Science says lots of stuff. Usually nobody listens.

Five Reasons:

1) The Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry recently discovered that people who drank moderate (some might say boring) amounts of beer throughout their lives have lower rates of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. People who drank enormous bucket loads of beer throughout their lives may also have lower rates of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, but that’s because most of them are already dead.

2) A far more fun study by The European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (Try saying that after a few shandies) found that beer makes you ‘happy and friendly’; something that definitely puts it a notch above broccoli on the list of health foods.

3) The Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition found that a moderate amount of beer post exercise can be as rehydrating as water. Again putting beer happily above water on any sensible list of key to life groups of molecules.

4) Some researchers at the University of Valladolid in Spain confirmed that beer contains iron, but that dark beers contain more than pale. Yawn.

5) Back in 2012 a University of Vienna study told us that beer increases the production of gastric acid in the stomach (if it increased the production of gastric acid anywhere else in your body then you really would have to worry). They try to turn this into good news and well, it kind of is: Gastric acid is necessary for digestion, and it also inhibits the formation of bad/unfriendly bacteria. On the flip side though, that midnight cocktail of extra gastric acid and six liters of beer isn’t so good for digesting the kind of stuff you might find yourself shoveling down your mouth on the way home. Plus too much gastric acid even by itself puts the letters i & n before digestion, which, well, isn’t so nice.

Check it all out here:

@ the:

Question: Should I have a baby or get a pet pig instead?

Answer: Always get a pet pig instead. 

1) Kinda Dumb:

A pig has the intelligence of at least a 3 year old child.  Though this mightn’t be much to boast about, the point is you have to feed a baby for three long years before it can provide you with the same intelligent company as a pig.

2) Not Allowed To Eat Them:

If you find yourself in a post apocalyptic nuclear holocaust nightmare scenario and/or there’s nothing fun in the fridge, you can eat your pig. You can’t eat your baby. Well you could, but really, you shouldn’t.

3) Useless Against Snakes:

Pigs can kill and eat poisonous snakes: If snakes come into your house to attack you, your pig will run straight over there and fight them. A baby on the other hand would just be sit there in a stupor thinking about its next poo: Babies= ZERO protection against snakes.

4) Pigs Versus Babies In The Arts:

 The 1995 film ‘Babe’ had a pig as its lead actor. It was warmly received by both audiences and critics alike receiving a whopping 97% positive rating on the popular movie review site Rotten Tomatoes. 

The preceding year the movie ‘Baby’s Day Out’ which featured a baby in the lead role was roundly panned by critics and receives just a paltry 21% on the same site. 

5) Notoriously Bad At Finding Land Mines:

A pig’s sense of smell is around 2000 times more powerful than humans and they can be trained to find truffles and land mines. So if that petty feud with the neighbors escalates to the point where they lay land mines around your house you can train your pig to find them. Babies on the other hand are notoriously bad at finding land mines.

6) Might Eat Itself:

Babies can be annoyingly fussy eaters but pigs will eat just about anything. In extreme circumstances a pig will actually eat itself to avoid starvation.

7) Fixing Stuff ‘Round Da House:

Science has shown that babies are not good at fixing things ’round the house, like leaky radiators etc. and will even tend to ignore them altogether. Whereas pigs, well ok, pigs aren’t much good at fixing things around the house either. 

8) Can Keep You Famous. And Young..

Clooney, his granddaughter, and a pair of rare hens.

In the early 1900’s Hollywood megastar George Clooney adopted a pet pig named Max and immediately shot to being just as famous as he did when he didn’t have a pet pig. Clooney, pictured here with his granddaughter and a pair of rare hens, also looks remarkably young for his age.

9) Annoying Advice:

When you have a baby you get tons of unsolicited advice from other women. When you have a pet pig you get none of that, though your dinner guests are obliged to talk strangely about you in the car on the way home.

10) Some Sunglasses And A Small Hat:

The talent has arrived..

Society tells you to put clothes on your baby. They’re expensive and they grow out of them every 6 to 8 minutes. Society tells you there’s absolutely no need to put clothes on a pig. Unless of course you want more likes on social media, then all you need are some sunglasses and a small hat.

1) In a Portuguese bullfight the bulls don’t die.

Can you just leave me the f**k alone?

They don’t die, but they really don’t have a fun day out either, being injured so much that they usually have to be slaughtered afterwards. Portuguese bullfights are also distinguished from the classic Spanish style in that the bull is fought first on horseback, where a rider runs around sticking various spears into the bull (whose horns have been filed down previously, to, ironically enough, ‘protect the horse’), until it gets so weak that it can then be subdued by a group of 8 men on foot called forcados who grab the horns and wrestle the bull to the ground.

It is in fact illegal in Portugal to kill the bull Spanish style, except for in one town in Alentejo called Barrancos which is by the border with Spain and which has managed to organize a special exemption for itself for by playing the ‘our tradition’ card.  These days though, apart from in a few strongholds like Barrancos, bullfighting generally has lost most of its popularity, with surveys showing most people, especially young people, to be against it.

2) One area of Portugal produces almost half the world’s cork.

Way better than a cloth soaked in oil..

When they reach the age of around 27 years old, the cork trees of Alentejo, whether they like it or not, get stripped of their bark, and again every nine years or so from then on.

The first batch of cork is seen as lesser quality and used mainly for industrial products while later harvests go into its far more famous usage; as wine bottle stoppers, or well, wine bottle ‘corks’, with these days over 60% of all that is harvested going to the wine industry. 

It wasn’t always that way though, up until the mid 17th-century wine makers in France thought it an unbeatable idea just to stuff the necks of bottles with cloth soaked in oil, before someone handed them a bunch of corks and they immediately began to feel a bit silly.

 3) In Portugal they eat more seafood per person than any other country in the world. 

Portuguese bacalhau, all the way from Iceland.

They get through over 80kg of the stuff per person per year, so until maybe Greenland gets its independence, they’re the champions.  You might well be forgiven for thinking it’s all sardines and bacalhau, their famous dried, salted cod dish, and though that’s a lot of it, you’ll find a good range of other seafood in Portugal too; linguado (sole), piexe-espada (swordfish), mexilhões (mussels) and salmonete (red mullet) are just some examples. 

 4) They also brought home some of our favourite foods.

Dunno, I just kinda ended up here..

Its long sea faring and imperial history led to it being responsible for the introduction of many different foods to Europe: Peanuts and coffee from Africa for example, peppers, tomatoes, potatoes and pineapples from the Americas, and a whole heap of spices from around the world too; paprika, pepper, ginger and saffron amongst others.

And they didn’t only influence European food, Portuguese sailors also introduced chilli to India and Africa for example, and tempura to Japan. 

5) And showed the English how to drink tea…

Cheers Caterina!

The culture of tea drinking was already making inroads throughout the mainland European aristocracy before, in 1661, a notorious tea addict Portuguese princess named Catarina Henriqueta de Bragança (Catherine of Braganza to the Brits) married King Charles II of Britain and hooked up him up as well to the leafy danger.

Charles himself, like many of his compatriots, would have come across tea before but just wasn’t that in to it; it just wasn’t a thing they did. After Catarina came along though the poor King found he just clammed up in social situations without a cup of cha in the hand and very quickly it was to become a daily habit, both for him and the rest of the English aristocracy. Within a few generations, the tradition had become solidly ingrained within the upper classes and eventually all of society, even as the Portuguese had long moved on to coffee.

 6) Fargo music is really nice.

You betcha!

Fado music, or Fargo music, as a friend once called it numerous times over the course of a night out in Lisbon and wasn’t once corrected by me, is Portugal’s most symbolic music. It is urban music, born and raised in Lisbon, with a slightly alternative style also nurtured in Coimbra, and it is gorgeously bittersweet, melancholic, and full of pain. 

Its most iconic performer was someone who lived and died before her voice could ever be recorded. Maria Severa only became famous long after her death in 1846 at the age of just 26 and her often mythologized life story, as both a singer and a prostitute among the taverns and brothels of Alfama in Lisbon, was to become an enticing representation of the early days of Fado, as she, just like the music, floated somewhere in the space between the bohemian nobility of the time and the poor and marginalized from where both her and her music had their origins.

Take it easy with the Fargo though; after a night of listening you might not see the point of climbing out of bed the next morning, such is the fatalistic darkness that it injects into the soul. (If you don’t have a soul though you’ll be just fine.)

7) War, what is it good for? Portuguese wine, apparently.

Not ”exactly nothing”

I’m certain you don’t like war in the slightest, I’d never dare accuse you of that, but, if you happen to be enjoying a nice glass of Port wine while reading this you might as well look on the bright side of humankind’s most embarrassing stupidity.

Northern Portugal’s Douro Valley wine region is the source of that sweet red fortified wine which might have remained an obscure local farmers tipple had the Nine Years War between Britain and France not broken out in 1688. The boozy British upper classes had by that stage developed a major taste for Bordeaux claret and to their horror suddenly couldn’t get it anymore.

Though I guess the Nine Years War probably wasn’t advertised as such at the start they probably assumed it might take some time to wrap up so they began to look for a replacement. They found port and were it seems, impressed. By the time claret became available again port had already made its mark and to this day is pretty much world famous. 

8) Portugal is, at 91,568 square meters, Europe’s largest country.

Except for Germany, Greece, Poland, Spain, Italy, Iceland, Britain….and a whole bunch of other countries. 🙂 

(My apologies for number 8..)

Interested in a trip around rural Portugal?? Check out our choice of farmstays here: https://www.farmstayplanet.com/farmstays/portugal-1

Cattle; most people only get to know them when they drink their milk or throw a slab of dead one on the grill. Here are some things you may not have known about our indispensable bovine comrades.

1) BULLSEYE

That dude behind me really stinks..

When their big furry ears don’t get in the way cows have over 300-degree, panoramic vision, with only a couple of blind spots right in front and right behind them.

They also have an amazing sense of smell; a cow tracks her calves from their scent and it’s estimated that they can pick up that scent from up to 5 miles away.

It is also alleged that they can be hypersensitive to modern, artificial smells, with some anecdotal evidence that they can get mildly repulsed by some perfumes and laundry detergents from human clothes.

The previously mentioned big furry ears aren’t just there to bat away flies either, cows can hear both high and low frequencies well beyond human hearing range, their environment being full of sounds that are inaudible to our own ears.

2) MAGNETIC FIELDS?

Take me to your breeder..

If you ever get lost in some fields without a compass another one of cow’s more mysterious senses can help. They seem to have an instinctual awareness of the earth’s geo-magnetic axis; When lying down in a field cows have a tendency to face either magnetic north or south. No one really knows why this is and it is totally independent of weather conditions. 

This phenomena is not exclusive to cows though, it has been observed in other animals too and indeed even possibly in humans: Some studies have shown, well ok, just one study has shown, that human brain electrical activity can change relative to whether the person is aligned in a East-West or North-South position, with sleeping in the North South position giving slightly more REM sleep.

 

3) HERD REICH

Thankfully someone drew an auroch before they all died..

Domestic cattle are descended from aurochs, an extinct species of long horned, wild cattle native to Europe, the last of which is thought to have died in Poland in 1627.

Filled with a soppy nostalgia for medieval Europe, the Nazi’s decided to re-create them through breeding programs where they mixed various types of modern cattle to eventually produce something that by all accounts quite closely resembled the ancient auroch, but of course wasn’t.

They then set many of them loose in the Białowieża forest on the borders of Poland and Belarus. The frazzled few that survived WW2 lingered on there for a while afterwards but died out as a wild species eventually. There are still some domesticated ones around on farms in Europe today though, especially in Germany, Austria and Holland where they are known as Heck cattle.

 

 

4) GREYISH KIND OF GREENY LOOKING RAG TO A BULL

 

Let’s just call this quits and go home, huh?

Cows and bulls are red-green colorblind. The red (or pink) cape in a bullfight is the same color as grass, which they are obviously quite fond of, and which, as it happens, looks more like a shade of grey than what we think of as red or green. 

In any case it’s definitely not the color that makes them aggressive, the obvious stress of being in such an alien environment has primed them already, and so the movements of the cloth on front of them become just a focus for their frustration and anger, and that’s all even before the person on front of them starts trying to stab them to death. 

 

 

5) COWS AND STAIRS

Are you sure you want to do this? (Photo credit: Martin Bialek via Wikimedia)

You may have heard the widely held myth that cows can walk up a stairs but not down, and though this isn’t strictly true, depending on the steepness of the stairs the going down can be very difficult for them, and it has less to do with the shape of their knees, as is often thought, but more because of a lack of weight balancing skills, and the fact that, despite their super duper over 300-degree vision they can’t really see the ground well just below their feet.

This means that they will be prone to taking a tumble on the way, and/or maybe just giving up and staring at you to do something about it. So, if ever you have a cow round your house and you want to bring it up the stairs, I don’t know, to use the bathroom, or to show it the new built-in wardrobes in the spare room, you’ll only have yourself to blame…

6) NICE TO MEAT YOU!

Those guys? Can’t stand ’em…

Cows are very social animals, and just like humans they have distinct personalities. This means that, also just like in humans, some personalities just don’t get along.

Cows can be quite fussy about who they want to hang out with; though their herds can be large they will usually form a close bond with just 2 to 4 individuals and actively avoid certain others at times, in some cases retaining a grudge for years.

As you would expect they can also become quite stressed when they are separated from their friends. And as it’s thought that cows can only become familiar with up to around one hundred other individuals, they tend to also feel stressed in herds of more than 100.

This kind of understanding of cattle as social creatures is quite new, but as it’s been shown that stressed cattle produce less, sometimes a lot less, milk, many modern farmers are now paying attention.

What time is chick out??

Agritourism: Though a pretty new form of vacation for most people, especially in the United States, it has been hugely popular for years in many countries; Italy, and Austria being two very good examples, and is likely to become just as popular everywhere else very soon too.

For those not familiar with the farmstay concept the first thought that comes to mind is that it’s some sort of working vacation, and well, it sometimes is and it sometimes very much isn’t. There are some opportunities for free accommodation on farms in exchange for work through the wwoofing network but all of the farmstays on farmstayplanet.com are vacation accommodations so you absolutely don’t have to work! 

It’s a vacation after all, just like with a regular hotel, B&B or self catering, and in the vast majority of cases the quality of accommodation and service is just the same, if not better, and with the added benefit that you also get to sample a peaceful relaxed lifestyle surrounded by the joys of nature. You should enjoy plenty of good fresh food too, much of it organic, while also having the opportunity to learn a bit about where all that food we get served up at home comes from in the first place.

How To Prepare For A Farmstay Vacation:

Not sensible shoes..

Usually there is not much more need to prepare for a farmstay rather than a conventional hotel or B&B, because a farmstay vacation is just like a hotel or B&B except on a farm. But, if you want to spend a lot of time outdoors, it would be wise to bring some sensible clothes for the weather, and that of course includes sensible shoes!

Many farmstays are of course in rural areas, some of which may not be well served by public transport, so before your stay you should investigate how to arrive. Hiring a car, or bringing your own, would be a good idea, but if you can’t, pretty much all our farmstays will lend you a hand to get there, many can do a pick up from local airports or train/bus stations for example, or they can let you know of the best way to get there by public transport and/or taxi, just drop them a line before you go.

What Do I Have To Do On A Farmstay Vacation?

Photo taken? Can I get back to my iphone now?

As I said before you don’t have to work or take part in any activities at all but in most cases the farm owners are really happy to show guests around and show them what it’s like to live and work on a farm, so feel free to have a look around, see what goes on and get involved if you like, or you can of course just relax and do nothing but enjoy the stress relieving peace and quiet that life in the countryside brings.

As you’re in the countryside you’ll often find plenty of other outdoors activities to enjoy too; hiking, cycling (many of our farmstays offer bicycle rental) swimming, fishing, skiing, horse riding, nature walks etc. etc. and you’ll find the farm owners will usually have plenty of good advice and recommendations.

Tips & Warnings:

Food, and even more food.

On any good farmstay you’ll find some really top homemade food. In some places you can take some to bring home with you, and of course don’t be shy to ask for some recipes to try at home yourself, some of our farms can arrange informal cooking lessons too; again just ask.

You can also get plenty of good tips and inspiration for joining the urban farm movement when you get home by learning about the growing of various vegetables and herbs. So too, if you can be confident enough about looking after them; you can learn a bit about the breeding of chickens, ducks and other small animals as well.

On a farm make sure you leave everything as you found it, especially on a farm with animals. And by that I especially mean: Close the gate after you!! Every farm’s golden rule.

Be careful around some farm animals, and very especially around farm machinery, and if you have children with you, you obviously have to keep an extra eye on them as well. The farm owners should be able to advise you on what to do and not to do, so always follow their advice.

Can’t wait to get going? Head for our homepage and start searching!