It should rather befall the man who cries to the shoeblacks and hotel waiters of the city, than to us who are of the land, to plead the cause of the colonist. But let us state his case for him.An examination of the meteorological conditions, the constitution of the soil, the economy of inland collection, and theaverage proximity of the radial point of export to the site of production has usually convinced the intelligent traveller, very especially if his intelligence is engaged in ocean or land transport, that the Argentine is the garden of the world.A closer examination of the abruptness of the thermographical curves and their relation to soil foods and the growth and harvest of its products; the difficulty of collecting from units of large area, and at the precise moment of their maximum yield and maturity, the seeds of annuals; the yet unbridged gulf between the field of production and the main channels of its collection;—might well lead the intelligent traveller to a contrary conclusion. When he ceased to generalize he would find the lot of the agriculturist was not as easy as it looked.Burmeister no doubt overstated the case if he said that wheat would never prosper in the Pampa soil. If he said that wheat cultivation would not prosper in the Pampa except under skilled husbandry we could find it easy, after twenty years’ experience, to agree with him.Meantime the best has been done to make it unsuccessful. The agriculturist, if we are to call him one, is let loose on a five hundred acre pitch of the prairie. In so many cases that one is entitled to generalize, he set out on borrowed land with borrowed implements to scratch the soil for three, four or five years and sow wheat on it.If he is asked whether he sows winter or spring wheat he does not know. If he is asked how many tons of straw he harvests, he neither knows nor cares. If he is asked what calcium carbonate and nitrate are, he thinks they are sheep dips, but is not quite sure. If he is questioned on rotation, he waves his hand to the rolling Russian thistle that gathers like a snowdrift against every obstacle.His house is, at best, an enlarged sardine tin. He has neither barn, byre nor pigsty. He has no enclosures for cattle, sheep or poultry. He has no garden. He has not a single tree to shelter him from the sun. With land suited for every form of live stock and field farming he is enslaved to the deadly monotony of wheat growing.There may be countries with a soil and climate such that white straw crops can be grown for a large number of years in succession without exhausting the land or setting up soil sickness. We know it is done at experimental farms such as Rothamsted. But we know too that the efficiency of soil culture in pursuit ofthese experiments is beyond the practical ability of the colonist; nor is the economy of the farm an item that is taken into consideration. We know, because we have witnessed it, that in this country after the colonist’s term of four or five years, during which he has collected an average crop of eight bushels per acre, is ended, what remains is a five hundred acre field of weeds.We can grow weeds. Whatever other merits may be denied to us we have achieved the production of a garden of weeds without equal in the world. Some of them are good plants for animal food, but out of place, for the colonist has not the means to make use of them for that purpose. Others are weeds of the most useless and noxious description. If it be true that the scabby Argentine sheep has been a source of wealth to European chemical manufacturers, the day must surely come when still greater fortunes will be made out of weed-spraying nostrums.Until this agricultural arab whom we call a colonist is replaced by an occupant with permanent or sufficiently long fixity of tenure; until he has adequate barns, byres, sties, water sweet and cheap, a garden and a homestead; and until he is possessed of cattle, sheep, swine and poultry he will remain as economically lean and weak as the muzzled ox. We have talked much of rural banks to enable him to borrow more money; but we have not begun to put into practice the rural economy that will be followed by the rural bank as sure as summer follows spring. When the agriculturist profits, instead of loses, on the year’s overturn, he will build up the bank on his own thrift.Within the economy of soil cultivation there is room for two alternatives only. Either the landowner must himself farm his land, or he must lease it with sufficient fixity of tenure and farming equipment to secure to his tenant the prospect of being able to pay a fair rent.Agriculture in this country has very largely failed through an attempt to drive a middle course between these two alternatives. The landowner, usually one possessing a large area and hitherto a pastoralist, has seen, or has thought he saw, a larger profit to be earned by turning his soil to agriculture. Instead of putting it to the test by turning agriculturist, he has paid his intelligence the sorry compliment of believing that an illiterate Italian, spewed up on our shores may be a year since, could earn this large profit if he were let loose upon the prairie withoutfurther capital or assistance than the right to plough the soil, in exchange for a share of the harvest, to be delivered threshed and bagged to his landlord.The benefits the landlord has derived from this, in a great majority of cases, have been to collect a smaller rent than he could have earned if he had depastured or farmed the land himself; and to receive back at the end of three or four years his pasture land converted into a garden of weeds. The process is termed “improving the land by the plough.” Not long since properties in the market were advertised as especially attractive if they were “all under agriculture.”Having sowed the wind the landlord is reaping the whirlwind. He has not only failed to profit by agriculture, but he has pledged the land and squandered the proceeds. The matter is not that such silly methods of rack-renting, bonanza farming, land gutting and money lending have wrought their own confusion. It is the loss to the industrial community, to the rural population, and to the national thrift that lays bare the defects of the system. These are the fruits. We have to look into the ordering of our agricultural industry, not as determined by a “good year” or “bad year,” a “dry” or “wet” year, but by such a readjustment of our rural economy that the soil shall be no longer cultivated at a loss. It is necessary to unmuzzle the ox. Without the aid of domestic live stock the colonist can neither profit from the by-products and fallow of the land, nor can he restore to the soil the factors necessary to yield crops that are of themselves profitable.Neither have we been careful to conserve and stimulate the settlement of a truly agricultural population on the land. We have exported the cult of sterility from the old world to the new. We have measured in this new world a field of production, not for the labourers, but for their European mandatories. It was said in the days of the Spanish dominion that America was the “factoria” of the mother country. She has seemingly not yet ceased to be regarded as a “factoria.”We take pride that we export so much and need so little. We call it a favourable “balance of trade.” We spread abroad pamphlets and graphic charts and dreary columns of ciphers to show how successfully we have gutted the land we live on to fill alien mouths. We display pictures of train loads of labour-saving machinery, glorying in the fact that one man aided by Pittsburg steel and Cardiff coal can fend off twenty familiesfrom a thousand acres, and garner the yield for the contentment of fat-handed brokers eating lobsters in a distant city.Had the matter been understood rightly by the “estanciero” of a generation or two ago, nay, even by this present generation, he would have put a premium on fecundity. His business was to encourage population; but while he drowsed in siesta hour over the newspaper proclaiming the arrival of alien immigration and smiling unctuously at the intelligence, he condemned his own men to celibacy, unwilling to spend the price of five bullocks on a mud hut to cradle the generation on his own land of a race of lusty yeomen. He took pride in the number of calves and lambs born on his estate. It would have beseemed him better to take pride in the number ofbabiesborn there.Such a consummation would be vastly upsetting to Malthusian economists who view with jealousy the peopling of new fields of production. They would have us believe that it is only here by the overflowing of the Nile, and there by the discovery of the New World, that the human race has been saved from famine. If we can no longer send 350,000 tons of meat and five million tons of cereals to the Old World our usefulness has passed away and our mission ended.Fiddlesticks! Had the Pampas of South America, the pasture lands of Australia, and the wheat fields of Canada remained virgin there would have been ere now thousands of acres in Great Britain under glass and harnessing the solar spectrum and the electric currents of air to manufacture food for the people. Feminists, instead of rending other people’s garments to bewail the departure of their mankind, would be conjuring out of four-inch potsherds fruit rich and rare for the household. If among the social economists of the present generation there is a disposition to revert to the Malthusian creed; in this spacious country, and as far as the vegetative population is concerned, there is no need to raise the voice of alarm. National progress and thrift will be soonest achieved by the increase of the national population; and, without closing the doors to useful alien immigration, the welfare of the community should be dependent rather upon the increase of the family than upon the overflow population from other lands. … Under our present system of agriculture the domestic requirements of the country are sacrificed to foreign demand. We measure our progress by our export trade of raw produce. When we speak of agriculture whatwe really mean is the production of maize, wheat and linseed for shipment abroad.It is to this end that so much has been heard of warrants, elevators and other devices to enable the farmer to dispose of his crop. They are in some degree devices for his own security; but they are in a much greater degree devices to secure for the export of cereals a more regular flow from the sources that supply it. The time is no doubt distant when this country shall have a population sufficient to consume the raw produce of its soil; but by turning our eyes constantly to its export trade as the sole source of its production we have not only limited the lines of our agricultural production, but we have neglected complementary lines that would have increased that export trade by maintaining soil values.The cereal that gives the best return from a large area of our Pampa soil and climate is barley. Being shallow-rooted our indifferent tilth suffices for its seed bed; and being short lived it can be sown late and harvested early, reducing the risks from frost and drought. The “chacarero” who produces 8 fanegas of wheat could produce on averages from the same soil and with no better husbandry 18 fanegas of barley per hectare. In food equivalents that is equal to 280 kilogrammes of pork.The “chacarero” does not grow barley for the same reason that he neglects or ignores almost every branch of agriculture except wheat, maize and linseed. For the same reason that he neglects rotation, fallow and weeds; vegetables and small fruits; live-stock breeding and feeding; poultry, dairy, and bee-hiving, tree planting; and the greatest of all cultures—home culture. He has no fixity of tenure. There is no other reason.It is said of the Argentine “chacarero” that he is ignorant and incapable of good husbandry. When he first began, of course, he was ignorant. The gold medallist from an Agricultural College is ignorant when he begins to practise farming. Though the farmer’s craft engages the whole cyclopædia of science, and there is no limit to the knowledge it demands, its practice is essentially one of observation and local experience. To those the “chacarero” comes as well equipped as another. His ignorance is but the reflection of his environment.It is also said of him that he is greedy, and undertakes a larger area than he can cultivate. Again, his greed is but the reflection of the landowner’s. He is called to the land on terms that exclude all fixity of tenure, maintenance of soil values, smallfarming, rotation or live-stock values; terms that merely bind him to plough as best he can a given area, to seed it in cereals that will enable his landlord to collect without inconvenience his rent in kind, delivered “dry, sound and bagged” at the foot of the threshing mill; to continue this process for three or more years; and at the end of his term to go to the devil if his unsuccess has not already landed him in that quarter.In a scheme of agriculture that was to take no heed of the permanent thrift of the land and the man who tilled it we have failed; as we deserved to fail, most miserably. We have built upon this most uncertain apex as a base, an inverted pyramid by which ocean and land carriers, merchants, brokers, speculators, and every branch of parasite commerce were to wax lustily. We may devise as we will rural credits, schools of agriculture, prophets of agrarian science, bellowing from the tail-end of peripatetic railway coaches, grants of seed, warrants, elevators, labour-saving machinery, and every other panacea to nurse the sick field labourer. Until we give him fixity of tenure he will continue to be a sick man. There has been no other solution to agricultural problems of the past. There can be no other solution. Our present rural population, concentrated on less than the present area they are engaged in cultivating, with continuity of usufruct or compensation for improvements secured to them, would produce a larger cereal harvest than they now do, and add to the wealth of our animal produce, and still more to the accumulation of our national thrift.
It should rather befall the man who cries to the shoeblacks and hotel waiters of the city, than to us who are of the land, to plead the cause of the colonist. But let us state his case for him.
An examination of the meteorological conditions, the constitution of the soil, the economy of inland collection, and theaverage proximity of the radial point of export to the site of production has usually convinced the intelligent traveller, very especially if his intelligence is engaged in ocean or land transport, that the Argentine is the garden of the world.
A closer examination of the abruptness of the thermographical curves and their relation to soil foods and the growth and harvest of its products; the difficulty of collecting from units of large area, and at the precise moment of their maximum yield and maturity, the seeds of annuals; the yet unbridged gulf between the field of production and the main channels of its collection;—might well lead the intelligent traveller to a contrary conclusion. When he ceased to generalize he would find the lot of the agriculturist was not as easy as it looked.
Burmeister no doubt overstated the case if he said that wheat would never prosper in the Pampa soil. If he said that wheat cultivation would not prosper in the Pampa except under skilled husbandry we could find it easy, after twenty years’ experience, to agree with him.
Meantime the best has been done to make it unsuccessful. The agriculturist, if we are to call him one, is let loose on a five hundred acre pitch of the prairie. In so many cases that one is entitled to generalize, he set out on borrowed land with borrowed implements to scratch the soil for three, four or five years and sow wheat on it.
If he is asked whether he sows winter or spring wheat he does not know. If he is asked how many tons of straw he harvests, he neither knows nor cares. If he is asked what calcium carbonate and nitrate are, he thinks they are sheep dips, but is not quite sure. If he is questioned on rotation, he waves his hand to the rolling Russian thistle that gathers like a snowdrift against every obstacle.
His house is, at best, an enlarged sardine tin. He has neither barn, byre nor pigsty. He has no enclosures for cattle, sheep or poultry. He has no garden. He has not a single tree to shelter him from the sun. With land suited for every form of live stock and field farming he is enslaved to the deadly monotony of wheat growing.
There may be countries with a soil and climate such that white straw crops can be grown for a large number of years in succession without exhausting the land or setting up soil sickness. We know it is done at experimental farms such as Rothamsted. But we know too that the efficiency of soil culture in pursuit ofthese experiments is beyond the practical ability of the colonist; nor is the economy of the farm an item that is taken into consideration. We know, because we have witnessed it, that in this country after the colonist’s term of four or five years, during which he has collected an average crop of eight bushels per acre, is ended, what remains is a five hundred acre field of weeds.
We can grow weeds. Whatever other merits may be denied to us we have achieved the production of a garden of weeds without equal in the world. Some of them are good plants for animal food, but out of place, for the colonist has not the means to make use of them for that purpose. Others are weeds of the most useless and noxious description. If it be true that the scabby Argentine sheep has been a source of wealth to European chemical manufacturers, the day must surely come when still greater fortunes will be made out of weed-spraying nostrums.
Until this agricultural arab whom we call a colonist is replaced by an occupant with permanent or sufficiently long fixity of tenure; until he has adequate barns, byres, sties, water sweet and cheap, a garden and a homestead; and until he is possessed of cattle, sheep, swine and poultry he will remain as economically lean and weak as the muzzled ox. We have talked much of rural banks to enable him to borrow more money; but we have not begun to put into practice the rural economy that will be followed by the rural bank as sure as summer follows spring. When the agriculturist profits, instead of loses, on the year’s overturn, he will build up the bank on his own thrift.
Within the economy of soil cultivation there is room for two alternatives only. Either the landowner must himself farm his land, or he must lease it with sufficient fixity of tenure and farming equipment to secure to his tenant the prospect of being able to pay a fair rent.
Agriculture in this country has very largely failed through an attempt to drive a middle course between these two alternatives. The landowner, usually one possessing a large area and hitherto a pastoralist, has seen, or has thought he saw, a larger profit to be earned by turning his soil to agriculture. Instead of putting it to the test by turning agriculturist, he has paid his intelligence the sorry compliment of believing that an illiterate Italian, spewed up on our shores may be a year since, could earn this large profit if he were let loose upon the prairie withoutfurther capital or assistance than the right to plough the soil, in exchange for a share of the harvest, to be delivered threshed and bagged to his landlord.
The benefits the landlord has derived from this, in a great majority of cases, have been to collect a smaller rent than he could have earned if he had depastured or farmed the land himself; and to receive back at the end of three or four years his pasture land converted into a garden of weeds. The process is termed “improving the land by the plough.” Not long since properties in the market were advertised as especially attractive if they were “all under agriculture.”
Having sowed the wind the landlord is reaping the whirlwind. He has not only failed to profit by agriculture, but he has pledged the land and squandered the proceeds. The matter is not that such silly methods of rack-renting, bonanza farming, land gutting and money lending have wrought their own confusion. It is the loss to the industrial community, to the rural population, and to the national thrift that lays bare the defects of the system. These are the fruits. We have to look into the ordering of our agricultural industry, not as determined by a “good year” or “bad year,” a “dry” or “wet” year, but by such a readjustment of our rural economy that the soil shall be no longer cultivated at a loss. It is necessary to unmuzzle the ox. Without the aid of domestic live stock the colonist can neither profit from the by-products and fallow of the land, nor can he restore to the soil the factors necessary to yield crops that are of themselves profitable.
Neither have we been careful to conserve and stimulate the settlement of a truly agricultural population on the land. We have exported the cult of sterility from the old world to the new. We have measured in this new world a field of production, not for the labourers, but for their European mandatories. It was said in the days of the Spanish dominion that America was the “factoria” of the mother country. She has seemingly not yet ceased to be regarded as a “factoria.”
We take pride that we export so much and need so little. We call it a favourable “balance of trade.” We spread abroad pamphlets and graphic charts and dreary columns of ciphers to show how successfully we have gutted the land we live on to fill alien mouths. We display pictures of train loads of labour-saving machinery, glorying in the fact that one man aided by Pittsburg steel and Cardiff coal can fend off twenty familiesfrom a thousand acres, and garner the yield for the contentment of fat-handed brokers eating lobsters in a distant city.
Had the matter been understood rightly by the “estanciero” of a generation or two ago, nay, even by this present generation, he would have put a premium on fecundity. His business was to encourage population; but while he drowsed in siesta hour over the newspaper proclaiming the arrival of alien immigration and smiling unctuously at the intelligence, he condemned his own men to celibacy, unwilling to spend the price of five bullocks on a mud hut to cradle the generation on his own land of a race of lusty yeomen. He took pride in the number of calves and lambs born on his estate. It would have beseemed him better to take pride in the number ofbabiesborn there.
Such a consummation would be vastly upsetting to Malthusian economists who view with jealousy the peopling of new fields of production. They would have us believe that it is only here by the overflowing of the Nile, and there by the discovery of the New World, that the human race has been saved from famine. If we can no longer send 350,000 tons of meat and five million tons of cereals to the Old World our usefulness has passed away and our mission ended.
Fiddlesticks! Had the Pampas of South America, the pasture lands of Australia, and the wheat fields of Canada remained virgin there would have been ere now thousands of acres in Great Britain under glass and harnessing the solar spectrum and the electric currents of air to manufacture food for the people. Feminists, instead of rending other people’s garments to bewail the departure of their mankind, would be conjuring out of four-inch potsherds fruit rich and rare for the household. If among the social economists of the present generation there is a disposition to revert to the Malthusian creed; in this spacious country, and as far as the vegetative population is concerned, there is no need to raise the voice of alarm. National progress and thrift will be soonest achieved by the increase of the national population; and, without closing the doors to useful alien immigration, the welfare of the community should be dependent rather upon the increase of the family than upon the overflow population from other lands. … Under our present system of agriculture the domestic requirements of the country are sacrificed to foreign demand. We measure our progress by our export trade of raw produce. When we speak of agriculture whatwe really mean is the production of maize, wheat and linseed for shipment abroad.
It is to this end that so much has been heard of warrants, elevators and other devices to enable the farmer to dispose of his crop. They are in some degree devices for his own security; but they are in a much greater degree devices to secure for the export of cereals a more regular flow from the sources that supply it. The time is no doubt distant when this country shall have a population sufficient to consume the raw produce of its soil; but by turning our eyes constantly to its export trade as the sole source of its production we have not only limited the lines of our agricultural production, but we have neglected complementary lines that would have increased that export trade by maintaining soil values.
The cereal that gives the best return from a large area of our Pampa soil and climate is barley. Being shallow-rooted our indifferent tilth suffices for its seed bed; and being short lived it can be sown late and harvested early, reducing the risks from frost and drought. The “chacarero” who produces 8 fanegas of wheat could produce on averages from the same soil and with no better husbandry 18 fanegas of barley per hectare. In food equivalents that is equal to 280 kilogrammes of pork.
The “chacarero” does not grow barley for the same reason that he neglects or ignores almost every branch of agriculture except wheat, maize and linseed. For the same reason that he neglects rotation, fallow and weeds; vegetables and small fruits; live-stock breeding and feeding; poultry, dairy, and bee-hiving, tree planting; and the greatest of all cultures—home culture. He has no fixity of tenure. There is no other reason.
It is said of the Argentine “chacarero” that he is ignorant and incapable of good husbandry. When he first began, of course, he was ignorant. The gold medallist from an Agricultural College is ignorant when he begins to practise farming. Though the farmer’s craft engages the whole cyclopædia of science, and there is no limit to the knowledge it demands, its practice is essentially one of observation and local experience. To those the “chacarero” comes as well equipped as another. His ignorance is but the reflection of his environment.
It is also said of him that he is greedy, and undertakes a larger area than he can cultivate. Again, his greed is but the reflection of the landowner’s. He is called to the land on terms that exclude all fixity of tenure, maintenance of soil values, smallfarming, rotation or live-stock values; terms that merely bind him to plough as best he can a given area, to seed it in cereals that will enable his landlord to collect without inconvenience his rent in kind, delivered “dry, sound and bagged” at the foot of the threshing mill; to continue this process for three or more years; and at the end of his term to go to the devil if his unsuccess has not already landed him in that quarter.
In a scheme of agriculture that was to take no heed of the permanent thrift of the land and the man who tilled it we have failed; as we deserved to fail, most miserably. We have built upon this most uncertain apex as a base, an inverted pyramid by which ocean and land carriers, merchants, brokers, speculators, and every branch of parasite commerce were to wax lustily. We may devise as we will rural credits, schools of agriculture, prophets of agrarian science, bellowing from the tail-end of peripatetic railway coaches, grants of seed, warrants, elevators, labour-saving machinery, and every other panacea to nurse the sick field labourer. Until we give him fixity of tenure he will continue to be a sick man. There has been no other solution to agricultural problems of the past. There can be no other solution. Our present rural population, concentrated on less than the present area they are engaged in cultivating, with continuity of usufruct or compensation for improvements secured to them, would produce a larger cereal harvest than they now do, and add to the wealth of our animal produce, and still more to the accumulation of our national thrift.
In Uruguay progress is still possible to the existing population; since the consequences of the civil disturbances which until recently paralysed the production of this country, by the constant commandeering of men, horses and supplies by one or other of the combatant parties, have not yet been overcome by the existing settlers who, therefore, still have work ready to their hands. Nevertheless, for Uruguay also it is a case of the more the merrier; more available labour, more rapidly increased agricultural output. Once means are found for an appreciable and constant increase of the population of these countries, immediate results of such increase may be expected not only from their production of Cereals, Live Stock and the “Secondary” products already enumerated,but also from coffee, chicory, tea, arrowroot, sugar-beet, sweet sorghum, hops, cinnamon, vanilla and very many others, for the cultivation of all of which favourable conditions are to be found in one or other of the various climates found between the many degrees of latitude traversed by the length of Argentina and the various altitudes between the Argentine Andine frontier line and the sea.
At the same time much could be done for their own comfort and prosperity by farmers, in the ample time which their chief occupations necessarily leave them, by the cultivation of some of these secondary products for their and their neighbours’ use. At present their almost unaccountable neglect to do so justifies anobiter dictumof the great Argentine statistician, Dr. Francisco Latzina, in a Monograph by him attached to the last Argentine agricultural Census.
“It seems to me,” Dr. Latzina says, “that the Ministry of Agriculture ought to take a decided initiative in encouraging horticulture which, as we see, does not supply the National demand. To add to the climax, even eggs are imported in this year of grace. If this goes on, the day will come, perhaps, when bread and milk shall be imported in order to be able to export all the wheat, flour and butter produced in the country.” (By “horticulture” Dr. Latzina means, in this connection, the produce of the Kitchen garden.)
It is a fact that, as he says elsewhere in the same Monograph, garlic and onions, peas and beans figure among the imports of a country possessing millions of acres of fertile land! While the farmer frequently buys his potatoes at the Store. This neglect on his part of everything which does not savour of export is one of the factors of dear living in Argentina. Uruguay is on a somewhat different footing in this regard, her rural population having, as has already been indicated, still about as much as it can do in making good the ravages of past Revolutions.
Still Uruguay sends vegetables to Buenos Aires, andUruguayan housewives complain of the high prices of Kitchen stuff which, consequently, now rule in the Montevidean markets.
A very large proportion indeed of the whole of the Republic of Uruguay may be considered as cultivable. In Argentina the question of how much of the whole area of that country may be so considered is yet without exact solution.
In this regard therefore it may be well again to quote Dr. Latzina, who says:—[38]
It is difficult to determine even approximately the cultivable area of Argentina, because hitherto, and yet for some time to come, the extent covered by mountains, deserts, salt marshes, sand-hills, swamps, moors and lagoons, and the Patagonian table-lands, which are almost entirely uncultivable—not so much so on account of the poor soil, but on account of the want of water and the boisterous and continuous winds which blow incessantly day and night in those parts. A calculation such as I wish to make can only be roughly made, and I may say that I doubt if the cultivatable area of Argentina be greater than half its total area—in round numbers, 150,000,000 hectares.
It is difficult to determine even approximately the cultivable area of Argentina, because hitherto, and yet for some time to come, the extent covered by mountains, deserts, salt marshes, sand-hills, swamps, moors and lagoons, and the Patagonian table-lands, which are almost entirely uncultivable—not so much so on account of the poor soil, but on account of the want of water and the boisterous and continuous winds which blow incessantly day and night in those parts. A calculation such as I wish to make can only be roughly made, and I may say that I doubt if the cultivatable area of Argentina be greater than half its total area—in round numbers, 150,000,000 hectares.
Dr. Latzina then suggests the reservation of two-thirds of that area for stock-breeding, leaving only 50,000,000 hectares for pure agriculture.
However, hardly one-half of this last-mentioned area is as yet under cultivation; leaving plenty of room for the present for the extension of agriculture.
This fact of very large areas within the Territory of the Argentine Republic being, chiefly for climatic reasons (e.g. the more southern and the mountainous parts of Patagonia), unfit for either cultivation or pasturage, except in the latter regard for goats and perhaps the very roughest kinds of sheep, should not be lost sight of when comparing Argentina with Uruguayan statistics. One eminent Uruguayan AgriculturalAuthority, for instance, has triumphantly referred (in, it must be considered, a more patriotic than strictly scientific spirit) to the fact, as stated by him, that the value of the Exports of Uruguay, per square mile of that Republic’s territory, are double those, similarly reckoned, of Argentina. Even accepting his figures as correct, which Argentine statisticians do not, the deduction he obviously suggests is certainly based on fallacious reasoning; indeed, the very comparison itself is misleading.
Uruguay is a small, compact country not two-thirds the size of the Province of Buenos Aires, containing practically no exclusively mountainous or arid or otherwise desert large areas and none of the obstacles, of distance, or other kinds, encountered by transport in Argentina.
Truly some statistics suggest that their compilers believe that “Figures can be made to prove anything.”
In connection with Agriculture, locusts still unfortunately succeed in not letting themselves be forgotten. From time to time vast swarms of these rapacious insects appear, covering and darkening the sky for leagues. They come from their breeding centres, undoubtedly somewhere in the huge virgin tracts in the western tropical regions of Brazil. Many well-meaning persons have counselled measures for their extermination there. A counsel of perfection, alas! Those who have preached have never been even on the frontiers of the thousands of square leagues of tropical forest and undergrowth which yet have scarcely ever heard the voice of man. To dream of exterminating locusts there is as if one proposed to empty a running stream with a bucket. An impossibility.
All that can be done is to attack and destroy the swarms when they have arrived. For this purpose special and, it should at once be said, very successful organization have been brought into existence by the Argentine National Government with the loyal concurrence and aid of the Provincial Governments and by the Uruguayan Government.
At first theDefensa Agricola, as this organization is called, encountered a good deal of passive resistance from rural landowners who, doubting its efficacy and seeing in it or affecting to see in it, rather a means of affording remunerative jobs for Government hangers-on, declared that its officials who pervaded the country requisitioning labour and supplies were a worse nuisance than the locusts themselves.
The Defensa Agricola continued its work, however, unheeding of such protests; and now, for some time past, may be said to have fully justified its existence and its methods by results in both countries.
It has its centres of observation, like any other force prepared to repel invasion, and, on the coming of a swarm being signalled, every human being in its course is called upon to aid in the defence.
The plan of this defence consists, briefly, in driving and sweeping the insects into trenches backed with long lines of sheets of corrugated iron, placed together end to end. Once gathered into these trenches the locusts are burned; and by the untiring continuance of this process they are gradually destroyed before much damage (very small indeed compared with the ravages of pre-Defensa Agricola days) has been done.
The sweeping-up process can be usefully employed for the extermination of settled swarms otherwise its members will quickly proceed to deposit eggs which later would hatch into young “hoppers” born with infinitely more voracious appetites than even their parents had.[39]
Locusts, as has been seen, come from the North and in the normal course of their nature would disappear again in that direction, leaving bare fields and their hungry young behind them in memory of their visit. Still in recent years, beforethe full development of the Defensa Agricola, it appeared that locusts had actually become acclimatized in some regions of both Republics, notably in the Southern part of the Province of Buenos Aires and in the Territory of the Rio Negro, and therefore did not return North but managed to survive frost.
This last menace may now, however, be considered as past.
The Defensa Agricola does not only devote its attention to locusts. It possesses a highly trained scientific staff which combats the invasions of all the other insect pests which from time to time threaten the crops, vines or fruit and other trees and useful vegetation. It issues clear instructions as to the treatment to be applied in each case and punishes noncompliance with its orders by fines which it is empowered to inflict.
Agriculture has much for which to thank this Institution in respect of protection against pests; the danger from which was increasing with the importation of vines and fruit trees from other countries.
The Argentine organization is under the direct control of the Ministry of Agriculture[40]; an indefatigable Government Department the immensely wide sphere of whose work is ever increasing; Division being added to Division as need arises from the ever-increasing number of the branches of National Industry, whether agricultural or not. For instance, it is only quite lately that anything like complete official statistics have been obtainable in relation to internal manufactures. The country regarded itself, as it was regarded abroad, as purely agricultural in the broad sense including Live Stock production. Now these statistics are regularly issued by the “Division of Commerce and Industry” so admirably directed and watched over by Señor Ricardo Pillado; a veteran the list of whose valuable economic services to the State dates from the financialrenaissance which followed the disastrous year 1891; in which renaissance he played a very leading part.
Señor Pillado was largely instrumental in the devising and carrying into execution of the drastic financial remedies rendered necessary by the culminating abuses of the Juarez Celman regime; and it is to his practical and patriotic genius that the Argentine statistical diagrams and many other statistics of that country reproduced in this book owe their existence and annual reappearances in the simple and striking forms which is their very salient feature.
DEVELOPMENT OF ARGENTINE AGRICULTURE
DEVELOPMENT OF ARGENTINE AGRICULTURE
The total value of the Agricultural Exports during 1914 was some $200,000,000 (gold), but recovery was made in 1915 to some $320,000,000 (gold) during the latter year.
The Argentine harvests of 1915-16 are estimated in round figures at:
The Maize crop is as yet unascertained at the time of writing.
The corresponding Uruguayan figures are as yet unobtainable. The Statistical Department of this Republic was reorganized in 1912, but, no doubt, has had to cope with enormous arrears. Still it is regrettable that authoritative statistics regarding this country are difficult, when not impossible, to obtain.
In 1913 Uruguay exported agricultural products of the value of $(Uruguayan) 1,857,000. 400,000 hectares in Uruguay were under wheat, a slightly less area under maize; the cultivation of oats was increasing rapidly, and that of barley slowly.
As has already been mentioned, the present (1915-16) harvests are reported as generally splendid in both countries though labour presents a serious problem, as do freights and scarcity of ships for export. Such complications have been prevalent and are likely to prevail throughout the war.
Naturally, the soil of such a vast area as that covered by the two Republics of Argentina and Uruguay is varied to an extent with which a book like the present cannot attempt to deal adequately. The greatest feature is, however, the celebrated Pampean formation which obtains over the whole of the Province of Buenos Aires, the greater parts of the Provinces of Santa Fé, Córdoba, San Luis and Mendoza, the National Territory of the Pampa Central, the Republic ofUruguay, and extends southwards beyond the Argentine Rio Negro. In many places on this formation there are also later alluvial deposits.
The lightest soils, those with the smallest proportion of clay and consequently the loosest, are found in the West, near the Andes.
Starting from the most sandy western region, the soil grows more and more compact towards the east, along the River Paraná, the South of the Province of Santa Fé and most of the Republic of Uruguay, the Northern part of the Province of Buenos Aires (where rather heavy soils predominate); while in the South and South-West, that is to say the southern portion of the Province of Córdoba, the National Territory of the Pampa Central and the central and southern part of the Province of Buenos Aires, the soil is of lighter, though firmer consistency, than that of the western part.
The generally salient qualities of the Pampean soil are richness in humus, deficiency in lime and good proportions of nitrogen and phosphoric acid. A characteristic feature of the subsoil is stratified layers of more or less calcareous concretions known asTOSCA(tufa or tophos stone). This layer is sometimes deep down; but in the southern region of the Province of Buenos Aires, beginning at Tandíl and Azul, it reaches nearly to the surface, so as to appear immediately under the soil, thus forming a waterproof subsoil impenetrable by roots.
The present writer has seen wheat growing on less than an inch of soil above the tosca; the roots spreading out at right angles to the stalks.
These layers of tosca or, in other parts, clay, are of great importance for holding water; seldom at any great distance from the surface.
On low and level plains when the soil is light or loose, chains of sand-hills are formed by the prevailing winds. Some of these are kept stationary by quick-growing vegetation,while others are constantly shifting. The shifting sandhill is, however, fast disappearing in consequence of the advances of pastoral industry; for, and by, which they are becoming fixed by herbaceous growth.
The tosca and clay subsoils have in many parts occasioned the formation of lagoons and swamps; the waters of which are, usually, at least brackish and often salt. A white or grey efflorescence seen in these swamps is locally called saltpetre, but in fact it only contains slight traces of nitre.
Towards the extreme North of the Province of Entre Rios and the Republic of Uruguay red soil heralds one’s approach to subtropical or tropical vegetation.
General Mitre, in hisHistory of Belgrano, has said of the River Plate Territories:—