Ameghino, Buenos Aires, Argentina: Feedlot

I've arrived in Ameghino, a small town of about 10, 000 residents that sits in the heart of an impressive agricultural world. I am here to spend one week learning about the feed lot and crop production side of the Argentinian beef industry.

I have spent the last four days at the Establicimento San Marcos S.A., commonly known here as Los Potros - the feedlots. Despite spending a month in the Formosa, and witnessing the open-air nature of the cattle industry in Argentina, I for some reason had it in my mind that a feedlot would be a contained indoor environment. That bubble was quickly burst upon my arrival at Los Potros.

The feedlots are no more than a collection of outdoor paddocks where cattle of different maturation or sex are divided and fed twice a day to meet optimal growth standards for the climate.

Ameghino is still extremely flat and is lacking the array of palm trees that covered the landscape of the North. Fall is in the air and the trees that are here, mainly in the town, have had their leaves turn yellow and start to fall. Many of the same land management methods practiced at Salvacion are evident in the landscape here in the central-south, though with their own unique flair. For example, there are few grazing herds, and those that are grazing are high-calibre Bonsmara herds, of which the offspring will often find themselves going to Salvacion to improve the genetic pool of the animals in the North. The water retention systems are similar with holding pools and pipe dispersal systems, however the water here is pumped up from the ground aquifers powered by quaint windmills across the property. Drought is not as big of an issue at Los Potros.

At a feedlot, the focus is obviously feeding the animals continuously and with the appropriate feed. There are seven different classes of animals each identified in different paddocks. The animals receive a mix of minerals, whole corn, ground corn, ground hops, safflower pellets and silo based on the phase of finishing in which they are presently situated. Feeding the animals, of which there are currently about 5000 on the ranch, is an all day job, 365 days of the year.
Above are the rations for the different phases of the animal feeding. The weight and proportions of each element need to be documented for each of the paddocks. To do this, a tractor with a shovel poors the different feeds into a mixer behind another tractor. Silo is always the greatest proportion, so it goes in last. Once the mixer is full, the feeds are mixed until they take on a darer colour and then distributed to the different feeding troughs.

Silo is an important part of feeding for the animals in the fields too - especially the bulls. One day Johnny, one of the administrators at the feedlots, took me to herd bulls from one field to another with a pickup! It was much slower than with agile horses, but I was impressed that we were able to move the big animals where we wanted at all. Once we got them to their new destination, we had to cut away plastic to make the large rows of silo available for them to eat. The silo is protected by electric wire too, because if the animals were able to have full access to the silo rolls, which they sometimes do after breaing through the wires, they trample and break the plastic which results in the silo going rancid.

All the silo on the farm is from the acres and acres of crops San Marcos S.A. produces. The three main crops are corn, soya and sorghum. Corn and sorghum can be used for silo, but most of the silo I have seen so far has been corn silo.

Once the morning feeding was done, I was encouraged to drive the tractor back to its parking place for lunch. Who can say no to driving an expensive John Deer....do you think my tractor's sexy?

And of course, I always like to finish the day visiting the horses. This gaucho is working hard to train a wild horse using this more docile one. He says it will take about six months. After riding the animals up North, I started to take it for granted that horses are just very docile and obedient creatures, when in reality it is the dedication and hard work put into them by the workers that make them so useful on the ranches.

Feeding People

I started out this morning in a fairly foul mood, not for any particular reason, other than just feeling low. Luckily the weather was nice, the air was fresh and I am one of those people that finds it difficult to be unhappy when I am outdoors. Still, my cloud of unhappiness was hanging over my head, even if a little more distantly.

We spent the morning weeding and continuing to tie tomato plants. Normally I prefer to listen to music while doing these tasks to get into a good rythm, but today I preferred to be with my thoughts. It was during this time of contemplation that I had a sort of epiphany - I am feeding people!

This may seem like an obvious thought, since I have been writing about growing food for weeks now, but for whatever reason, the idea of growing food here and actually feeding people had never really clicked in my mind. Until today, the work I have been doing on the farm has served much more selfish ends - I have learned to grow food for myself, family and friends; I have been learning how to operate a farm in order to potentially run a farm myself in the near future; I have been growing food as a 'product' to sell to 'customers' as a means of gaining an income and a living. The fact that I now realize I am responsible for feeding whole, nutritious and organic food to an inumberable amount of people, who would, in a more abstract sense, not have access to this food without me doing what I am currently doing, was quite a profound realization. I am now a part of the farming network of BC, of Canada and of the world. Without people such as myself doing what we are doing, humanity would not be able to eat!

This realization is as a result of a brief bout of Facebook jabs a friend and I have been having this week. He posted on Monday that he was glad his day was over and that it was a short week. I replied that unfortunately farmers do not get short weeks. Curious, he asked what farmers do on statutory holidays - this coming Friday is Canada Day, a national holiday for most businesses. I replied that farmers farm on statutory holidays, because the for some reason the plants never got the memo that they don't need to grow on holidays. His response was that the plants won't die in one day, and that farmers should get the memo to take a day off too.

My friends last comment made me upset. Though I understand where he is coming from, it shows a lack of understaning of the cycles of a farm and the livelihood sacrifices made by farmers to do what they do. First, just like cows get into a milking cylce, plants too get into a harvesting cycle whether it be a daily, bi-daily, or weekly cycle. For example, now that our zucchinis are producing, they need to be cultivated everyday. In fact, the growth that occurs in a 24 hr period is usually the difference between 'too small' and 'too big', so if we were to leave the zucchinis for a day, we would not only end up with a number of 'too big' zucchinis, but the plants will not have poured their energy into growing new zucchinis without the more mature ones being harvested.

Next, the farm is on a weekly cycle. If we were to take Friday, our harvest day off, then we would have to do one of two things - 1) harvest for market on Thursday, which means that our customers will have produce that isn't as fresh as they normally receive, or 2) not harvest a skip a market week. If we were to harvest on Thurdsay too, the normal work that would be done on that day would have to be omitted as well. If we were to skip a market week, we would be sitting on a lot of produce that would be bad by the subsequent week, we would not receive any income for the skipped market, we would not be able to deliver our CSAs to our buyers and overall the Klippers name would lose some of its reliability for not being present.

I really hadn't thought of all the consequences of skipping a day of work for a statutory holiday, until I mentioned this bout to my boss in the field. She said to tell my friend that we will take a day off, when he and the rest of the world start to fast because of holidays.

This comment is what made it click in my head, that I am feeding people.