THE PLAIN OF THE PAMPAS
The limits of the prairie--The rains--The wind and the
formation of the clay of the Pampas--The wind and the
contour--The zones of colonization on the Pampas--Hunting
wild cattle and primitive breeding--The sheep-farms--The
ranches--The region of "colonies"--The region of lucerne,
maize, and wheat--The combination of agriculture and
breeding--The economic mechanism of colonization--The
exchanges between the different zones of the Pampas.
The Pampean landscape is doubtless one of the most uniform in the
world. Its monotony is tiring to the eye; it is partly responsible for
the mediocrity of most of the descriptions of the Pampas. But this
uniformity is an advantage for the purpose of colonization. Attention
has often been drawn to the rapidity with which plants and animals
introduced by Europeans spread in the Buenos Aires district, and,
pushing ahead of the breeders and farmers, colonized the Pampas. In the
second half of the nineteenth century, when the whole extent of the
plain beyond the ancient Indian frontier was occupied, the development
of it was so much easier because it was possible to use simpler and
more uniform methods of exploitation. It needed neither large capital
nor long personal experience on the part of the immigrant. Basques
and Italians who had only just landed could take an active part in it
almost without apprenticeship. The primitive groups of population could
advance from one zone of the plain to another and take with them their
own methods of farming and breeding, their own form of rural economy.
A close study will, however, enable us to detect appreciable physical
differences in the Pampean plain. Neither climate nor soil is the same
all over it.
The name "Pampa" chiefly means a vegetal growth, a prairie. Its
limits are the frontier of the scrub (_monte_), and strange as it may
seem, it is still difficult to trace them exactly. North of Santa
Fe, between the Salado and the Parana, the Pampa stretches as far as
Fives-Lille, a little beyond 30 deg. S. lat.[76] On the Central Norte
and the Central Argentine lines the fringe of the _monte_ reaches to
Fuertin Inca and Malbran, about 170 miles north-west of Santa Fe. It
then turns south-east and south, passing round the entire depression of
Los Porongos and Mar Chiquita; and the line from Santa Fe to Cordoba
crosses it at Francia and approaches the Rio Secundo. South of the Rio
Secundo it goes westward and joins the foot of the Sierra de Cordoba
south of the Rio Tercero (at the stream Tequia). From this point to La
Cambre, some sixteen miles east of San Luis, the prairie extends as far
as the edge of the sierras, and penetrates into the southern half of
the Conlara depression, between the hills of Cordoba and of San Luis
(Pampa de Naschel). The mimosa forest enters the steppe in narrow belts
along the Rio Quinto to within a few leagues below Villa Mercedes,
along the Rio Tercero as far as the confluence of the Saladillo, and
along the Salado to the south of Santa Fe. There are, in addition, many
isolated clumps of _chanares_ and more extensive patches of wood in
the north-west corner of the prairie (Santa Fe province). The _monte_
along the Salado is continued south of Santa Fe along the Parana, as
far as the point where the chief arm of the river reaches the cliffs
on the right bank, at San Lorenzo. This is the domain of the _ombu_, a
tree with thick trunk and naked roots which is found scattered over the
prairie in the Parana region as far as south of Buenos Aires.
[76] On the left bank of the Salado, west of the Resistencia
railway, a great gulf of low prairie penetrates into the
forest of the Chaco in the north, almost as far as 28 deg. S.
lat., but it has rather the character of one of the floodable
clearings of the Chaco (_esteros_) than of the temperate
Pampa.
In the west, between San Luis and the mouth of the Colorado, the
transition from the Pampa to the _monte_ is gradual. Just as at Santa
Fe, the approach of the _monte_ is announced by the appearance of
_chanares_, in the south-west corner of the Cordoba province and on
the southern slope of the Sierra de la Ventana. The _monte_, properly
so called, though impoverished, invaded by the _jarilla_, and mainly
composed (as in northern Patagonia) of dwarf mimosas, covers the area
of the Pampean sierras on the left bank of the Chadi Leuvu and the
Colorado. Between this area and a line passing through Rancul, Anguil,
Atreuco, and Bernasconi, where the naked prairie begins, there is a
mixed zone which one may call the _calden_ zone. This mimosa, a near
relative of the _algarroba_, which has a wider range than the other
plants of the _monte_ in this latitude, forms woods at intervals in
the south of the San Luis province and on the flanks of the parallel
valleys of the central Pampa. Between these woods the tableland
is generally covered by the prairie, with occasional patches of
_chanares_. About twenty-five miles east of Buena Esperanza the line
from San Rafael touches the far corner of a forest of _caldenes_, which
stretches south-westward, and reaches the Rio Salado about 35 deg. 30'
S. lat. Beyond Buena Esperanza it keeps on the prairie as far as the
crossing of the Salado, which here marks the limit of the _monte_. The
Rio Negro line passes directly from the prairie to the Patagonian scrub
mid-way between Bahia Blanca and the Colorado.
Within these limits the prairie extends without a break. The sierras of
the Buenos Aires province have no arborescent vegetation.
The zone of the prairie, intermediate between tropical Argentina and
the sub-desert regions of western Patagonia, has a medium rainfall. It
decreases gradually from north-east to south-west. There is a rainfall
of 1,200 to 1,000 millimetres on the lower Parana, and only 400 to
600 millimetres on the western edge of the Pampa. The zone which lies
between the 800 millimetres and 600 millimetres average is more than
270 miles in breadth. But what is most characteristic of the climate
of the Pampa is the equal distribution of the rain throughout the
year, and the absence of a real dry season. In this the Pampa differs
from the surrounding regions, both in the south-west and the north.
At Buenos Aires the six months of the (relatively) dry season yield,
nevertheless, 44 per cent. of the total rainfall, and at Bahia Blanca
40 per cent. This regularity diminishes in proportion as one approaches
the coast. At Rosario the six months of the dry season only yield 30
per cent. of the year's rain; at Villa Mercedes (San Luis province) 25
per cent. When one goes beyond the limits of the prairies the ratio
of rain in the dry season decreases rapidly; it is only 20 per cent.
at Cordoba and 18 per cent. at San Luis. At Cordoba, the curve of the
rainfall indicates a typical tropical regime, with a summer maximum
and a very low minimum in winter. Passing south-eastward from Cordoba,
at Bellville, Villa Maria and especially Rosario, the dryness of the
winter diminishes, and at the same time a secondary minimum appears
in the middle of summer (January-February). At Buenos Aires, the form
of the curve changes completely. The summer minimum is almost as low
as the winter minimum, and most of the rainfall is in the spring
(September) and the beginning of the autumn (March).[77]
[77] Argentine Mesopotamia, which is a continuation of the
Pampean region from the climatological point of view, is also,
even in its northern part, without the rigorous dry seasons of
the Chaco. Ascending the Parana, from Corrientes to Posadas,
just as in passing from Cordoba to Buenos Aires, one notices
that the winter minimum decreases, and a secondary maximum
appears in the spring. The predominance of the spring rains,
which is a characteristic of southern Brazil, is conspicuous
on the middle Uruguay. On the lower part of that river the
rain-system approaches that of Buenos Aires, with maxima
in spring and autumn, a principal minimum in winter, and a
secondary minimum in summer.
These various shades of the Pampean climate are of essential importance
in the history of colonization and the spread of cultivation. The belt
of summer rain is the belt of maize-growing, whereas the cultivation of
wheat requires spring rain and a comparatively dry summer.
While the isohyetic curves, which represent the precipitation for the
whole year, are orientated from north-west to south-east, the curves of
rainfall during the cold season, from April to September (dry season
in the north), cut diagonally across the preceding, and are oriented
directly north and south. Bahia Blanca receives in winter as much rain
as Rosario, and General Acha (in the district of the central Pampa)
as much as Cordoba. Unless one attends to this, one cannot explain
the extension of wheat-growing, in the south-west, as far as the 400
millimetre curve, and even beyond it on the Atlantic coast.
* * * * *
The relief of the Pampean plain is known fairly accurately, thanks
to the observations made along the railways. The ground rises slowly
toward the west. The 100-metre curve describes a deep gulf some 300
miles west-south-west of Buenos Aires. The belt comprised between 100
and 150 metres above sea-level is more than sixty miles broad in the
latitude of Santa Fe, and 130 miles in the latitude of Buenos Aires.
Beyond the 150-metre curve the land rises rapidly toward the west and
north-west, and reaches 400 metres in the Cordoba district and 500 in
the Villa Mercedes district. It is at the altitude of 150 metres, and
the break in the inclination which this marks, that the Rio Quinto is
lost, near Amarga, south of General Lavalle.
The ridge between the Pampa and the basin of the Salado in the south
of the San Luis province is about 450 metres above sea-level. South of
the province of Buenos Aires the Sierras de Tandil and de la Ventana
are joined together by a ridge which does not fall below 200 metres.
Certain irregularities of the surface, such as the depression of Mar
Chiquita to the east of Cordoba, the thrust of the plateau on the right
bank of the Parana, south of Villa Constitucion and San Nicolas, can,
apparently, only be explained by recent tectonic movements.
The Pampean deposits which cover the plain rest upon a rocky base of
which the salient representatives are the sierras of the province of
Buenos Aires and the hills at Cordoba and San Luis. This base also
appears east of the Pampean basin in the granite island of Martin
Garcia, in the middle of the estuary of the Plata, and in the hills on
the coast of Uruguay.[78]
[78] While the Pampean deposits lie immediately on the
crystalline and Paleozoic formations in the sierras of the
lower Colorado and of the central Pampa, in the south of the
province of Buenos Aires and in Uruguay, they are, on the
eastern edge of the Sierra de Cordoba, separated from it by
red sandstones and conglomerates of uncertain age, perhaps
synchronous with the continental red sandstones of Corrientes
which outcrop east of the Parana and have been known since
D'Orbigny's time as "granitic sandstones."
Underneath the even sheet of the alluvial deposits the surface of the
sub-Pampean platform is very irregular. Its shape has been discovered
by deep borings in search of arterial waters. It has been warped and
cut up by faults, some of these deformations being probably synchronous
with the formation of the Pampean deposits which have concealed them
as they have been produced. A subterranean rocky ridge continues the
Sierra de Cordoba southward and joins it with the sierras of the
Colorado. The granite emerges at Chamaico, on the western railway, and
on both sides the borings have passed through great depths of clay and
sand.[79] This ridge isolates the eastern Pampa from the sub-Andean
chains, and marks the limit of the area with sheets of underground
water. In the north of the Pampean region, between the Sierra de
Cordoba and the Parana, the loose continental formations are more than
2,000 feet thick at Bellville, and more than 3,500 feet north-west of
Santa Fe (fodder farms of San Cristobal and El Tostado). At Buenos
Aires the granite has been found 985 feet below the surface.
[79] At Rancul, in the east, 660 feet of loess overlying red
sandstone: at Telen, in the west, 2,800 feet of sand, marl,
sandstone and gravel.
[Illustration: THE PAMPEAN PLAIN. TRES ARROYES (BUENOS AIRES PRAIRIE
BETWEEN THE SIERRA DE TANDIL AND THE SIERRA DE LA VENTANA).
_Zone of wheat and oats on large scale. The Pampa is a tableland here
(400 feet above sea-level), with clay overlying the limestone of the
Tosca. The valleys are well marked._
Photograph by the Author.]
[Illustration: THE PAMPEAN PLAIN. TOAY, ON THE CENTRAL PAMPA (590 FEET).
_The tableland, with a strong framework of limestone Tosca, is cut
across by well-marked dry valleys which sink lower toward the east. At
the edges of the valleys the sand is the prey of the winds. Here we are
near the limit of the wheat belt._
Photograph by the Author.
PLATE XV. To face p. 166.]
The Pampean formation consists almost entirely of loose deposits,
sand and clays of various sorts. There is no gravel.[80] Even in the
vicinity of the sierras the beds of gravel, with round or angular
pebbles, are almost always covered by clay, and are exposed only in the
banks of the streams. Olascoaga mentions the surprise of the _gauchos_
of General Roca's army when they found Patagonian pebbles on the ground
during their stay at Choele Choel on the Colorado, in the course of
the campaign on the Rio Negro. Officers and soldiers dismounted to
pick them up. Sand and clay form a thick bed of continental alluvia.
The Tertiary maritime transgressions, which have left their mark in
the clays and limestones of the left bank of the lower Parana, and the
layers of shells at San Pedro on the right bank, never penetrated far
into the interior of the Pampean region, and one finds no trace of them
when one leaves the coast or the river.
[80] Roth claims to have found gravel in the San Nicolas
_barranca_ on the Parana. I have myself found small rounded
flints in the clay of the Chaco at Tartagal. But these
deposits probably come from the left bank of the Parana, where
the beds of river gravel are considerable.
The source of the elements which compose the Pampean alluvia is very
uncertain. Their composition does not clearly show their origin. The
clays are comparatively rich in calcareous matter, which seems to
indicate that they do not come from tropical America or the upper basin
of the Parana. Wright and Fenner insist upon the high proportion of
siliceous glass of volcanic origin which they contain, which points
to an intense eruptive activity during or before their formation.[81]
Doering had already noticed in the Cordoba region the prevalence of
beds of volcanic ash, which become thicker as one approaches the
sierra. It is certain that the Pampean sierras have had their share in
the formation of the Pampean beds. But the main mass is probably of
Andean origin. However that may be, as soon as one gets away from the
fringe of the mountains, the only variety noticeable in the lands of
the Pampa is that which they owe to the conditions in which they have
been deposited.
[81] In Ales Hrdlicka, _Early Man in South America_
(Smithsonian Instit. Bull., 52, Washington, 1912).
River deposits strictly so called, estuary deposits, lagoon deposits,
aeolian deposits, aeolian deposits redistributed by water, river deposits
redistributed by wind--all these different types are represented in the
Pampean formation, but their relative importance is still disputed.[82]
[82] Many attempts have been made to classify the Pampean
lands, but the results cannot be regarded as final. Ameghino,
who is first and foremost a palaeontologist, has done a service
in showing the futility of these geological divisions based
upon the actual surface of the deposits (colour, fineness,
etc.). But even palaeontology gives rather uncertain results,
as it is impossible to recognize and follow step by step
the various stages of the movement of the fossils. All the
classifications of the Pampean are based upon a study of two
groups of sections. The first group comprises the cliff on
the right bank of the Parana from Rosario to Buenos Aires
and the coastal cliff which is a continuation of it, with a
break from Ensenada at Mar Chiquita to Bahia Blanca. Ameghino
has recognized there a thick series of aeolian deposits
separated by several discordances, the oldest elements of
which, at Bahia Blanca, belong to the Miocene. The second
group comprises the cliffs which enclose the valley of the Rio
Primero above and below Cordoba. Doering and Bodenbender in
this case describe two stages of aeolian loess, each covered by
torrential gravel.
From the study of these sections geologists have drawn
certain conclusions as to the movements which have affected
the soil of the Pampa and the changes which the climate has
experienced. These conclusions have in each case only a local
value, and they have not yet been co-ordinated. The majority
of the observers, from Doering to Bailey Willis and Rovereto,
seem not to have taken into account sufficiently the fact that
in the continental formations the most diverse deposits may
come next to each other in the same series, according to the
particular process of deposition, and that their alternation
does not imply a general change in the conditions of erosion.
When we confine ourselves to studying the actual conditions in which
the deposits were formed, we are first struck by the poverty of the
hydrographic network of the Pampa. It is slight except in the vicinity
of the sierras, where the slope of the ground is pronounced, and in the
eastern area, on the right bank of the Parana and Entre Rios, where
the climate is more humid, and the streams flowing over an impermeable
soil more numerous. The only one of the streams born in the Pampean
sierras that reaches the Parana is the Rio Tercero or Carcarana. All
the others dwindle as they descend, and disappear in a low-lying
district marked by lagoons which they only reach in time of flood. The
floods themselves never bring the Rio Cuarto and the Rio Quinto and the
Salado de Buenos Aires into touch with each other. The waters of the
northern slope of the Sierra de Tandil, and even those of the Sierra
de Curumalal, on the other hand, reach the Salado after the rains,
either by way of streams which drain the strings of lagoons, or by
flood-sheets, which spread over large areas.
The watercourses of the plain are unstable in their direction. The
traces of their wanderings remain in the form of stretches of alluvial
sand crossing the fine aeolian clays. These river sands sometimes spread
over extensive areas, the distribution depending upon a hydrographic
scheme which is now partially effaced. The sands of the departments of
General Lopez (south of the Santa Fe province) and General Arenales
(Buenos Aires province), where the Salado is now developed, were
probably brought by the Rio Cuarto, and mark an earlier junction of
the Cuarto and the Salado. These sands run along the Salado as far as
the confluence of the Saladillo, and the contrast between the light
soil and the clay of the bank of the Parana is so striking that the
sand has long been regarded as a marine deposit, indicating an ancient
shore. Along the Saladillo also, north-west of the Guamini lagoons,
there is a sandy belt which corresponds with an important direction
taken by the actual flow of the river, crossing the Bolivar and Veinte
Cinco de Mayo departments.
While the agency of running water in transporting alluvia is confined
to certain sections of the plain, the action of the wind is seen over
its entire surface. The wind everywhere supplements or replaces running
water. Like running water, it classifies the elements it conveys, and
selects them according to their weight and size, the finest clays being
deposited in the moist eastern zone and the coarsest sands in the
sub-desert zone of the west. The mechanism of erosion explains this
contrast. The grains of sand that are driven by the wind travel at the
surface of the ground as long as the vegetation is too sparse to fix
them. If one goes further east, to a moister district with a thicker
vegetal carpet, the grains of sand no longer move at the surface of
the ground, but the wind still carries fine particles of clay, which
it bears to a great height. The bed of clay does not at all imply an
arid climate, as is said sometimes, but corresponds to the region of
the steppes, with moderate rainfall. It is, however, during dry seasons
that the deposition of clay is at its greatest. Darwin mentions that
after the droughts of 1827-1830 in the area round the Parana, the marks
were buried under dust to such an extent that one could no longer
recognize the limits of the various lands. Apart, however, from these
sorts of floods or storms of dust caused by the _pampero_, the summer
atmosphere is clearly laden with dust, which colours the skies in the
east of the Buenos Aires province, as far as Entre Rios.
The contour of the plain bears, like the soil, the double marks of
erosion by running water and aeolian erosion. The rivers of the Pampa,
when they leave the sierras, flow between high cliffs, the height
diminishing as one goes downward. Presently these _barrancas_ become
low, approach each other, and at last merely mark the banks of a larger
bed which the floods fill. There is no trace of valleys. Bailey Willis,
surprised at this weakness of watercourses that have, nevertheless, an
appreciable fall, attributes it to the fact that the cycle of erosion
opened by the last upheaval of the Pampa has not yet had time to
penetrate into the interior. In reality, it means that here we are at
the limit of the zone of erosion by running water, and that in this
climate the essential factor in shaping the landscape is the wind.
The region of the right bank of the Parana (east of the Salado),
which alone has a complete hydrographic network, must be considered
apart. From the latitude of Rosario to that of Buenos Aires it is cut
by flat-bottomed valleys which are sometimes a hundred feet deep.
The excavation of these valleys is due to an upheaval which raised
this part of the Pampa above the base-level. The rapids of the lower
Carcarana also bear witness to this resumption of excavation. Farther
on an inverse movement has put the bottom of the valleys below this
level, and led to their being filled up (lagoon deposits of the
Lujanense of Ameghino). South of Buenos Aires the upheaval has been
less important, and the valleys are not so deep. Some of them (middle
Salado and its tributaries on the left bank) are now occupied by long
lagoons with steep banks, branching along the side-valleys, and these
owe their origin to the same negative movement, subsequent to the
excavation of the valleys. The upheaval did not extend to the eastern
part of the province of Buenos Aires south of the Salado, a low-lying
flat area, badly drained, exposed to floods, the contour of which has
been minutely studied in connection with the construction of a great
network of drainage-canals. North of Rosario, on the only slightly
permeable clay, the water circulates, after rain, not by means of
valleys in the proper sense, but along broad and almost imperceptible
depressions (_canadas_) where the current is slow, and the water dries
up in the dry season. Their general relations are not yet known.
The loose deposits of the Pampean offer little resistance to erosion.
The cycles are run through rapidly, and the traces of earlier cycles
are faint, and are soon effaced.[83]
[83] Certain features of the hydrographic network clearly have
the character of having been superimposed: that is to say, the
path of the watercourses has been bequeathed to the actual
plain by former erosion-surfaces, which have now disappeared,
on which the valleys were originally imposed. That is why
in the district of the confluence of the Colorado and the
Chadi-Leuvu the valleys pass from Pampean deposits to the
crystalline sierras, which were at one time entirely covered
with water.
An ancient erosion-surface, dissected by the existing valleys, has
survived in the south-west of the Pampean plain, thanks to the presence
on the surface of a sheet of hard limestone, the _tosca_. The _tosca_
is the result of the concentration of calcareous elements contained
in clay at the surface in a dry climate. The formation of it implies
a prolonged stability of the surface on which it has accumulated.
Like the deep decomposition-soils in moister regions, it indicates
a peneplain on which erosion has ceased. The bed of _tosca_ covers
the whole district between the Sierra de Tandil and the Sierra de la
Ventana, the south-western slope of the Ventana, and most of the area
of the central Pampa. In the north it does not go beyond the line from
Buenos Aires to San Rafael. Its eastern limit goes almost by Ingeniero
Malmen, Monte Nievas, and Atreuco, where it joins the southern bank of
the lagoons of Carhue and Guamini in the east.[84] In some places the
tosca is about forty feet thick.
[84] In the vicinity of San Luis and Cordoba the hard strata
which are called _tosca_ are beds of eruptive ashes.
To-day the region of the _tosca_ forms a plateau cut by narrow valleys,
sometimes 200 feet deep, west of the Sierra de la Ventana and in
the central Pampa. These parallel valleys, with few ramifications,
generally lying south-west to north-east, open to the east upon the
Pampean plain about the frontier of the Buenos Aires province. On the
other hand, the southernmost of them begin at the foot of the Ventana,
and seem to blend in the south-west with a general depression that
is still little known, though it appears to end at the bottom of the
estuary of Bahia Blanca. None of them has permanent running water.[85]
The origin of the dry valleys of the _tosca_ is one of the most obscure
problems of the morphology of the Pampean plain. Perhaps they are due
to aeolian erosion, like the depressions which are found on the plateau
of the Colorado and the Rio Negro further south.
[85] The surface of the _tosca_ tableland is further
punctuated by a great number of closed depressions of various
depths: long tunnels (_dolines_) which can only be explained,
apparently, as an effect of the dissolving of the limestone by
water.
The action of the wind in shaping the landscape is more clearly seen
in the formation of the dunes. When one starts from Buenos Aires or
Rosario, and gets beyond the region of the level Pampas, the dunes are
the first feature to meet the eye on the surface of the plain. The
first fresh dunes are encountered at Carlota, on the line from the Rio
Cuarto; at Lavalle on the line from Villa Mercedes; and at Trenque
Lauquen on the line from Toay. The dunes spread northward as far as the
latitude of Mar Chiquita, but do not enter the Chaco. They are also
found in parts of the scrub on the west, but their proper domain is the
western border of the steppe, the upper part of the plain at the foot
of the Sierra de Cordoba, the south of the San Luis province, and the
central Pampa.
Any accident that causes the vegetal covering to disappear, such as
the tread of cattle near a drinking place or an enclosure, is enough
to set aeolian erosion at work. The wind raises the sand in a sort of
tossing sea. Then the dune assumes a circular shape. A depression
appears in the centre, and it deepens until it reaches the average
level of the plain. Frequently there is a little lake in it. From this
point onward the deformations are less rapid. The vegetation again
creeps over the ground, and the dune falls a prey to the rains, which
slowly reduce its mass.
In the central Pampa, where the elevation is considerable, the dunes
do not form separate circular patches, but stretch in lines parallel
to the valleys--sometimes in the heart of the valley, at other times
backing against one of its slopes.
Far to the east of the zone of the quick dunes, in the south of the
Cordoba province and the centre of the Buenos Aires province, there
are certain soft undulations, covered with vegetation, with a sandier
soil than that of the plain around them. These are dead dunes. The
district of the dead dunes is characterized by the extreme irregularity
of the surface-soil, the humus, which gains in richness and depth, as a
general rule, as one goes eastward, because there it is in some places
covered by recent aeolian deposits.
The distribution of the dead dunes is connected with the stretches of
river sand across the Pampa, which have offered an easy victim to the
winds. A line of dead dunes follows the upper course of the Salado in
the district of Junin and Bragado. On the line from Buenos Aires to San
Luis one crosses it between Chacabuco and Vedia, and then one comes
again upon the horizontal plain, which has fresh dunes, only further
west, at 120 miles from Villa Mercedes. Its elevation is so conspicuous
on the level plain that the first breeders who used its pasturage gave
it the emphatic name of the _cerillada_. D'Azara correctly appreciated
the nature of it. "It is," he says, "only a dune of very fine sand."
It is only a few yards high. The dead dunes of the Bolivar and Veinte
Cinco de Mayo departments, which Parchappe described, have a more
conspicuous relief, and in their disposition sometimes remind us of
the fresh circular dunes with a central lagoon. The lines of coastal
dunes in the eastern part of the Buenos Aires province obstruct the
proper flow of the water there, and form a group apart, which must be
clearly distinguished from the dunes on the plain.[86]
[86] Outside the districts with quick and dead dunes, a
frequent type of landscape on the Pampa is a plain thinly
sown with very small lagoons, generally circular, between
which develop a series of barely perceptible undulations. The
inequality is at times so slight that one only notices it
by the contrast between the vegetation of the lower and the
higher ground. This type of landscape, which is especially
seen in the district of Lincoln or of Nueve de Julio, is
due to the action of the wind on a plain where the level of
the underground water is near the surface. This level marks
a limit below which aeolian erosion does not take place: a
sort of base-level. The periodic variations of level of the
underground water reduce or enlarge the undulations of the
surface.
Thus the impression of monotony which the Pampa makes in us is
corrected to some extent by close observation. High and low land
alternate on it. Parchappe himself had noticed the contrast between
the area that stretches from Buenos Aires to the Salado, with its soft
undulations and its well-developed hydrographic network, the horizontal
plains on the right bank of the Salado, with their irregular dunes, and
the southern plateau of the _tosca_ between the Sierra de Tandil and
the Sierra de la Ventana.
* * * * *
We may now distinguish the following regions in the Pampa as a whole:
1. The central part of the Santa Fe province forms what is called
the district of the "colonies": that is to say, the domain of the
colonies established two generations ago, and the zone in which the
type of cultivation introduced by them took root. The chief crops here
are wheat and flax. Hedges of service trees (_paraisos_) surround the
fields. In contrast with the parts of the Pampa which have remained
naked, the region of the colonies seems a veritable grove. It stretches
westward beyond the frontier of the Cordoba province, and it reaches
the fringe of the _monte_ between San Francisco and Mar Chiquita.
For the north, Miatello gives 30 deg. S. lat. as the normal limit of the
wheat-growing area; beyond this it suffers both from the low rainfall
of winter and the excessive rainfall in summer. As a matter of fact,
the large estates only reach this latitude on the line from San
Francisco to Ceres. On the Resistencia line, north of Santa Fe, they
stop at 30 deg. 30' S. lat. In the intervening district the limit of the
region of the colonies almost coincides with that of the department of
Castellanos, about 30 deg. 45' S. lat. The area lying between this line
and the northern edge of the Pampa is given up to breeding. In the
south the region of the colonies stretches as far as Las Bandurias and
Irigoyen.
2. South of the region of the colonies, the tableland on the right bank
of the Parana, west of Rosario and San Nicolas, is the maize region,
the corn belt of Argentina. Flax is generally cultivated as well as
maize. It is the agricultural country _par excellence_ of Argentina.
The soil, of fine clay, dark red in colour and retentive of moisture,
and the abundant summer rains, are very suitable for maize. The limits
of the maize region describe an arc of a circle round Rosario with a
radius of 60 to 100 miles. They do not quite reach the frontier of
Cordoba in the west, and they leave out the entire south-western corner
of the Santa Fe province. The maize belt touches the Parana between
32 deg. S. lat. and the Baradero. In the north it passes suddenly into
the region of the colonies. In the south, on the other hand, there is at
the edge of the corn belt an extensive transition-area, where maize and
wheat occupy pretty much the same surface; it stretches as far as the
Rio Salado de Buenos Aires.
3. The region of the lucerne farms is much larger. It comprises the
whole north-west corner of the Buenos Aires province, from the Salado,
in the district of Junin, to the southern limit of the Nueve de Julio
and Pehuajo departments, and as far as the latitude of Guamini. The
limit of the lucerne farms does not include the lands of the central
Pampa, but advances westward and takes in part of the Pedernera
department in the San Luis province. The lucerne farms run along the
San Rafael line to Batavia, and at this point they reach the limits of
the colonized zone. In addition, the zone of the lucerne farms includes
the whole south-eastern part of the Cordoba province, as high up as the
line from Villa Mercedes to Villa Maria, and the southern part of the
Santa Fe province. In the whole of this area, fifteen to twenty-five
per cent. of the surface is planted with lucerne. The conditions
required for its cultivation are a moderate depth of the underground
water and a light soil that allows the roots to penetrate easily. The
eastern belt of clays is not good for lucerne, which survives there for
much less time than in the west, where it may live fifteen or twenty
years.
The lucerne belt is above all a great breeding area for horned cattle,
as sheep-pasturage injures the lucerne. It is not nearly so monotonous,
however, as the preceding regions. In the south-east, in the Buenos
Aires province, the creation of the lucerne farms was undertaken at a
time when agricultural colonization had already begun. We therefore
find two types of exploitation side by side. The cultivation of maize
enters it in the south-west, in spite of the comparatively unfavourable
climatic conditions. The centre of the lucerne area in the south of
the Cordoba province is also a great agricultural zone; but there
agriculture is directly connected with the creation of the lucerne
estates. It is, in fact, entrusted to colonists who till the ground
for four or five years, and restore it to the owners sown with lucerne
at the expiration of their lease. The crops consist almost exclusively
of wheat and flax. Lastly, in the west (San Luis province and extreme
south-west of Cordoba province) the soil gets increasingly more sandy,
and the climate drier. A single tillage suffices to destroy the natural
vegetation and clear the place for lucerne. The lucerne fields have
been created by the breeders themselves, the sole masters of the
region, without the aid of the colonists.
4. Beyond the lucerne belt, at the point where the plain rises toward
the Sierra de San Luis and the Sierra de Cordoba, the subterranean
water sinks deeper. This zone at the foot of the ranges, unsuitable
for lucerne, yet with a soil comparatively rich in humus, has been
taken up by agricultural workers. The wheat area extends, in the San
Luis province, as far as Fraga and Naschel, in the Conlara depression.
The maize area extends to Oncativo, in the Cordoba province, between
the Tercero and Secundo rivers, where the summer rainfall is heavier.
Thanks to the nearness of the mountains, this area has a water-supply
for irrigation, and this sustains several small centres of good farms.
5. The south of the Buenos Aires province and the central Pampa are the
wheat zone. The bed of _tosca_, which is not far below the soil, does
no harm to the wheat except in years of drought. The valleys, where
the _tosca_ is interrupted, and the dunes, where the soil is deep, are
very carefully used for lucerne fields of limited extent. Wheat-growing
seems now, both in this and the preceding zone, to have reached its
limit, as the dryness makes it improbable that there will be any
extension westward.
6. Lastly, the east of the Buenos Aires province, the centre of
which is fairly indicated by the little town of Dolores, is the only
part of the Pampean plain which has not been reached by agricultural
colonization. The land lies low, and is badly drained. The only change
that has taken place in the vegetation is a progressive improvement due
to the hoofs of the cattle during their long stays there. This pastoral
area is clearly limited in the south by the Sierra de Tandil. In the
north it is continued in the more varied region that lies between
Buenos Aires and the lower Salado, where the alternation of winter
pasture on the dry lands and summer pasture in the valleys, encourages
the best methods of breeding, and has made it the region of the dairy
industry.
In the Entre Rios province the limit of the large estates of wheat and
flax is marked by 32 deg. S. lat. The part of Entre Rios which extends
north of 32 deg. and the Corrientes province do not strictly belong to
the Pampean region.
* * * * *
Extensive breeding was the first form taken by white colonization on
the Pampa. The word breeding is, in fact, hardly the correct name for
an industry that mainly consisted of hunting, and was wholly distinct
from the patient and advanced methods used at the same time in the
northern provinces.
"The real wealth of the province of Buenos Aires," says Dean Funes,
"was, and always will be, the trade in hides" (_la pellejeria_).[87]
A good part of the hides exported came from the hunting of the wild
cattle and horses which had grown numerous on the area of the Pampa
beyond the Rio Salado.[88] It was mainly after 1778, when trade with
Spain had been authorized and there was an increased demand for hides,
that the hunting of these ownerless beasts was taken up. Two thousand
Spaniards from Buenos Aires, Santa Fe and Mendoza hunted every day,
says D'Azara, killing an animal for each of their meals in addition
to those they killed for hides. From 1775 to the Revolution, the
Spanish Government made continuous efforts to regulate and reduce the
massacre of the herds. It laid down penalties for every person selling
hides that did not bear his own mark; it farmed out the right to hunt
animals with no mark, and organized the destruction of wild dogs, etc.
The ranches developed under shelter of this legislation. Still, the
Revolution did not witness the end of this cattle-hunting. D'Orbigny
took part in 1828 in two hunts of wild horses (_baguales_) in Entre
Rios. The Argentine _gaucho_ long retained the ways of a hunter rather
than those of a breeder in the strict sense; witness Urquiza's soldiers
who, says Demersay, during the campaign of 1846, when they could not
find trees to which they could fasten their horses, killed cattle and
tied the reins to their horns.
[87] _Ensayo de la historia civil del Paraguay, Buenos Aires,
y Tucuman_ (3 vols, in 16^{mo}) Buenos Aires, 1816, t. iii, p.
214.
[88] The number of wild animals and the area over which they
roamed have often been exaggerated. It does not look as if
they ever covered the whole of the Pampean plain. A salter who
crossed Patagonia and the whole of the Pampa in 1753 (_Voyage
du San Martin au fort de San Julian_, Coll. de Angelis, v.)
only found wild herds near the Salado frontier, and he knew by
this that he was close to the ranches. At the beginning of the
nineteenth century there were no wild cattle left on the right
bank of the Parana. There were still some in Entre Rios.
Passing from the hunting country to the zone of ranches, one notices
that the main work of the breeder is to prevent his cattle from running
wild. "The ranches of this country," said Dean Funes, "having been set
up on immense plains, on which it was not easy to confine the herds
within fixed limits, it sometimes happened that the animals went vast
distances in search of water or pasture, and ended by being regarded
as wild and ownerless," When D'Azara wants to show that the ranches
of Paraguay are superior to those of Buenos Aires, he is content to
say that there the animals are tamer (_mansos_). With the wild animal
(_alzado_) is contrasted the _de rodeo_ animal: that is to say, the
cattle which are rounded up periodically in the centre of the ranch to
be taken to the pasture where they must live (_aquerenciar_). It is the
difficulty of preventing the dispersal of the herd that fixes the price
of the _rincones_ (surrounded by inundated areas) of Corrientes, in
which the animals are captives.
MacKann's description of pastoral life in the Buenos Aires province in
the middle of the nineteenth century give us a very clear impression
of the stage of transition between exploiting the natural increase of
a herd that multiplies without man's intervention, and breeding in
the strict sense. The value of a horse in the former case is almost
exclusively the cost of breaking it in. The breeder is actually anxious
when he sees his horses increase, as he fears he may not have the
resources for breaking them in. The most formidable of the dangers that
threatened the feeble discipline of the herd was drought. That in the
year 1827 was a disaster. The animals left the ranches in a body to go
southward, where they mixed.[89]
[89] The water problem is not as important for the history of
colonization in the Pampean region as in the north. Primitive
breeding was confined to natural supplies of water, lagoons
or streams, and to shallow wells (_jagueles_) dug down to
the superficial sheet, which is generally not deep, but is
liable to dry up. As colonization improved, the breeder, and
subsequently the farmer, were better equipped for boring
wells, and no longer feared drought. They got down to the
deeper waters, semi-artesian (Buenos Aires district) or
artesian (west of the Santa Fe province, round San Francisco).
In other places the superficial waters, which are fresher
than the deeper layers, were used by adapting new types of
filters to the wells (Buena Esperanza district). The only two
districts where the quest of water offered any difficulty are
the south-west corner of the Pampean region and the northern
extremity of the prairie in the Santa Fe province. The sheets
of water are very irregular there, often saline, and it was a
long time before the ranches got an assured supply.
One remarkable circumstance is the importance of the dunes in
connection with the distribution of the underground water. The
rain-water accumulates in the dunes and flows slowly through
the sand to the sub-soil. The level of the underground sheet
in the clay on which the dune rests is always nearer the
surface in the neighbourhood of the dune. The dune itself has
often a greener vegetation than the land around it. Nothing
is more surprising than to find at Medanos (west of Bahia
Blanca), in the middle of a plain of arid aspect, fields of
lucerne and orchards lodged in the hollows of dunes that are
still fresh. In the whole of the Buenos Aires province the
dead district of the dunes is, on account of its water-supply,
a good place for habitation. D'Azara notices the numerous
water-spots which ran along the foot of the dead dunes of the
Cerillada. All round were the white bones of the _baguales_.
In the valleys of the central Pampa, where the sheet of water
in the centre of the valley is often saline, the underground
water improves gradually as one approaches the line of the
dunes.
Revolutions and wars interrupted the work of taming the cattle. When
Galvez went from the Cordoba province to Buenos Aires at the end of the
Rosas Government, he was struck by the condition of the ranches.[90]
Many of them had been confiscated, or their owners driven into exile.
Cattle were no longer marked, and they had become wild. The troubles
of the emancipation-period were much less injurious to the Buenos
Aires breeders than to those of Entre Rios. The Entre Rios herd was
almost annihilated during the revolution, and some of the ranchers of
the left bank crossed to the right bank of the Parana. After 1823 the
pastoral wealth of Entre Rios was rapidly restored, thanks to raids on
Brazilian territory. They were so profitable that the whole population
took part in them. In 1827 the inhabitants of Bajada went there in such
numbers that the town was half deserted. Every day thousands of cattle
were collected on the bank of the Uruguay, and crossed the river. Some
of them were even taken beyond the Parana, to the Santa Fe province.
Woodbine Parish confirms this rapid restoration of Entre Rios, of
which D'Orbigny was a witness. But this period of prosperity did not
last long. The war with Uruguay, under Rosas, again ruined the Entre
Rios ranches, and the drought of 1846 helped to scatter the remaining
herds. Extensive breeding is only lightly rooted in the soil. The
chief centres of production change their locality, as the political
circumstances change, from one part of the Pampean plain to another.
[90] V. Galvez, _Memorias de un viejo_ (Buenos Aires, 3 vols,
in 16^{mo}, 4th ed, 1889).
[Illustration: THE PAMPEAN PLAIN. THE RIO BAMBA (IN THE SOUTH OF THE
CORDOBA PROVINCE, 500 FEET ABOVE SEA-LEVEL).
_Small circular lagoons. The underground water, which comes from the
Sierras to the north-west, here reaches the surface. Zone of lucerne
farms._
Photograph by the Author.]
[Illustration: THE PAMPEAN PLAIN. BUENA ESPERANZA (SAN LUIS PROVINCE,
1,166 FEET ELEVATION).
_The plain is sown with quick and dead dunes, often shaped in a circle
round a lagoon. A dune invaded by vegetation._
Photograph by the Author.
PLATE XVI. To face p. 182.]
Primitive breeding affords few examples of periodical migration for the
better use of pasturage. In 1822, in the course of a journey amongst
the Sierras de Tandil and de la Ventana, Colonel Garcia noticed that
the Indians kept their cattle round the temporary lagoons of the
plain in the winter, and went up to the mountain-streams in summer.
Transhumation movements of this kind were difficult for the creole
ranchers, whose fairly large herds could not be handled easily. The
Chascomus breeders, however, at the close of the eighteenth century,
drove their cattle to the low banks of the Salado during the dry
season.[91] Garcia also notices the importance of the Salado pastures
for the ranches of Salto, Areco, and Lujan.[92] The need to remove the
herds in the dry season, and to find _invernadas_ within reach of the
former ranches, was due to the change brought about in the natural
vegetation of the Pampa and the spread of the _pasto dulce_. The
annual herbs which compose the _pasto dulce_ die and disappear after
fertilization. Until the autumn rain they leave the ground quite naked,
whereas the tough grasses of the _pasto duro_ afforded a thin but
permanent pasture.
[91] _Diario de un reconocimiento de las guardias y fortines
que garnecen la linea de frontera de Buenos Aires_ (1796), by
D. Felix de Azara (Coll. de Angelis, vi.).
[92] _Nueva plan de fronteras de la Provincia de Buenos Aires
por el Colonel Garcia_ (1816, Coll. de Angelis, vi.).
* * * * *
The first improvements of the pastoral industry of the Pampa are
connected with the development of sheep-breeding. Exports of wool
began about 1840, and made great progress after 1855 (17,000 tons
in 1860, 65,000 tons in 1870). From 1850 to about 1890 the economic
returns on sheep-breeding were far better than on cattle-breeding.
During the whole of this period the multiplication of sheep farms was
only restricted by the supply of workers. The first shepherds had been
Basques, in the south of the Buenos Aires province, and Irish, in the
north. The owner settled them as small farmers in the _puestos_ on the
edge of the ranch, the central part of which was devoted to cattle.
They could thus, while they guarded their sheep, see that the limits of
the estate were respected, and prevent the cattle from roaming.
Wool was for a long time the only product of the sheep-rearing
industry. From 1866 onward it was decided to use the hides and tallow
also. As the material of the grease-works was cheap, they spread all
over the sheep zone. Many ranches had works of their own. From 1867
to 1877 the _saladeros_ that had been built long before for killing
cattle undertook the slaughter of sheep on a large scale. The number
of sheep sold to the _saladeros_ rose to 3,000,000 a year. In 1880 the
first cargoes of frozen mutton were sent abroad. The creation of the
grease-works had made no difference to the breeding, but the building
of the refrigerators brought about a rapid transformation of the flock.
The Lincoln breed, heavier and more meaty, displaced the fine-wool
Merinos. This substitution of Lincolns for Merinos is now complete
throughout the Pampean region.
Until 1880 sheep-rearing was concentrated east of the Salado, north
and south of Buenos Aires, beginning with a line that passes through
Quilmes, San Vicente, Pilar, and Campana, which marks the limit of the
suburban zone. In addition it had spread on the right bank of the lower
Salado as far as the foot of the Sierra de Tandil, in an area where the
first stations date from 1823, though the population did not make much
progress until after 1855. About 1880, after the pacification of the
Pampa, the sheep-farms began to expand westward. It was then that the
wool of the _pasto fuerte_ appeared on the Buenos Aires market. It came
from the Azal district in 1870, from Olavarria in 1880, from Bolivar in
1885, and from Villegas in 1890. The Census of 1889 ascribes 51,000,000
sheep to the province of Buenos Aires; that of 1895 gives much the same
figure (52,000,000). Detailed comparison of the two enumerations shows
that the expansive movement to the west continued, and was completed
during this period. The flocks in the north-west zone of the province
(Lincoln, Villegas, Trenque, Lauquen) more than doubled; the flocks of
the south-west area (Alsina, Puan, Bahia Blanca, Villarino) continued
to grow, and increased by a third. Those on the lands of the central
Pampa increased threefold. On the other hand, in the departments
north and south of the Sierra de Tandil, where colonization is older,
sheep-breeding is stationary. The north-east and south-east areas,
between the Parana and the Salado, have diminished: one losing a fifth,
and the other a half, of its flocks.
From 1895 onward the number of flocks of sheep on the Pampean plain
decreased rapidly. The number of sheep had sunk from 34,000,000 in 1908
to 18,000,000 in 1915 for the Buenos Aires province; from 2,800,000
in 1908 to 2,300,000 in 1914 for the central Pampa. The reduction was
general, and found in every district; but it was not equally great
everywhere, and did not begin at the same date in every district.
Sheep-breeding has almost entirely disappeared from the eastern belt,
east of the Salado, which was its cradle. South of Buenos Aires
the sheep are giving place to horned cattle, and they had almost
disappeared by 1908. North of Buenos Aires they survived long, but
the reduction of the flocks has only been the more rapid since 1908.
This corresponds with the advance of maize-growing. In six years the
Bartolome Mitre and Pergamino departments have lost, respectively,
four-fifths and five-sixths of their sheep. In the north-west of the
Buenos Aires province the sheep began to be reduced at the time when
the lucerne farms were founded, about 1900. The decrease has since
gone on uninterruptedly. The actual flocks represent one-fourth of
the flocks of 1895. In the south-west (wheat belt) there was a rapid
shrinkage before 1908, but it seems to have almost been arrested since
then, thanks to the combining of sheep-rearing with wheat and oats. The
actual flocks are about one-half the flocks of 1895. Finally, in the
area north of the Sierra de Tandil the sheep retreat before the cattle,
as they do further north, but they are not so completely wiped out as
in the lucerne belt, and the flocks are still two fifths of the flocks
of twenty years ago.
In the province of Entre Rios and south of Corrientes the number of
sheep continued to rise until 1908, but the increase is only in the
northern departments, outside the agricultural belt. The southern
departments, which are large growers of wheat and flax, lost one-third
of their flocks between 1895 and 1908.
Cattle-breeding was restricted for a long time by the difficulty of
disposing of its products. The hides alone found ready buyers. The
making and export of salt beef dates from the eighteenth century, and
it was to help this industry that the expeditions to the salt-beds of
the Pampa and the journeys of salters to the Patagonian coast were
organized. From 1792 to 1796 no less than 39,000 quintals of jerked
beef were sent from the Rio de la Plata to Havana. But the market for
salt meat (_tasajo_) was always limited. It consisted only of the
Antilles and Brazil, and the _saladeros_ never fully exploited the
meat-producing capacity of the Argentine herds. The crisis of the
_saladeros_ occurred before the time when the refrigerators began to
compete with them. By 1889 there were only three left in the province
of Buenos Aires.
Although the price of cattle was not very remunerative, and provided
no incentive to improve the breeding; although the _saladero_ was not
at all exorbitant, merely asking for animals in good condition, the
improvement of the herd by introducing selected pedigree-breeders had
begun about the middle of the nineteenth century. The Basque dairies
established in the district near Buenos Aires sold pedigree-calves
to the ranches, and these were used for breeding purposes.[93] About
1880 the advance of sheep-breeding pressed the cattle-ranches back and
disputed the space with them more and more, within the ancient Indian
frontier. The smallness of the market for cattle and their slight
mercantile value were very favourable circumstances for the occupation
of the new lands, thrown open at this date by the submission of the
Indians. The herds which found no buyers were sent to the _campos
de afuera_. The ranches developed very rapidly. Daireaux has very
accurately described this period of pastoral colonization, and the
starting of convoys that were intended to give a population to the west
of the Pampa. Cattle were there several years before sheep. As a matter
of fact, breeders do not regard cattle as having a value of their own.
They are merely auxiliaries that must improve the pasture and prepare
the ground for sheep. The cattle themselves are preceded by troops of
half-wild horses which first take possession of the virgin field and
begin the transformation of it.
[93] This is, in a special form, the first instance of
specialization, in the cantons of the Pampean region, in the
breeding industry, properly so called (producing breeders).
The number of cattle increases rapidly. In 1875 it was estimated that
there were 5,000,000 head of cattle in the province of Buenos Aires.
In 1889 there were 8,500,000. Since that date the variations have
been comparatively slight. The Census of 1895 gives 7,700,000; that
of 1908 gives 10,300,000; that of 1914 gives 9,000,000; and that of
1915 gives 11,300,000.[94] But the value of the cattle has gone up
rapidly. The exports of live meat, which lasted from 1889 to 1900, were
the beginning of the rise. It was strengthened when the refrigerators
ceased to confine themselves to killing sheep and began to buy cattle.
The exports of chilled or frozen beef increased after 1898. The value
of them rose to 10,000,000 gold piastres in 1904, double that in 1909,
and more than quadruple in 1914.
[94] The variations in number are less considerable for the
Pampean region than for the whole of Argentina. It is better
supplied with capital than the other breeding districts, and
can rapidly replace the losses caused by excessive export by
buying cattle in the adjoining provinces.
The difference between the price paid by the refrigerators for
pedigree-cattle and the price of animals of creole blood, which the
local market takes, hurries up the transformation of the herd. In
order to watch reproduction and nurse the pasture, the ranches put up
wire-fences. But the breeding methods are especially modified by the
introduction of lucerne. It spread in the south of Cordoba and west of
the Buenos Aires province from 1895 onward, and from 1905 onward in
part of the San Luis province. There were already small lucerne farms
in the Buenos Aires province. A description that was written at the
end of the eighteenth century speaks of lucerne farms round the town
which were reserved for feeding draught cattle.[95] But the area from
which the cultivation of lucerne started at the close of the nineteenth
century is the district of the Cordoba province that is crossed by the
line from Rosario to Cordoba, completed about 1870 to Bellville and
Villa Marina. The lucerne farms there were not created by the breeders,
and the lucerne was at first intended for export to Rosario and Buenos
Aires in the form of dry fodder. The trade in dry fodder has remained
good there. The 1908 Census gives 128 square kilometres of lucerne for
cutting in the Tercero Abajo department (Villa Maria) and 267 square
kilometres in the Union department (Bellville).[96]
[95] Fernando Barrero, _Descripcion de las provincias del Rio
de la Plata_ (published by the Argentine Ministry of Foreign
Affairs, Buenos Aires, 1911).
[96] Amongst the specialized industries connected with the
development of the lucerne farms we must mention the growing
of lucerne for seed, which has settled in the dry zones, where
the lucerne is not so much invaded by other species; for
instance, the district of Madanos, west of Bahia Blanca.
[Illustration: MAP III.--THE CATTLE-BREEDING AREAS.
_The density of the herd is slight in the maize belt. It is
considerable in the centre and east of the Pampean region, which supply
the refrigerators with pedigree stock of good weight. The density is
considerable also in the north of Mesopotamia, but the cattle there
are less valuable and are taken by the saladeros of the Uruguay. The
presence of the tick, which inoculates cattle with Texas fever, is
the chief obstacle to the improvement of the herd in the north of
Argentina._ To face p. 188.]
The lucerne spread southward and south-westward from this point; and
the improvement of the herds kept pace with it. I have shown elsewhere
how this improvement was checked north of a line along the course of
the Parana, the northern frontier of the Constitucion and General Lopez
departments, in the province of Santa Fe and on the Rio Cuarto, and
in the Cordoba province, by the presence of the _garrapate_, which
inoculates the cattle with a dreaded disease, Texas fever. The creole
cattle are immunized against the _garrapate_, but pedigree cattle
quickly succumb to it. In order to protect the southern zone, where
the _garrapate_ does not reproduce, the Argentine Government imposes
severe restrictions on the transport of cattle from north to south;
the cattle have to have disinfectant baths at the frontier-stations.
This cuts pastoral Argentina in two. While the Durham cattle of the
south are intended for the refrigerators, the creole cattle of the
north still supply the _saladeros_, which have disappeared from Buenos
Aires, but survive on the Uruguay. Yet the advantages of crossing with
European breeds are such that the northern breeders, in spite of the
risk and the expense, have not given up all hope of accomplishing it.
The transformation of the herd, however, is bound to be very slow.
Pedigree breeders are brought from the south and kept in the stable.
Their progeny, born on the spot, resist Texas fever better and can be
put out to pasture. There has been more progress in the contaminated
zone on the right bank of the Parana than in Entre Rios and Corrientes.
Pedigree animals have been introduced at Santa Fe, not only in the
region of the colonies, but further north, in the extreme northern
corner of the Pampa (San Cristobal department), colonized by ranchers
from the north of Buenos Aires and the south of Santa Fe, who were
ousted by the progress of maize. They have brought with them to the
new lands the cultivation of lucerne and the methods they followed on
their former property. At Corrientes, on the other hand, breeding is an
historic industry. The staff of the ranches is indigenous. The pastoral
traditions are unchanged.
When we study the variations in the numbers of cattle in different
parts of the Pampa, by comparing the results of recent Censuses
we find that the number has risen rapidly since 1895 in the whole
of the eastern area, north of the Sierra de Tandil. The increase
is particularly conspicuous north of the Rio Salado, in the dairy
district. (Mean density in 1915, 40 to 60 horned cattle per square
kilometre.) In the south-west region (wheat belt) the density has
always been low (12 per square kilometre), and it shows no tendency
to increase. In the north and western region of Buenos Aires (lucerne
belt) there has been a rapid increase, especially between 1895 and 1908
(creation of the lucerne farms), and it has not been interrupted since
(density 50 to the square kilometre). There is the same increase in
the whole area of the lucerne farms in the Cordoba, Santa Fe, and San
Luis provinces, where the herds doubled between 1895 and 1908. Only two
regions have suffered a reduction: the agricultural area of the centre
(Chacabuco, Chivilcoy), where there has been a decrease since 1895, and
the maize district (north of Buenos Aires), where cattle-rearing did
not diminish until after 1908.
* * * * *
Agriculture had begun to develop by the end of the eighteenth century
in the district round Buenos Aires. D'Azara admits the enormous
preponderance of breeding, but mentions that the right bank of the
Parana exported flour to the left bank, which was exclusively pastoral.
Barrero also observes that between the belt of orchards and lucerne
fields, about a league in width, which surrounded Buenos Aires, and
the area of the ranches, which did not begin for six or eight leagues,
there was an agricultural belt, the district of the _chacras de pan
llevar_. The main crop was wheat, and the tillage was chiefly done in
the rich soils at the bottom of the valleys, which are called _canadas_
in the local dialect (canada de Moron, canada du Rio Lujan, etc.).
It was, however, not at Buenos Aires, but in the Santa Fe province,
that modern agricultural colonization began in the nineteenth century.
It goes back to the foundation (in 1854) of the colony of Esperanza,
west of Santa Fe, from which it was separated by the strip of forest
which follows the course of the Salado. European immigrants--Swiss,
French, and Piedmontese--had settled there. The early years of
colonization at Santa Fe were difficult, and the colonies did not begin
to develop rapidly until after 1870. About that date we can distinguish
three nuclei of agricultural colonization at Santa Fe. The first group
of colonies was settled in the north, on the bank of the Parana. In the
centre the Esperanza group advanced steadily westward. A third group
of colonies lay along the Central Argentine railway from Rosario to
Cordoba.
The Esperanza colonists had at first grown maize, but the prosperity
of the colonies was mainly due to wheat. Zeballos, who visited the
colonies in 1882, describes them as a vast lake of wheat. Wheat
predominates, not only in the department of Las Colonias, west of Santa
Fe, where it survives in full strength, but further north, at Garay,
whence it has since been displaced by flax and earth-nuts, and in the
south, round Rosario, in the belt which is now given up to maize. It is
for the wheat that the mills of Carcarana and the granaries of Rosario
have been built. The land sown with wheat at Santa Fe rose in 1882
to 102,000 hectares out of a total of 127,000 hectares of cultivated
land.[97] By 1889 the area of wheat was quadrupled. It spread like a
drop of oil, reaching Rafaela and Castellanos on the west. In 1895 the
advance was still more rapid. Wheat-growing has crossed the Cordoba
frontier, and spread round San Francisco and east of Mar Chiquita
(departments of San Justo and Marcos Juarez). The agricultural regions
in the centre of the Santa Fe province and those of the Central
Argentine have met, and the wheat has invaded the whole of the San
Martin department. It extends even south of the old colonies of the
Central Argentine toward the south-west of Santa Fe, in the General
Lopez department.
[97] The population of the Santa Fe colonies in 1882 was
52,000, of whom 12,000 were in the colonies of the San Javier,
north of the town of Santa Fe.
The 1908 Census shows a very different state of things. The density of
the wheat-cultivation has continued to grow appreciably in the whole
of the northern region, and also in the south-west of the province,
at some distance from the Parana (General Lopez department). On the
other hand, it has been reduced in the adjoining district of Rosario
(departments of Iriondo, Belgrana, Caseros, and Constitucion), where
maize-growing has developed. Maize has won part of the wheat belt.
----------------+----------------------+---------------------
| Wheat Area | Maize Area
| (in kilometres). | (in kilometers).
Departments.[98]|------+-------+-------+------+------+-------
| 1889 | 1895 | 1908 | 1889 | 1895 | 1908
----------------+------+-------+-------+------+------+-------
Las Colonias }|1,623{| 1,307 | 1,621 |} 82 |{ 24 | 31
Castillanos }| {| 1,845 | 3,425 |} |{ 4 | 7
S. Jeronimo }| 664{| 854 | 849 |} 65 |{ 15 | 264
S. Martin }| {| 964 | 1,884 |} |{ 22 | 35
_Iriondo_ }| 971{| 929 | 442 |} 65 |{ 81 | 641
_Belgrano_ }| {| 1,137 | 638 |} |{ 37 | 296
_S. Lorenzo_ }| 652{| 387 | 1,390 |} 178 |{ 150 | 1,169
_Caseros_ }| {| 1,139 | 468 |} |{ 83 | 970
Gal. Lopez }| 12{| 888 | 1,370 |} 51 |{ 373 | 1,558
_Constitucion_ }| {| 227 | 165 |} |{ 575 | 736
S. Justo }| 12{| 732 | 2,345 |} 48 |{ 7 | 34
M. Juarez }| {| 1,504 | 1,442 |} |{ 53 | 92
----------------+------+-------+-------+------+------+-------
Restricted in the south by the extension of the maize belt, the region
of the colonies has now a very distinctive character amongst the
agricultural areas of the Pampa.
[98] The names of departments which belong in their entirety
to the maize region are given in italics. The department of
San Jeronimo straddles the maize region and the region of the
colonies. The General Lopez territory also extends, in the
south-west, far beyond the limit of the maize belt.
This originality is not so much in virtue of its crops (hard wheat and
flax) as on account of the age of colonization and the division of
property. Most of the colonists are owners, and estates of 50 to 200
hectares are the rule. The houses are comfortable; they are surrounded
by orchards and kitchen-gardens. Moreover, the rural economy has been
complicated, and it has assumed a familiar aspect for the European
observer, owing to the introduction of cattle-rearing on a small
scale by the farmers. The number of horned cattle doubled between
1908 and 1914 in the Castellanos department, and increased by a third
in Las Colonias. The area of lucerne has extended in proportion. The
farms have been multiplied on the low lands (_canadas_), unsuitable
for wheat, which the older colonists had disdained; but they are
now regarded as the best bits of land. The recent rise in the value
of land in the region of the colonies is connected, not with an
increase of agricultural production, but a development of breeding. A
few co-operative dairy societies have been established. In general,
however, breeding is solely for the meat-market. The cattle-trade goes
on very different lines from those of the large estates and ranches. It
has remained in the hands of small dealers (Jews of Moisesville).
Agricultural colonization in the Buenos Aires province was at first
entirely independent of the Santa Fe colonization. The crops of the
adjoining region of Buenos Aires never disappeared altogether. In the
period to which Daireaux's description of the economic life of the
Pampa refers (1880-89), the farmers disputed with the breeders a belt
some ten leagues broad round the capital. But sheep-breeding left no
place for agriculture in the next belt, which enclosed the first on
every side, and extended almost as far as the Salado. Agricultural
colonization had found free land only beyond the sheep-farm area, 170
miles west of Buenos Aires, round Chivilcoy, Chacabuco, and Bragado.
As early as 1872 the Chivilcoy district produced 130,000 hectolitres
of wheat; or nearly half the total production of the Buenos Aires
province. In 1889 it formed a comparatively dense agricultural patch,
the cultivated area being devoted half to wheat and half to maize.
Wheat. Maize.
Chivilcoy 307 kms. 399 kms.
Chacabuco 155 " 164 "
Bragado 147 " 261 "
At that date the whole west and south of the Buenos Aires province
was exclusively pastoral. There were only two isolated nuclei of
agricultural colonization. The first was round Olavarria, on the old
Indian frontier, where Russo-German colonies had been established in
1878. The second was in the Suarez department, at the extreme north of
the Sierra de la Ventana, where a group of French colonists settled
five years later, at Pigue.[99] The opening of the line from Buenos
Aires to Bahia Blanca ought, one would think, to have prepared the
way for agricultural colonization in this section. However, the 1895
Census shows a check to these first attempts at tillage in the south.
It fell by one half at Suarez, and by three-fourths at Olavarria. The
Pigue colonists have succeeded in keeping to their lands, but those of
Olavarria have abandoned them, and most of them have emigrated to the
Entre Rios province.
[99] Wheat-area in 1889 in the Olavarria department, 319
square kilometres; in the Suarez department, 118 square
kilometres.
[Illustration: THE PAMPEAN PLAIN. BUENA ESPERANZA (SAN LUIS PROVINCE).
_The first_ chanares.
Photograph by the Author.]
[Illustration: THE PAMPEAN PLAIN. JUNIN (150 MILES WEST OF BUENOS
AIRES, 330 FEET ELEVATION).
_The clays. A line of dead dunes crosses the Junin district, following
the course of the Salado. They are indicated by light, sandy soil, very
different from the clays of the north of Buenos Aires province._
Photograph by the Author.
PLATE XVII. To face p. 194.]
On the other hand, colonization has kept the land won in the district
of the middle Salado, and it extends in a sporadic way toward the
south-west and west. (Nueve de Julio, 252 square kilometres of wheat
and 400 of maize: Veinte Cinco de Mayo, 84 square kilometres of wheat
and 218 of maize: Junin, 197 square kilometres of wheat and 204 of
maize in 1895). It has been maintained ever since, with slow progress,
but without being ousted by breeding. This is one of the regions of
the Pampa where the most different types of rural exploitation are
mingled together. Agricultural colonization has been carried on both by
small proprietors and farmers or tenants. Wheat and maize seem to be
permanently associated, and the climate is equally good for both; the
maize crop being the better if the summer is wet, and the wheat crop
when the summer is dry. The two cereals follow each other on the same
land, in rotation, the wheat being helped by the constant weeding and
clearing which the maize requires. The colonists use oxen in the work,
and fatten them afterwards.[100]
[100] Draught animals in 1908: at Chivilcoy, 17,000 cattle
and 10,000 horses; at Junin, 15,000 cattle and 6,000 horses;
at Nueve de Julio, 15,000 cattle and 6,000 horses. In the
region of the Santa Fe colonies: at Castellanos, 17,000 cattle
and 54,000 horses; at Las Colonias, 6,000 cattle and 35,000
horses. In the wheat belt (South of Buenos Aires): at Puan,
(no cattle) 29,000 horses. At the sierras (no cattle), 14,000
horses.
Agricultural colonization in the lucerne region dates from 1895 to 1905:
------------------+----------------+----------------
| Wheat Area | Flax Area
|(in kilometres).|(in kilometres).
+-------+--------+-------+--------
| 1895 | 1908 | 1895 | 1908
------------------+-------+--------+-------+--------
Buenos Aires: | | | |
Lincoln | 152 | 819 | -- | 100
Pehuajo | 106 | 727 | -- | --
Guamini | 20 | 528 | -- | --
Trenque Lauquen | 100 | 1,439 | -- | 59
Villegas | 4 | 812 | 1 | 84
Pinto | -- | 469 | -- | 60
Cordoba: | | | |
Gal. Roca | -- | 1,009 | -- | 89
Rio Quarto | 5 | 1,156 | -- | 172
Juarez Celman | 144 | 1,679 | -- | 183
Union | 373 | 2,548 | 12 | 316
------------------+-------+--------+-------+--------
Ihave shown how this was bound up with the development of the lucerne
farms themselves. The extreme west of the lucerne belt (Pedernera
department and San Luis) is the only place where the cultivated area
was reduced. The contracts by which the ranchers entrust their lands to
the colonists, on condition of returning them sown with lucerne, were
gradually modified as the stream of colonization developed. The land
was at first left to the colonist rent free, the rancher being paid by
the creation of the lucerne fields. But in proportion to the increasing
volume of the stream of immigrants, and the keener competition of the
colonists, the rancher asked better terms. There are similar contracts
in regard to the restoration of lucerne fields which have been worn
out by pasturage, so that the land has to be ploughed up periodically.
The men who clear the land in the lucerne belt have mostly been
recruited in the district of the old colonies of Santa Fe, where the
new generation had begun to feel the pinch. The crops which they raise
during the four or five years of their lease are chosen without any
idea of sparing lands which they are not to keep. Wheat succeeds wheat,
and the first and last crop is often flax. The proportion of flax is
lower only in the southern part of the lucerne belt. In the Buenos
Aires province the colonist grows lucerne on his own account, either to
sell as dry fodder or for breeding or fattening.
Colonization does not in these parts correspond with the division of
property. Not only does the farmer not become the owner of the soil,
but he does not live on it permanently; he is a veritable nomad. His
house has a temporary look that strikes one at the first glance. The
area cultivated is almost stable, if the region is considered as a
whole. But cultivation passes periodically from one section to another,
and its removals cause sudden alterations or crises in the railway
traffic and the development of the urban centres.
The lucerne belt has been peopled by Santafecinos, and it has in
turn sent colonists to the western agricultural belt at the foot
of the Sierras de San Luis and de Cordoba. They have less suitable
climatological conditions, but they have the advantage of greater
stability, as the breeders do not dispute the land with them.
While agricultural colonization has been an aid to pastoral
colonization in the north-west of Buenos Aires, it tends to displace
breeding, or restrict its sphere, in the north-east and the south.
Maize-growing started on the banks of the Parana, where it was already
paramount in 1889, between Campana (north of Buenos Aires) and San
Nicolas. In 1895 it advanced up the Parana as far as the Santa Fe
province (Constitucion) and spread over the interior for some sixty
miles in the Salto department. In the next few years it made rapid
progress toward the west and north-west, covering the departments of
Pergamino, Rojas, and Colon, and part of General Lopez, San Lorenzo,
and Constitucion in the province of Santa Fe.
---------------+-----------------+------------------
| Maize Area. | Flax Area.
|-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+------
| 1889| 1895| 1908| 1889| 1895| 1908
---------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+------
Campana | 67 | 45 | 22| 15 | 31 | 17
Baradero | 339 | 260 | 291| 26 | 78 | 173
S. Pedro | 398 | 353 | 420| 5 | 73 | 235
Arrecifes | 124 | 126 | 155| 15 | 50 | 265
Salto | 16 | 326 | 236| 13 | 3 | 75
Gal. Lopez } | 51 |{373 |1,538| -- | 70 | 752
Constitucion } | |{575 | 736| -- | 270 | 404
Pergamino | 168 | 160 | 340| 50 | 30 | 275
Rojas | 86 | 81 | 247| 4 | 23 | 275
Colon | -- | 44 | 126| -- | 14 | 78
S. Lorenzo | 178 | 150 |1,169| 11 | 36 | 450
Caseros | -- | 83 | 990| -- | 13 | 319
---------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+------
Export of Argentine maize on a large scale began in 1895. Flax-growing
was not added to maize until 1900.
The heavy land requires a good deal of harrowing, and the weeding and
harvesting of the maize give employment to a comparatively large staff.
The estates are of moderate size, often only 50 hectares. Ownership
was not divided at the period of colonization, the land, thanks to the
breeders, having already acquired so high a value that the colonists
could not buy it. On the lands which have been farmed out there has
developed a rural, and often far from docile, proletariat. It is in
the maize region that the worst agricultural strikes have taken place.
The struggles of the owners and the colonists are the more prolonged
because the sowing of the maize can be put back to the end of the
spring without much harm being done. The adjoining zone of the Parana
produced some of the _maiseros_ who have scattered over the north-west.
But the modern colonies include, in addition, a large proportion of
immigrants who have recently landed from Italy and Spain. The maize
growers do not mix with the wheat-growers. Each group has its own area.
The increase of wheat-growing in the south dates only from 1898:
------------------+----------------------------
| Wheat Area (in kilometres).
|------------+---------------
| 1895 | 1908
------------------+------------+---------------
Alsina | 45 | 1,296
Puan | 52 | 1,321
Suarez | 104 | 978
La Madrid | 75 | 249
Pringles | 13 | 724
Darrego | -- | 885
Terr. de la Pampa | -- | 1,731
------------------+------------+----------------
[Illustration: MAP IV.--DENSITY OF THE MAIZE CROP.
_As it needs more heat and moisture than wheat, the maize does not go
so far to the west and south. It is concentrated for export at the
ports of the Rio de la Plata and the Parana, especially at Rosario. The
Argentine "corn belt," the chief maize area, extends back of Rosario
and San Nicolas to beyond Casilda and Pergamino._
To face p. 198.]
Wheat first spread along the line from Buenos Aires to Bahia Blanca,
west of the Sierra de la Ventana, then in the coastal district,
east of Bahia Blanca. These two wheat-areas became connected after
1904, when the opening of the direct line from Olavarria to Buenos
Aires facilitated the development of the intermediate region
(Pringles-Laprida). From Bahia Blanca it spread to the west and
north-west along the Toay line, and southward as far as Colorado on
the coast. In the whole area of the Central Pampa it is still possible
to distinguish two strata of immigrants, of different dates, one
superimposed upon the other: the sheep-breeders and the farmers. Round
Toay the contrast between the two elements of the population is even
more striking, because the first pastoral colonization, which dates
from 1890, was to a great extent the work of creole _puntanos_ (from
the San Luis province). The actual agricultural colonies, on the other
hand, include recent European immigrants and colonists from other parts
of the provinces of Buenos Aires and Entre Rios.
The yield of the wheat grows less and less as one goes westward. The
harvest may be injured either by late frost or drought, or, especially,
by hot winds which scorch the plants and blight the half-realized hopes
of the farmers in the weeks just before the harvest. But the relative
poorness of the return is compensated by the extent of the farms and
the cheapness of labour. The harvest is often done with machines that
peel and pack the wheat, and the workers are not compelled, as they
are at Santa Fe, to wait for the threshing machine. The aridity does
not permit flax-growing, but oats can be grown, especially between the
Sierra de la Ventana and the Sierra de Tandil; and it is good to sow
oats when the land has been impoverished by consecutive crops of wheat.
Exports of oats through Bahia Blanca began in 1906.
The displacement of breeding by farming is less thorough than in the
maize belt. Oats, sown about the beginning of autumn, serve for fodder.
The animals are kept in the fields during the winter, and the oats are
cut and put into the mill, without being threshed, as a reserve fodder.
Moreover, the wheat farmers have themselves taken to rearing sheep,
and the sheep feed in the stubble and fallow.
* * * * *
From this short account of the history of colonization we draw certain
important conclusions. At the time when agricultural colonization
began, it was admitted that farming was the best way to exploit the
soil, and that the Pampa would sooner or later pass from the pastoral
to the agricultural cycle; or, to use the local phraseology, that the
"colony" would replace the ranch everywhere. This idea was wrong.
The only area in which the facts seem to give it any support is the
corn belt. The general rule is, on the contrary, that in its progress
colonization develops a mixed type of exploitation, combining farming
and breeding; either one alternates with the other in a sort of
periodic rotation, as in the lucerne area, or both proceed together,
the farmers including breeding amongst their occupations, as in the
district of the Santa Fe colonies or in the wheat area in the south of
the Buenos Aires province.
It seems, moreover, that the development of colonization depends not
only upon physical conditions, but upon factors of a purely economic or
social character, which the geographer must not overlook. It will be
enough here to indicate the chief of these.
We have seen the part that has been played in the exploitation of
the soil by groups of colonists who swarm from one area to another.
Whether we think of the ranchers of the eastern part of Buenos
Aires transplanting themselves to Cordoba or north of Santa Fe, the
sheep-breeders moving westward, or the Santa Fe colonists settling in
the lucerne area, they all take with them their own habits and methods
of work, and they take time to adjust them to a new environment.
[Illustration: MAP V.--DENSITY OF THE WHEAT CROP.
_The wheat belt stretches in a broad section of a circle from Bahia
Blanca to Santa Fe, which is now reached by maritime vessels. The
cultivation of wheat crosses the line of 600 millimetres of rainfall,
and even the 400-millimetre line, in proportion as one passes from the
area of summer rain to that of spring and autumn rain._
To face p. 200.]
The colonist, whether breeder or farmer, is not left to himself.
Colonization is sustained and directed by speculation in land, and
is influenced by it. Speculation discounts the work of the colonist,
and attaches to the land a value which is not based upon the revenue
it has produced, but upon that which the speculator calculates that
it may produce in the future. If the speculator is audacious, he does
not let himself be discouraged by initial bad experiences; it takes
repeated checks to exhaust his optimism. The colonist, even if his
farming accounts do not show a profit, may nevertheless gain something
if the value of his land goes up. The increase of his capital conceals
from him the smallness of his returns, especially as he can easily get
advances on the value of his property from the banks, and this enables
him to draw upon his wealth every year.
Speculation is concerned with new lands on the fringe of the area
already colonized, where the soil is, as a general rule, already in the
hands of the exploiters themselves. The speculators, having paid a high
price for these lands, try to organize the development of them. It is
partly owing to their influence that colonization continuously enlarges
its domain, instead of concentrating its labour in the older districts
where it might sometimes be more productive. In fine, speculation in
land has a profound influence on the conditions of colonization, making
it more difficult for the colonist to buy the land he is developing.
The owner who grants him the use of the land means to keep for himself
any increment of its value. He rents, but he will not sell.
Thus the history of colonization cannot be separated from the
traffic in land. The special features of this traffic in the
Pampean region--its concentration at Buenos Aires; the creation of
a land-market resembling a stock market; the practice of selling on
the instalment plan, which enables small capitalists to enter the
market; the repeated transfers of pieces of land which the buyers have
never seen and which they know only from plans--are one of the most
original aspects of modern Argentina. They are partly due to a fact of
a geographical nature--the uniformity of the Pampean plain, on which
every piece of land is worth about as much as the adjoining piece.
Colonization is easy and rapid in proportion as it requires less
capital and labour. The expansion of breeding in the west between 1880
and 1890 was facilitated by the low market price of cattle at that
time. Breeding has the advantage over farming of not needing so large
a staff, but it requires a larger capital. Of the crops, assuming that
the conditions of soil and climate are equally favourable, wheat is
better than maize for colonization, because the preparing of the soil
and the harvest can be done more speedily, and the same number of hands
can plant a larger area with wheat than with maize.
The action of the Argentine Government and the provincial authorities
has been restrained, apart from the earliest period of the
establishment of the Santa Fe colonies, both as regards the securing of
immigrants, the distribution of lands, and the administration of the
colonies.[101] Colonization has been, on the whole, a private affair.
The work of organizing colonization has at times been undertaken by
the proprietors themselves; they leased pieces of land and got a
good price for them, at the same time increasing the surplus value
of the plots they kept for themselves by promoting the increase of
population. Sometimes it was undertaken by Colonization Companies,
which bought land to divide and sell. More frequently it was undertaken
by merchants who advanced credit to the colonists they settled, on
condition that the colonists bought what they needed of the merchants,
and entrusted them with the sale of their crops. The migration of the
Santa Fe colonists was partly due to, and sustained by, a corresponding
migration of merchants who had acquired wealth in the older colonies,
and who thus got a larger body of customers. The merchant who organizes
colonization often acts as the intermediary between the owner and
the colonist, guaranteeing the owner a fixed rent for his land and
receiving so much per cent. of his harvest from the farmer. This system
is very widespread in the corn belt, but it is found all over the plain
of the Pampas. It tends to disappear when the colony is older and
deeper-rooted, as the colonist gradually earns his independence; he
buys his lease, his equipment, and his furniture, and controls the sale
of his own crops. In the districts where he has not become owner, the
leases are generally variations of two types: farming leases, where the
colonist has capital enough for working, and renting leases, where the
capital is provided by the owner or the middleman.
[101] The Agricultural Centres Law, passed in 1887 by the
province of Buenos Aires to encourage colonization, has
not had good results. By the terms of this law, owners
who professed themselves willing to devote their lands to
colonization received an advance on the value of the lands
in the form of mortgages, the interest and repayment of the
mortgage being charged to the colonists. Many owners took
advantage of the law, but, after a pretence of colonization,
kept the ownership of their lands.
Lastly, colonization can make no progress unless it finds markets on
which it can put its produce. Up to the present western Europe has
been the chief market for the wool, leather, meat, and cereals of the
Pampean region; tropical America absorbs part of the output of the
_saladeros_, flour, and dry fodder; and North America has recently
begun to compete with Europe for wool, leather, and frozen meat. The
facility with which the products of the Pampa have found their way into
the world's markets, as is seen in the comparative stability of the
returns, explains the continuous advance of colonization and the short
duration of the crises which have disturbed it.
The home market, however, has had an importance in connection with
colonization that must not be overlooked. When wheat-growing spread
at Santa Fe the crop was at first devoted to supplying Buenos Aires,
and as late as 1883 Zeballos thought that the essential result of
agricultural colonization was the fact that Chilean flour was beaten
off the Argentine market. Even to-day the districts on the outskirts of
the cereal area depend upon the home market. The Villa Mercedes mill
supplies Mendoza. Cordoba and Santa Fe send their flour to Tucuman.
The price of cereals still shows slight fluctuations in these parts as
compared with prices in Buenos Aires.
_Table of Exports of the Chief Products of the Pampean region_ (_in
thousands of tons_):
---------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------
| 1901 | 1905 | 1910 | 1913 | 1914
---------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------
Wheat | 904 | 2,868 | 1,883 | 2,812 | 980
Maize | 1,112 | 2,222 | 2,660 | 4,806 | 3,542
Flax | 338 | 654 | 604 | 1,016 | 841
Flour | 71 | 144 | 115 | 124 | 67
Wool | 228 | 191 | 150 | 120 | 117
Salted hides | 28 | 40 | 61 | 65 | 63
Dried hides | 26 | 24 | 29 | 21 | 14
Chilled beef | 44 | 152 | 253 | 306 | 368
Chilled mutton | 63 | 78 | 75 | 45 | 58
---------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------
The heading "cereals" appears in the statistics of Argentine
exports in 1882. In 1900 the value of the agricultural produce
exported is equal to that of the products of breeding. In 1904
it is higher.
Pastoral colonization, again, has not been entirely independent of the
home market. Martin de Moussy says, it is true, that the area which
sent the products of breeding to Europe in 1865 extended as far as the
Sierra de Cordoba. But this statement needs correction. The hides from
the whole of this zone were, in point of fact, sent down to the ports
on the Rio de la Plata, but live animals were sent to Chile from the
whole of the north-west of the Pampean region. It was for the purpose
of selling cattle to Chile that ranches were multiplied about 1860 in
the neighbourhood of Villa Mercedes and lower down, on the Rio Quinto.
Jegou's description shows that even in 1883 the breeders of the San
Luis province devoted themselves exclusively to supplying the Chilean
market.[102] Buyers from Chile and the Andean provinces still visit
Villa Mercedes, and until a recent date they came to Villa Maria, in
the province of Cordoba. The Santa Fe ranches found their customers,
until the opening of the Cordoba line (1870) amongst the _troperos_,
who bought draught oxen for their waggons. The loss of these customers
and the crisis that followed are one of the reasons why agricultural
colonization met with so little resistance on the part of the breeders,
and was able to take root so easily at Santa Fe. In the San Cristobal
department the breeders who settled there after 1890 found their first
market in the _obrajes_ of the neighbouring forest. The opening of the
railway to Tucuman afterwards enabled them to send their cattle to the
provinces of the north-west. The Buenos Aires buyers were late in this
remote canton of the Pampean plain. They did not arrive until 1911.
[102] A. Jegou, "Informe sobre la provincia de San Luis,"
_Ann. Soc. Cientifica Argentina_, xvi. 1883, pp. 140-152,
192-200, and 223-230.
The importance of the Pampean region itself as a market of consumption
grew in proportion to the increase of its population. The extent to
which it absorbs the products of breeding and agriculture varies a
good deal. For some of them it is paramount. Horse-breeding, for
instance, which is still one of the great industries of the Pampa, has
never contributed to the export trade. It is the same with regard to
potatoes, which are concentrated in two strictly limited districts,
round Rosario and north of the Sierra de Tandil. Only a small part of
the dry fodder is exported. As regards cereals, a comparison of the
statistics of production with the statistics of export shows that the
home consumption is about one-third of the production. It is almost nil
for flax, and nearly fifty per cent for wheat.
The average of production and export for the years 1912, 1913, and
1914, in thousands of tons, is:
------------+--------+--------+-------+-----------------
| | | | Total
| Wheat. | Maize. | Flax. |(including Oats).
------------+--------+--------+-------+-----------------
Production | 4,241 | 6,398 | 931 | 12,662
Export | 2,140 | 4,227 | 790 | 8,038
------------+--------+--------+-------+-----------------
As the chief centres of consumption are the ports themselves, it
follows that the commercial currents that have to supply them are
confused with the currents which maintain the exports. The exchanges
between the various regions of the Pampa are more interesting to the
geographer. In their tendency to specialize, these regions have ceased
to be self-contained, and they have to look to adjoining regions. The
feeding of the mills necessitates the transport of wheat in different
directions. The chief mills are at Buenos Aires, where they are
suitably located to work both for the home market and for export; and
the mills in the interior have some difficulty in competing with them.
Some of these, however, are still active. They mix hard wheat, bought
in the district of the Santa Fe colonies, with the soft wheat that is
grown in the middle and south of Buenos Aires province.
But this inter-regional transport of cereals is a small thing in
comparison with the transport of cattle. The extension of the lucerne
farms has developed the fattening industry in many districts, while
others still confine themselves to breeding in the ordinary sense, and
they feed the other centres. The most specialized fattening district
is that of Villa Mercedes and the western part of the lucerne belt,
while the eastern part of the province of Buenos Aires and Entre Rios
are still areas of production. The differentiation of the pastoral
zones can be gathered from a study of the statistics. According to the
1908 Census, milch cows represent 53 per cent. of the whole of the
cattle in all the departments which form the heart of the breeding area
east of Buenos Aires, and only 45 per cent. in the departments of the
north-west of Buenos Aires and south of Cordoba and in the Pedernera
department of San Luis, where fattening is common.
According to the 1914 Census oxen are 24 per cent. of the herd in the
same departments of eastern Buenos Aires; 24 per cent. also in Entre
Rios; and the proportion rises to 31 per cent. in the lucerne area.
Dolores department (eastern Buenos Aires) has 64 per cent. milch
cows and 21 per cent. oxen. Pedernera department (San Luis, in the
lucerne area) has 49 per cent. cows and 38 per cent. oxen. General
Roca department (Cordoba) has 48 per cent. cows and 34 per cent.
oxen. Arenales (Buenos Aires) has 39 per cent. cows and 46 per cent.
oxen.[103]
[103] For Argentina as a whole the percentage is: milch cows,
55 per cent.; oxen, 26 per cent.
Oxen intended for the refrigerators are bought either on the ranches
or at Buenos Aires, where beasts in good condition are consigned to
buyers, but oxen for fattening are bought at fairs which are held
periodically in the towns of the interior. Another transaction at these
fairs is the trade in pedigree breeders. The best known of them is
held at Villa Mercedes (province of San Luis), where 8,000 oxen are
sold every month. At the Mercedes fairs one may see Durham steers from
the east of Buenos Aires which are to be fattened and sent back to the
refrigerators or the slaughter-houses of Buenos Aires. There are also
creole cattle from the north of the San Luis province and Rioja which
will later be eaten in Mendoza or in Chile. There is, in fact, on the
western frontier of the Pampa no line of demarcation corresponding to
that set up in the north by the limit of the area contaminated by the
_garrapate_, separating the district of creole breeding from that of
selective breeding. There is free communication here between the two
zones, and the lucerne fields for fattening at Villa Mercedes are used
in common by the breeders of the Pampa and of the bush.[104]
[104] A large number of the cattle which are to be fattened
are bought at the market in Buenos Aires; but these do not, as
a rule, come from the Pampean region.
_Cultivated Areas in the Argentine Republic_ (_in square kilometres,
almost exclusively in the Pampean region_).
-----+--------+--------+--------+--------+---------
| Wheat. | Maize. | Oats. | Flax. | Lucerne.
-----+--------+--------+--------+--------+---------
1896 | 25,000 | 14,000 | -- | 5,600 | 8,000
1900 | 33,000 | 12,000 | -- | 6,000 | 15,000
1902 | 36,000 | 18,000 | -- | 15,000 | 17,000
1905 | 56,000 | 22,000 | 700 | 10,000 | 29,000
1910 | 62,000 | 32,000 | 8,000 | 15,000 | 54,000
1912 | 69,000 | 38,000 | 12,000 | 17,000 | 59,000
1913 | 65,000 | 41,000 | 11,600 | 17,000 | 66,000
1914 | 62,000 | 42,000 | 11,400 | 17,000 | --
-----+--------+--------+--------+--------+---------
_Exports for 1913, 1914, and 1915 at each port._
--------------+------+-------+-----+-----+-------+--------
|Wheat.| Maize.|Flax.|Oats.|Totals.|Average.
--------------+------+-------+-----+-----+-------+--------
{| 782 | 1,757 | 275 | 13 | 2,829 |}
Rosario {| 242 | 1,952 | 248 | 1 | 2,445 |} 2,716
{| 717 | 1,790 | 366 | -- | 2,875 |}
| | | | | |
{| 441 | 1,389 | 246 | 240 | 2,318 |}
Buenos Aires {| 297 | 906 | 55 | 78 | 1,537 |} 2,051
{| 511 | 1,349 | 342 | 96 | 2,299 |}
| | | | | |
{| 927 | 2 | -- | 462 | 1,393 |}
Bahia Blanca {| 241 | -- | -- | 222 | 463 |} 1,075
{| 921 | -- | -- | 442 | 1,364 |}
| | | | | |
{| 5 | 910 | 74 | -- | 989 |}
S. Nicolas {| 1 | 430 | 60 | -- | 492 |} 651
{| 5 | 420 | 48 | -- | 474 |}
| | | | | |
{| 333 | 358 | 14 | 170 | 876 |}
La Plata {| 160 | 51 | 16 | 49 | 278 |} 459
{| 152 | 45 | 6 | 16 | 222 |}
| | | | | |
{| 265 | 51 | 158 | -- | 476 |}
Santa Fe {| 7 | 23 | 128 | -- | 159 |} 278
{| 114 | 7 | 77 | -- | 199 |}
--------------+------+-------+-----+-----+-------+--------