We finally landed in Buenos Aires at 11:00 AM local time. It was a long flight and we had a little hiccup in Houston as Argentina hadn't informed us that we would need to pay our entry fee before landing in country. Then we were off to immigration and into the bus for a nice long drive across the country.
Our first farm visit was the dairy operation known as Estancia San Miguel. We met with Raul Lockey and he served as our guide to explain their operation. They milk 1,000 head of holstein cross cattle. Most of their land is used for pasture land, including grazing the cows on soybeans!
As we jumped into the backs of trucks for our tour to see the cows they explained that the cattle are continually grazed and do not use a complete ration as we would use in the US. The most surprising thing to most of us was to see the cows grazing in soybean fields. As Chris Opdahl "I just can't wrap my head around grazing cattle soybeans, that is some expensive milk". These cows are milked twice a day (4:00 AM & 2:00 PM), however the interesting part is because of their grazing they end up walking ~5 km (~3.1 miles for the rest of us) everyday and are rounded up by one person on foot.
It was a great visit and we are all getting an appreciation for Argentinian agriculture. As Shane Runge put it "It is just a whole different way of life".
We then spent the rest of the day and into the evening on a long bus ride to our final destination of the day, Catrilo. Our amazing hosts had dinner arranged at a pizza restaurant and it was great to unwind after a long day and a half of travel. Tomorrow we will be visiting the Fossati farm and moving onto Santa Rosa.
No comments:
Post a Comment