|
Colby, Kansas | What areas did you visit? I was in the Cordoba providence in fall of 2005, mostly around a small town not far from Marcos Juarez (in my mind I would compare that area to Eastern Nebraska, Western Iowa without hills), also went up north around Gutenberg (a little more like Central Nebraska). I was office mates with a guy whose family farms down there, he is now back there consulting and farming. They also farm some in the Chaco providence (more like the High Plains, sunflowers and grain sorghum). He keeps me informed on whats going on down there. From what I gather I don't think land down there is really priced much differently than land here, they have experienced a steep increase in land values recently as well.
We also observed a lot of the bean ditches and a lot of grain bags. Visited with one producer who was running around 34 000 acres, he did have some irrigation, 4 towable valleys that he moved around. As I recall (I don't know where my notes are) the wells were quite deep (5 - 600 ft maybe). Two things I will give them credit for, they have been quick learners about adopting no-till and most are firm believers in rotations. The operations we visited were insistent on keeping wheat in the rotation for residue, and then rotating through two years of corn, two years of beans, back to wheat. I think they have better cropping systems than what you typically hear from South America (namely Brazil). I think a lot of this ties back to a different management strategy, most everyone was focused on the long term.
We were down there to do some precision ag stuff, and it was also interesting to see their different beliefs in technology adoption, here in the US where the farm owner/operator is also the primary source of labor, the big push was/is on autosteer, guidance, labor-saving technologies. Down there at the time you mentioned autosteer and they just kind of shrugged their soulders. But mention soil sampling, veris, yield mapping, VRT, etc. they got extremely excited and were making great strides in their operations. Basically what it boiled down to was the guy farming 20 000+ acres was a businessman and a manager first, labor is cheap and he's interested in things that will help him manage.
I'm looking forward to going back I really enjoyed it down there, though twice about coming back. When I got back everyone kept asking what I thought, my reply was "Beautiful Land, Beautiful Women, and cheap diesel fuel, what more could you want?" Saving money to maybe go down this next new years.
Sorry for the long post, thanks for letting me reminisce.
Lucas
Edited by LHaag 2/27/2008 19:42
 (P1010124-1.JPG)
 (IMG_0758.JPG)
 (IMG_0732.JPG)
Attachments
----------------
 P1010124-1.JPG (88KB - 60 downloads)
IMG_0758.JPG (65KB - 60 downloads)
IMG_0732.JPG (93KB - 61 downloads)
| |
|
Argentine solutions... (pix)
