Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
absentee landlords but successful capitalists who linked the production
of the countryside to domestic and export markets in the city.
Despite the visibility of wealthy ranchers, the small family ranch
and family farm were by far the most common productive units on
the Pampas. A majority of the ranchers lived on comparatively modest
spreads, which they worked with the aid of family members and a few
hired hands. The typical rural residential unit was a farm or small ranch
with six to eight people: a man, his wife, their children, a
peón
(hired
worker), an orphan, and perhaps a slave or a
liberto
(a child born to
slaves after 1813 and considered chattel until age 21, when he or she
became free). In addition, disparate sources seem to indicate a constant
turnover of land tenure. Business failures, trade recessions, the effects of
drought, and increasing costs of rural production provoked the sale and
rental of numerous rural properties. Renting rural property offered new-
comers, especially Europeans, the opportunity to operate ranches and
farms in this era of growing markets.
Expanding foreign trade accounts for much of the profit margin in
ranching, yet Argentine producers themselves had to streamline and
rationalize cattle production. The major cost-saving breakthroughs for
the cattle industry came in the marketing of livestock and livestock
products. In the 1810s, as in colonial times, the
estanciero
butchered
most of his own cattle and prepared the hides and tallow at the ranch.
An account book for 1812 reveals that one rancher made only 12 per-
cent of the year's revenues from the sale of live cattle—probably to the
butchers who purveyed beef to the residents of Buenos Aires. By mid-
century, however, any given
estanciero
sold a major part of his herd
on-the-hoof to the port's stockyards and slaughterhouses. Cattle drivers
delivered great herds of up to 800 head of cattle directly to
saladeros.
Because the meat-salting plants also produced tallow and grease, the
cattleman had to provide steers and cows with “fat meat.”
These changes in the final destination of his product contributed a
significant efficiency to the cattleman's operations. No longer did he
rely on the processing of hides and tallow on his own property or by his
own increasingly expensive employees. The
estanciero
now garnered 70
percent of his revenues from the sale of live animals. Much of the costly
processing of pastoral goods on the ranch was eliminated.
Labor Conditions in the Countryside
Constant expansion of cattle and sheep production on the Pampas
offered much economic and social opportunity for newcomers. An
