a delight: easygoing, helpful and hard working…cannot say enough good things about her. And in a weird case of it's a small world after all, her dad's cousin, Craig Moropoulos, coaches football in Santa Barbara, California, were I spent approx. 11 of my formative years, and her mother is from Leicester England, where Johannes and Pelle live, and where my father was born.

We also added a new employee this year, Jhesebel Aline de Santana: 19-years old, drives a tractor like she has been doing it her whole life (even though I am pretty certain she hasn't), lassoes pigs one-handed while hanging from trees, climbs jussara palms like a monkey chasing a banana, is hard-working, fearless and sharp as a whip -a real find. She is so clever, in fact, that soon after joining us she won a five-year scholarship to study at the School of Veterinary Medicine at Unicamp (University of Campinas). We are, of course, thrilled for her, and we have agreed that she will continue to work at Fazenda Alfheim during school holidays etc. This was important for her as she otherwise would not be able to afford the R$45 (€19.93 or $26.99) bus trip back to Vargem Grande!

And while on the subject of new additions, Danielle Haddad (caught here displaying a piece of Lone's amazing cheesecake), who studied at the Royal Agriculture College with Esben, began a three-four-month internship with us on February 4th. Danielle will be joined by Jamie Paxton and Julie Pallozzi, two more volunteers, who will arrive sometime next week and on February 21st, respectively.

As summer wanes there is no shortage of life at Fazenda Alfheim.

An abundance of life is certainly a euphemism for describing the hog's activity over the past couple of weeks. On February 1st, we moved all of the F1 sows, the Duroc boars and, after a brief period seconded to an acclimatization pen next to but separate from the incumbents, the three new large Sorocaba/Monteiro boars to pasture 3 to harvest the corn. At first, it was nothing but love, but after a week or so the three new boars started, more or less systematically, to attack first the Duroc boars and then one another. Boars began quite literally running for their lives, escaping from pasture 3, followed by a number of the sows…chaos ensued! We have implemented martial law, detaining the two most aggressive new boars in the secure facility with the other, smaller Sorocaba/Monteiro hogs. Biggie, our prize Duroc, is recovering with a few ladies in a far-away field that will soon be planted with sugar cane, while Beta, our younger Duroc, has been moved to the pre-maternity ward while he, too, recovers from a number of serious wounds. The last Sorocaba/Monteiro boar has also been locked down, but separate from his homies as they started in on him once they had beaten down Biggie and Beta. We are not sure how all of this will end, but after two weeks of chasing hogs in and out of various pens and pastures and treating wounds, we are satisfied with a pause to think. I am pretty certain that we can file this under the heading To be continued...

Prior to hog hazing, Esben and Jhesebel prepared more bee boxes in anticipation of our expansion from 20 to 40 boxes, which should take place later this month. Once fully operational, this latest expansion will raise Fazenda Alfheim's annual production to approx. 600 liters of raw, organic honey! In that connection, we have begun working with Suzanna Jones to develop a logo for the fazenda and its products. I will report on our progress in this endeavor more or less real time. Very exciting!

Finally, Lone and I spent this past weekend in São Paulo. On Saturday we went to Shopping Vila Olímpia, where we saw The King's Speech at Kinoplex Vila Olímpia. An absolutely delightful, thoughtful and suspenseful film. I have not seen such a fine film in a long, long time. A must see.

When the levee breaks 2011

Written to Joshua Tree (Remastered / Expanded) (Deluxe Edition) by U2

“You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.”

- Buddha

Because I had a business meeting on Saturday, January 15th, Lone and I took advantage of the opportunity and spent Friday night in São Paulo -after delivering Fazenda Alfheim's beyond organic piglets to our restaurant customers. We dined at Lorena, 1989, with its head chef, Léo Botto. Delicious food and genial company. Lorena, 1989 will join the ranks of Fazenda Alfheim's customers in Q2, when we raise our piglet production to the next quantitative level. In the meantime, Léo graciously agreed to have his restaurant serve as a distribution center for our raw, organic honey. Therefore, all of you who are interested in purchasing 1, 2, 3 or more jars can do so by depositing money in our bank account and then retrieve them up at the restaurant, which I can also highly recommend as one of the premier dining spots in São Paulo. Well worth a visit.

In the meantime, for those of you looking to enjoy Fazenda Alfheim's Porchetta "Orgânica", I encourage you to visit Felice & Maria, Massimo Ferrari's enchanting rotisseria, which offers cozinha italiana casalinga, in Vila Olímpia.

When Lone and I returned to Fazenda Alfheim, we were met with a wet surprise: the stone bridge on our property was overrun with water, so much so that we decided to park our Mitsubishi L200 Triton HPE 3.2 Diesel and walk the final kilometer in the pouring rain to the main house, where Esben and his girlfriend, Camila, were looking after the fazenda. Esben, Camila and I returned a couple of hours later when the water had subsided and drove the pickup to the main house.

On Sunday, the bridge in front of the fazenda collapsed again, less than a week after it had been repaired, so on Monday we had no choice but to leave Alfheim via Bairro Alto and Posso Alto to Rodovia dos Tamoios to drop Camila and I off at the bus terminal in Taubaté. We ended up getting stuck at one point where part of the hillside had collapsed, depositing a mammoth amount of mud in the middle of what was already a poorly-maintained road. I was unable to rock the Mitsubishi loose, so I had no choice but to grab my belt from my travel bag, strap it on to keep my bermudas from falling down, and start running back to Alfheim to get help. Seven kilometers later…I arrived. Esben met me in front of the house, and I explained the situation. In his unflappable manner, he asked me to hump a 50 kg sack of corn up to the Mato Grosso do Sul piglets while he finished a couple of tasks. We asked João to join us, and he gathered the requisite hoes and shovels and started marching (he informed us that the brakes on his motorcycle did not work) to the pickup at a pace that would have run a British Special Forces lifer ragged. So while Esben drove the tractor, I tried to keep up with João while he tore through the kilometers like a Mini-Me version of John Henry.

Once we arrived, we quickly unstuck the Mitsubishi with the help of our fantastic Lego tractor (a genuine Rudolf the Red Nose Reindeer moment for the little tractor that could) and continued on our way, though the road was treacherous: it took us three and one-half hours to reach Paraibuna, normally a one and one-half hour journey.

On the way we met the Mayor of Natividade da Serra, so we stopped and gave him a status report. It seems our joint meeting with the Promotoria de Justiça de Paraibuna a couple of weeks back had a real impact because the bridge was repaired that same day.

When we arrived in Taubaté, Lone dropped us off at the bus terminal, where she picked up Amanda Moropoulos (more action shots to follow shortly), the first of our four Q1/Q2 volunteers. Fortunately, we were able to text Amanda and let her know that we would be arriving late…very late in point of fact. Under the banner of all is well that ends well, I suppose we would have to say that the day was a success. An adventure...but also a success.

Finally, I would be remiss if I wrapped up without informing all of my readers that none other than that bastion of scientific rigor CNNGo has proven that Brazilians are the world's coolest nationality. So while Denmark might rank as one of the two happiest places on earth, the Danes themselves do not impress as hipsters…sorry Lone.

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.

Abundant was its honey

Written to iTunes Live from SoHo by Counting Crows

"Health is the greatest gift, contentment the greatest wealth, faithfulness the best relationship."
- Buddha

As with every year-end, the unfolding of 2011 was memorable for many reasons, but among all of the highlights, our New Year's Eve visit to Picinguaba and Lone's first full-scale honey harvest stood out, infectious in their effervescence.

Lone, Johannes, his friend Gabriel and I, wrapped up 2010 by visiting our friends Jeff and Suzanna in Picinguaba, where we met some of their friends, Nigel and Michelle Noyes, and at last had the pleasure of meeting Emmanuel Cabale's wife, and ever-so-briefly their son and daughter.

Over the years, we have celebrated New Year's Eve on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro and Natal, at Márcio and Heather Magano's wonderful guest house, Capela, and, of course, at Fazenda Alfheim. New Year 2 0 1 1 on the beach in Picinguaba was at once both intimate and grand in an intensely communal way. And as always, Brazilians demonstrated their unique ability to generate and transmit an intensely unstrained and genuine sense of joy.

After the fireworks, Lone and I retired early and, like good farmers, rose early for a quick swim before heading back to the guest house for a simple breakfast, after which we departed for Fazenda Alfheim with Johannes and Gabriel.

Esben and Pelle chose to spend the New Year with friends at Kenny and Sara Geld's fazenda. It deserves mentioning that Carson and Ellen Geld, Kenny's parents, celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary on January 6th, Epiphany, also Pelle's 21st birthday! Our youngest son certainly keeps excellent company, both figuratively and literally.

Back at Fazenda Alfheim, Lone, aided greatly by Johannes, Esben, Pelle and Jemma, and, of course, Rosana, set about harvesting over 70 kg of piercingly golden honey. With Esben and Pelle providing the muscle, Lone put her new centrifuge and honey-making equipment to good use. Needless to say, our doors are again open for anyone who wants to purchase Alfheim's own nectar of the gods.

Finally, we reached an agreement with the Prefeitura de Natividade da Serra and the Promotoria de Justiça de Paraibuna regarding maintenance of the estrada municipal…and not a moment too soon. After celebrating the signature of a compromise agreement comprising four concrete improvements, including replacing the bridge in front of our fazenda with a metal bridge in Q2 2011, Lone returned home just in time to find, ironically, that that self-same bridge had collapsed, perhaps in exasperation, and even our Mitsubishi L200 Triton HPE 3.2 Diesel could not cross it and enter Fazenda Alfheim. After Esben and Pelle carried 10 sacks of corn across the bridge and loaded them onto our Lego tractor, they left the car parked discreetly on the estrada municipal. Unfortunately, some candango chose to vandalize the vehicle, breaking a window and turning the lights on to drain the battery. An unfortunate exclamation point to an otherwise spectacular end and a beginning, but certainly insufficient malevolence to dampen all of the positive energy that the preceding days had generated.

Bem-vindo 2011! And não bem-vindo 'Enviropigs'!

Um maravilhoso Natal e um próspero Ano Novo!

Written to Smokes Like Lightning by Lightnin Hopkins

"Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length."
- Robert Frost

This will be one of my shortest-ever blog posts, a brief text wishing all of our family and friends um maravilhoso Natal e um próspero Ano Novo!

As regards our own family, Pelle and his girlfriend, Jemma, arrived yesterday at Ninho da Arara, the pousada of a good friend of mine from my Berkeley days, Davis Bales. Pelle and Jemma will unwind for a couple of days after a long, long journey from UK before returning by bus to Taubaté, where Esben and I will pick them up after picking up Johannes, weather gods willing, from São Paulo/Guarulhos – Governor André Franco Montoro International Airport. Weather gods not permitting…we will have to make do with two of Les Trois Mousquetaires. 7-9-13!

For those of you who have not yet registered the monumental event that was my joining Facebook, I have, in fact, recently succumbed to the seductive power of Time Magazine's Person of the Year 2010. I held out for as long as I could, I really did, but in the end the gravitational pull of the more than 500 million people connected to what Esben glibly describes as the world's most time-consuming image management tool was too overpowering for my fragile psyche. We shall see where it all ends, but for now I have ensconced myself in the warm glow of this world's digital hoi polo.

And finally, what would a year-end blog post be if it did not end with a quote from our generation's oracle:

“Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right.”
- Oprah Winfrey