I am still pinching myself to make sure I didn't just dream this past week. It took me a month of e-mails to seven different contacts to arrange this visit to Avaré, but looking back on the experience, I can say that every minute of preparation was completely worth it.
The purpose of the trip was to learn firsthand how sugarcane ethanol is produced in Brazil. Therefore, I arranged a tour of an ethanol plant and of the adjacent sugarcane fields. However, sugarcane fields are notoriously out in the middle of nowhere, so I needed a place to stay. That's [partly] where the organic fruit farm comes in. The farm's director, Luciano Bopp, graciously offered me free lodging and board at the farm's guest house, pictured at the top of this entry. More than "just" a place to stay, Luciano also gave me a tour of the organic fruit farm and a tour of the sugarcane fields, which the farm rents out to the ethanol factory that I visited the next day.
My schedule was approximately as follows:
Friday, April 29: Take bus from Rio to São Paulo (Tiête station, 6 hours). Take Metrô to hostel in São Paulo and spend the weekend in the city.
Monday morning: Take bus from São Paulo (Barra Funda station, 3.5 hours) to Avaré. Meet Luciano at the bus station and travel 45 minutes by car to the farm.
Monday afternoon & evening: Explore farm (fruits + sugarcane) with Luciano.
Tuesday, all day: Tour ethanol factory in Cerqueira César, a municipality near Avaré, and have lunch with Director José Meyer.
Wednesday: Take bus from Avaré to São Paulo (Barra Funda station). Transfer to Tiête station in São Paulo. Take bus from Tiête station to Rio. (15 hours total)
Wednesday, midnight: Arrive in Rio. Collapse in bed in Gávea for a few hours before returning to campus and class Thursday morning.
Looking at this summarized schedule, it does seem like a lot of travel for two full days of tours. It was. However, there wasn't really a shorter way to do it (aside from the weekend in São Paulo, of course). There is no direct bus from Rio to Avaré, so a transfer between bus stations in São Paulo is required. Additionally, Avaré doesn't have any public transportation--none that goes out to the farms, anyway--so a car was required there, too. Furthermore, flying wouldn't have made any sense at all, so in the end, I just took the opportunity to enjoy the road trip to the fullest.
But now I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's rewind a bit and talk about Avaré:
Luciano (below) is the current director of the organic farm in Avaré, Fazenda Takaoka, and is one of the people that made the entire trip possible. Our tour of the farm started out in the fruit fields, where he explained to me the basics of organic farming and the details of how organic farming works at Fazenda Takaoka. One of the points he stressed was that production on an organic farm functions basically the same way that it does on conventional industrial farm -- just without the chemicals. For fertilizer, they use compost and occasionally some other natural fertilizer product, and for insecticides/pesticides, they use pheromones from butterflies and moths, which just keep bugs away from the crops instead of killing the bugs altogether. The farm does occasionally allow other groups to carry out experiments on the fields. Below, Luciano was showing me an insecticide experiment from a local NGO.
There are six different types of fruit grown on the farm: peaches, plums, nectarines, guavas, lychees, and atemoyas. This year, insects and especially caterpillars have been attacking the guavas. Nearly every guava has had some sort of damage, so the white bags shown in the tree below were designed to protect the guavas while they ripen on the tree.
After touring the fruit fields, we continued onto two other fields: corn and royal palm (the latter of which I had coincidentally tasted in a pastry for the first time before I left for Avaré). Luciano insisted that the corn grown for people was the same corn that was fed to livestock; the livestock corn was just harvested later. I'm almost positive that this is not the case in the U.S.--that two distinctly different types of corn are grown--but apparently, in Brazil, growing just one type works perfectly fine.
After the corn debate, we moved onto the sugarcane (below).
When Luciano and I visited, most of the sugarcane field was muddy due to irrigation activities. The fields are irrigated using what is essentially a giant portable hose, the reel of which is what I'm sitting on in the picture below. This portable setup allows the fields to be irrigated semi-automatically with water and fertilizing nutrients, such as recycled vinasse (a byproduct of ethanol production), being supplied through the pipelines on either side of the base.
After touring the sugarcane fields, I visited the combined sugar mill and ethanol factory, Usina Rio Pardo, pictured below.
"Usina" in Portuguese means "mill," "factory," or "refinery." "Rio Pardo" is the name of a nearby river, where "Rio" means "river" and "Pardo" means "brown" or "mulatto." The river unfortunately holds up to its name: its water is a muddy brown due to eroded sediment along its banks and run-off from nearby farm fields and factories. It should be noted, however, that Usina Rio Pardo takes special care to minimize contamination of the river and other waterways, and actually recycles much of the water used throughout the factory.
I had two guides for my tour of Usina Rio Pardo. Marta (left) was my main guide. An architect by training and accountant by day, Marta was my English-language translator. I am proud to say I did most of the tour in Portuguese, but there were parts where I had no idea what the person was describing or how to phrase a question, and for these parts, Marta's translations were absolutely critical. Since Marta lived in the U.S. for 13 years, we also reminisced about things we missed from the States. At the top of the list were: Girl Scout cookies (Samoas for Marta), Trader Joe's, and Whole Foods. Our conversation made me start thinking about everything else I miss ... oops. My second guide for much of the day was one of the plant's engineers. He guided us through the actual machinery portions of the plant, once we donned our hard hats, of course. Some of the main pictures from the tour are below. The sugarcane arrives from the fields in what looks like a series of boxcars. Each car of cane is dumped onto a huge conveyer belt (with sides) and is transported through the various processing stages.
People at the plant always know how much sugarcane is being harvested and processed, and where each batch is currently located, thanks to a sophisticated GIS system of real-time data, field maps, and video images. Each computer screen below shows a different type of information being collected: amount of sugarcane harvested per hour (top center), descriptions of the harvesting equipment and their real-time locations (bottom left), and hourly precipatation data plus real-time video images (bottom right).
Once the sugarcane is harvested, it can begin to be processed into ethanol. First, sugarcane juice is extracted from the stalks. The juice is the base for the ethanol. The outer fibrous material of the stalks is burned to produce electricity for the rest of the factory and for a nearby town. Through a series of filtration, evaporation, and fermentation processes, a molasses-like substance is produced. At this point, about half of the product is separated to produce table sugar and the other half continues to be manufactured into ethanol.
Below is a sample of the liquid before it is fully fermented (8 hours required). Antibiotics are added to the liquid to kill the bacteria and other microorganisms present at this stage.
The sugarcane that is not processed into ethanol is made into table sugar. Below are trays of pre-crystallized sugar and a sample of the almost-crystallized molasses. Unsurprisingly, this was the sweetest smelling segment of the tour. I had a chance to taste the sugar earlier in the day and it tasted exactly as it smelled.
In addition to producing ethanol and table sugar, Usina Rio Pardo also carries out its own laboratory testing, mainly to control the quality of its product. The pictures below are from the plant's lab. Most of the testing deals with microbiological control and variations in composition. The Brazilian government requires very little, if any, of this information to be reported, so the testing conducted at the lab is primarily for internal knowledge and to find ways of improving the product.
And ... that was the day! After lunch, I sat down and filled in all the gaps in my notes while I waited for Luciano to pick me up and drive me back to the farm. (The only trouble with being without a car and/or public transportation is that you always have to rely on someone for everything!) I was exhausted at the end of the day, but extremely grateful for the tour. I went to bed that night infinitely more knowledgeable about sugarcane and ethanol production than I had been when I woke up that morning.
Anytime you go on a tour or learn something new, there is always more to learn. The tour of Usina Rio Pardo was no exception and I now find myself reading various outside sources to make sure I understood everything exactly right. Below, as a bonus for those of you who understand Portuguese, are two short YouTube videos about Usina Rio Pardo (Part I & Part II), featuring Director José Meyer:
On Wednesday morning, I returned to the bus station in Avaré and settled in with my notebook and some snacks for the trip back to Rio, via São Paulo. The bus arrived in São Paulo on time (at the Barra Funda station), but after I transferred to the Tiête station to catch the bus to Rio, there was just one problem: the bus to Rio never arrived. After speaking with various officials at the Tiête bus terminal, we finally figured out what was wrong: I was waiting for a bus arrival, not departure. That is, somehow I ended up with two tickets from Rio to São Paulo and no tickets from São Paulo to Rio! It wasn't a catstrophe--I just went upstairs and exchanged the ticket for the next bus leaving for Rio--but it did mean that I had to wait an extra three hours at the bus terminal and didn't get back to Rio until 2:30 in the morning. It wasn't fun, but it could have been worse: I could have been forced to spend the night at the Tiête station!
Despite the minor transportation mishap, I am so glad I had the opportunity to visit Avaré. I learned about the agro-industrial sector that drives Brazil's economy, I met some incredibly knowledgeable and friendly people, and I had a chance to relax for a few days on an organic farm. I couldn't have asked for anything more! If any of you ever happen to find yourself in São Paulo or Brazil and would like to see some of these places for yourself, just ask me. I heartily recommend visiting Fazenda Takaoka and Usina Rio Pardo and would be delighted to make the connections!
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