Sanguinhal Farm

Helena and Délcio Alves, both Azoreans—she was born in Canada but with her heart in Água Retorta, São Miguel, and he from Flores—returned from Toronto to the southeast of the largest island in the Azores in 2022. That same year, they decided to start planting Azorean Regional Corn, first for their own consumption and later as a form of food activism: to keep one of the archipelago's most distinctive products alive.

"Corn has always been the cereal of the poor. People couldn't grow wheat, so they grew corn. They used it for everything, from kernels to rails, leaves to cobs. They stuffed mattresses, carpets, fed animals, used parts of it as toilet paper or to fuel fires," says Helena. It's no wonder, then, that many traditional Azorean recipes include corn in their preparation: cornbread, corn cake, flat skillet cornmeal bread (Bolo da Sertã), thick porridge, boiled corn, oven cake, corn cheesecakes, roasted corn - just like what "men used to carry in their pockets when they went out to farm".

After the first harvest in October, Helena and Délcio draw on their generational past to defend this variety and preserve its cultural value. Their grandparents had always planted corn, and it was on their paternal grandfather's land that they built the house where they now live in 2009, where the terrace with an ocean view full of fields of white and yellow corn.

"At some point, hybrid corn took over the island. My father was always careful to avoid contaminating the regional varieties, sowing at altitudes and fajãs (coves) where there were no other corn crops nearby." Luís Silva, Helena's father, used to select the seeds of the most special corncob, the roundest grain, the right colour, to try to guarantee a purer result. "He dedicated himself to this for over 20 years. Our corn isn't exactly what my grandparents grew, but it's the best we can get."

The process that allows them to store just over a ton a year - which translates into 500 kilos of corn flour - is completely handmade. "We even ordered a seeder, but it didn't work, so we realized we had to do everything by hand." This manual process involves ploughing the land in April, digging holes, preparing the seedbed, and doing the first weeding when it reaches 15cm. From the various grains sown, they select only the best plant. Weeding is repeated when the plants are 30cm tall, and when the corncobs are full of grains, the dry leaves are cleaned off. Harvesting takes place at the end of October, and the cobs are stored with the leaves still on to keep them for longer. Finally, the corn is bundled up, before being laid out in the sun to dry. At the end of winter, the maize is defoliated and the heat from the oven that bakes the bread is used to dry the corncob, preventing weevils and butterflies. When this stage is complete, each corncob is sorted, the rotten grains discarded, and threshed before being ground on a stone mill in Ribeira Grande.

"We don't use any kind of chemical product. Only biological fertilizer at first, because this land used to be pasture, and in November we sow fodder [broad beans and lupins] to add nitrogen to the land." On the 3,000 square meters of land 290 meters above the sea, there are canines, felines, birds, sheep, and hundreds of other living beings that ensure the balance of the ecosystem. The dog Lira wanders around the grass helping to control rabbits, herons, and eagles; the cats Norte and Cinza hunt rats and keep birds away from the vegetable garden and orchards. In the chicken coop lives Rio, a dying cat that Décio rescued and who grew up among the chickens, protecting them with a guerrilla attitude. "I'm a great believer in animal intervention and letting things live for themselves," explains Délcio, "it's what works best."

The mission doesn't end with the land in Água Retorta. Together with engineer Duarte Pintado, Helena developed a characterization report for this variety of Azorean Regional Corn. It was tested in the laboratory to understand its nutritional qualities and to ensure that no genetically modified organisms were present. The application to include this corn in the National Catalog of Varieties of Agricultural and Horticultural Species has been accepted, and they are confident that it will appear on the list in the first quarter of 2024. 

In the future, they want to create cultural and gastronomic experiences around this product. "We can teach people how to grow this corn, organize visits and activities around the harvest, with tastings of the various traditional recipes."

For now, Quinta do Sanguinhal flour is on sale at Rei dos Queijos pt and Príncipe dos Queijos, and at the Massa Mãe Açores bakery in Ponta Delgada, São Miguel.