The Pampas

“Jaguars that used to roam the vast Pampas and Northern Patagonia were extirpated, and the species is presently restricted to three isolated and critically endangered populations in the Northern tip of the country… Between 2015 and 2016 the first pair of jaguars arrived to this breeding center from Argentinean zoos. These animals won't be released, but their offspring could grow without human contact and learning to hunt by themselves, so they can be released in the wild... On January, 2017, a second male, Chiqui, arrived to the project from Paraguay, granted for a period of time by Yacyretá´s reserve, Antinguy... In May, a second female arrived to Aguará rescue Center to go through her quarantine phase... With the arrival of this female, the breeding stock is intended to be strengthened.”

“Many scientists agree that meat consumption is intrinsically tied to climate change... But in Argentina, conservationists argue that raising beef on natural grasslands is a sustainable tradition, and much better suited to the biodiversity of the grassland, called ‘the Pampas,' than industrial row-crop agriculture and feedlots. Just 20 years ago, virtually all of Argentina's cows still grazed freely. But as global agriculture markets boomed, it became harder for cattle farmers to resist the quick profit from soy, wheat, and corn... ‘Basically, cow production got pushed out of the Argentine Pampas,' says Ricardo Sager, director of scientific and technological development at Argentina's National Institute of Agricultural Technology... At one farm in Entre Rios, Argentina, ranchers are trying to turn Sager's argument on its head, by contributing to the creation of a premium for beef for the first time ever in Argentina's history. There, on 65,000 acres alongside the Paraná River, 20,000 cows graze without being bothered by humans. The herd, owned by Estancia Grass Fed Beef, is one of the largest pasture-raised herds of steer in the world. ‘We're essentially working in the traditional Argentine model,' says J.P. Thieriot, the co-founder of Estancia, ‘which not long ago was a model for sustainable farming.' That model, he explains, involves grazing and fertilizing by free-range cattle for five to seven years, until the ground is primed for a short (one- to two-year) crop cycle.”

“Outside the town of Villegas, in the western Argentine Pampas, the land appears as a tri-colored patchwork in mid-summer. There's the deep green of corn leaves, the lighter green soybeans, and the straw colored stubble of corn stalks that have been sprayed with pesticides after harvest. That's just about it for as far as the eye can see, which in this case is far.... But if you're familiar with how this land has looked for decades, you realize there's something missing: pasture... Across the more than 120 million acres of the Pampas, grass is being torn up and the land planted in genetically modified soy. The cattle are being pushed into feedlots or sent north and west to lands too poor to grow crops, just as happened in the U.S. corn-belt decades ago. And, as in the United States, as the cattle move out, industrial farms growing fewer and fewer crops with more and more pesticides and fertilizers are taking their place. The very nature of Pampean agriculture —which along with the gaucho myth lies at the heart of Argentine consciousness—is changing.”

“The expansion of soybean in Argentina has been impressive: introduced in the early 1970s, the soybean area (production) reached 5.1 Million hectares in 1990 and exploded to 14.0 Million hectares in 2005, displacing other crops, pastures, and forests... While Argentina enjoys the economic benefits of soybean exports ($US4.5 B in the first half of 2006; 20% of all exports), worries are growing about soybean monoculture, and the expansion of cultivated land over natural ecosystems.”

“As soon as the plane ascends from the sprawling capital on the Rio de la Plata, the pampa comes into view, stretching in a semicircle for hundreds of flat, green, treeless and fertile miles. The pampa, an agricultural zone matched only perhaps by the American Midwest, remains the source of Argentina's wealth. It sets thecountry apart from the rest of Latin America, elevates its people to the brink of a European standard of living and makes the nation potentially one of the most affluent in the world.”

“These are our brothers, our land the pampa

Where nothing stops, where nothing passes.

It is where the wind is a muleteer and the hills walk.

These are our brothers, our land the pampa

Where there are many mares, where there are many cows,

And many guanacos, deer and ranges.

These are our brothers, our land the pampa,

Where there is good grass and good watering.

Caldén and carob tree have good branches.

These are our brothers, our land the pampa,

We live under awnings. When the weather changes,

We changed the awnings. This is our house.

These are our brothers, our land the pampa.

It is not narrow earth. The earth is very wide.

For as much as they want, all reach them.

These are our brothers, our land the pampa”

“Birds in Buenos Aires, probably the best studied group of wildlife in the biome, suffered four grassland species extinctions... Of these, eskimo curlew (Numenius borealis), a medium sized, migratory shorebird that nested in the North American tundra, is the only globally extinct species. This bird once visited the pampas in flocks, but the last sightings in Argentina were in 1939. Although the causes of its extinction are not clear, habitat transformation and heavy hunting in its nesting and wintering areas are at least partly responsible.”

“On the greenish-brown expanses of the untilled Pampa the horizon is as level as that of the sea and disappointingly near. Here and there are patches of brilliant red flowers clinging close to the soil, farther on there is a stretch of silvery grass bowing and changing slightly in color with every puff of wind. But when you have crossed 700 miles of these plains are drawing into the Province of Mendoza the scene becomes dismal and dusty. Here is bare, dry sand thinly grown with stunted thorn bushes, with occasional miserable hovels unfit for men— nothing else.”

“Another hour brought the ‘army' out upon the sabana: a gently rolling plain covered with breast-high pampas and dotted here and there with small palm islands and with depressions were pools from flooding river or tropic rains still lingered. ‘Now here again are bad things we have to look out for,' said Mendez. ‘Keep close on the trail I make. Look!' Dick peered down at a heap of clean-picked bones in a patch of broken glass.... ‘Yes. A jaguar ate a cow there not long ago and the vultures tidied up after him… a jaguar eats steadily and ravenously until he can hold no more; then he crawls off into the grass to sleep...”

“The view from the post of Cufre, in Banda Oriental, was pleasing: an undulating green surface, with distant glimpses of the Plata… after galloping over the Pampas, my only surprise is, what could have induced me ever to have called it level. The country is a series of undulations... From these unevennesses there is an abundance of small rivulets, and the turf is green and luxuriant. The number of the animals remains imbedded in the grand estuary deposit which forms the Pampas, and covers the granitic rocks of Banda Oriental, must be extraordinarily great. I believe a straight line drawn in any direction through the Pampas would cut through some skeleton or bones.”

“And so one night, I was out there gazing at the stars, which it seems are more beautiful the more unhappy you are, and that God must have created them for us to find comfort there.

A man feels love for them, and it's always with joy that he sees the Three Maries* coming out -- because when there's been rain, as soon as it clears, on the pampa, the stars are a gaucho's guide.

Your Professors are no good here, experience is all that counts. Here, those people who know everything would see how little they know – because this has another key to it, and a gaucho knows what it is,

It's a sad thing to spend whole nights out in the midst of the plain, gazing at the stars that God created, in their course, without any company except the wild beasts, and your loneliness.”

“Behind the woods, to the eastward, towards the mountains of the Rioia, and those of the vale of Catamarca, are vast plains, where there is plenty of pasture, but without any fresh water whatsoever, except what is collected in lakes in rainy seasons... notwithstanding these disadvantages, the soil is not unfruitful, when duly cultivated, and produces water and musk melons, of a prodigeous size, and the best flavored of any that grow in these countries... Corn is also raised here in great quantities, and sent to Cordoba and Buenos Aires.”

“By the 1750's, large estancias (ranches, or landed properties) with growing cattle herds were becoming common around Buenos Aires; increasing the supply of hides and helping the city's economy develop. Still without the technology to fence in vast areas of land, estancias were typically areas of high quality pasture bordered by rivers or other barriers where exploitation of the herds could at least be more rationally managed.”

“The earliest trace of the horse in the pampa dates to 1536 when Pedro de Mendoza brought several and left them with the unfortunate first colony of Buenos Aires. Upon the abandonment of the city in 1541, many were left behind. These animals fled to the pampa where they multiplied profusely. At the end of the sixteenth century great herds of wild horses inhabited the pampa.”