Last week I was generously hosted by one of the neighbours, Andres, to visit his ranch, Estancia Clarin. One of the interesting elements of Clarin in comparison to the other properties in the region, is that Andres has put a huge emphasis on growing cash crops and not just raising cattle. His primary focus has been on corn, soya and sorghum, all used to supplement animal feed and act as another source of income. If you can successfully grow the crops, the return financially on the land is exponentially larger. Andres said, for example, that a hectare of corn at the proper density can bring in a profit of $250 at harvest, whereas you only receive about $50 of profit from the same land if it is allocated to cattle grazing.
These numbers may seem low in comparison to the cash that was brought in from the ground crops and tree fruits at Klippers Organics, but when you consider that the type of farming here is extensive instead of intensive, and you punch the numbers, $250 x 7 000 hectares for example is $1,750,00 profit. It adds up quickly.
After a quick tour of Clarin, we headed south-west two hours to El Colorado, where Andres was going to meet some business colleagues to look at buying some new equipment for his farm. I have essentially no experience with agricultural equipment as the farming I have done has all been done by hand. But when I imagine farming in the Prairies of Canada, what I visualize are large turbines, tractors, seeders and tillers getting all the work done. This was my first chance to see some of the utility of these devices.
The first piece of machinery we inspected was an industrial seeder. In Argentina, finding new, up-to-date, good quality machinery on farms is not common. For this reason, the seeder stood out next to the other devices it was positioned against. When I reached into the seeding boxes on the machine, I pulled out, much to my surprise, pink seeds! I didn't recognize the crop, because of hte unusual colour, and it turns out that the seeds are soya seeds covered in a fungacide. Another world.
The real reason we were in El Colorado, was to look at a piece of machinery that is the intermediary piece between the harvester and bagging or trucking the harvested seed away from the farm. The crop we were dealing with specifically was sorghum.
Sorghum is not very popular in Canada, as our climate is unable to support its growth. The grain can be used for human consumption and fodder. In the areas I have been visiting, most of the grain varieties are grown for fodder.
The machine we were there to inspect was located in a field filled to the brim with sorghum seed. Nearby I was shown what has now become a silo experiment. Silo consists of all the fibrous materials left in the field after harvest which are then chopped into little bits, compacted into an air-tight, anarobic environment and allowed to mature. Good silo can last up to three years in this way without rotting. However, the silo we saw had not be compacted adequately and so the gentleman had to dig and dig to try and find silo of appropriate colouring to show us. Andres shared that their system over preserving the silo was flawed, because it allowed too much air into the system, which is why so much of the silo had turned black and become toxic.
To test the machinery first a industrial bag to contain and store the sorghum had to be installed on anther piece of equipment. For some reason that operators at the farm we were visiting didn't now how to do this, so the people I arrived with, the 'buyers', had to do the work if they wanted to see the machines tested.
Once the bag was in place, the two machines, attached to the tractors lined up and started pouring the sorghum into the bag for storage.
It was neat to see the processes of a different king of agriculture. Personally, I prefer to be more involved with the land, instead of doing all the work from atop a tractor. That being said, I understand that industrial farming has its place and is a requirement to feed to world.
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