It is difficult to estimate, except in the most approximate manner, the cultivable area of the Argentine. It should be not less than half the total area, or, in round figures, 370 millions of acres. Of this estimate at least two-thirds represents land suitable for stock-raising, leaving available for the production of cereals about 122 millions of acres; of which, at the present time, only a fifth part is under cultivation. We may see, by this simple comparison between the future and the present, that agriculture has still a great future before it and a large margin of development.
To give a true idea of this power of production, it is enough to recall, with M. Emile Daireaux, who has described the great farms of the Argentine pampa, that the plough, under the most favourable of climates, meets no obstacles in the way of hills or forests; not a tree, not a rock, not even a pebble in the soil. All European crops give there an abundant harvest, without expenditure upon manure, without shelter for the stock; the colonist may even content himself with a modest wattled hut, protecting him from the mid-day sun or the cold breeze of the night. The soil is everywhere friable; no painful struggles retard the speed of the plough, which traces at one stretch a furrow miles in length without turning the ploughshare. The plough is drawn by four horses, reared at hazard in the open air, knowing no grooming, no complicated training; and sometimes a single hand is able to manage two teams and ploughs.
Thanks to the frequentation of these lands for centuries by horses and cattle, these alluvial deposits, rich in natural manures, have an apparently inexhaustible fertility. Awakened by labour from its eternal sleep, the soil is so vigorous that one finds numerous instances where the same grain, sown for twenty successive years in the same place, yields always the same abundant harvest.
The only serious scourge which can menace the creative power of the earth, independently of the always to be dreaded drought, is the invasion of locusts.
These invasions take the form of flying armies of locusts passing between earth and sky, and revealing their passage by the semi-darkness they produce in the regions over which they travel. Leaving the hot deserts of the tropical regions, the locusts advance in their phalanxes, sometimes 50 or 60 miles across; swarm succeeds swarm uninterruptedly for several days, leaving behind them no trace of vegetation. They till the wells, stop the trains, by opposing veritable barriers of their bodies, obstruct the rivers in which they drown, and sometimes even, by the accumulation of their bodies, form a bridge over which the rear-guard can pass.
Serious though this danger may be, especially in the more exposed provinces, such as Santa Fé, we must say, in honour to the Argentine Republic, that it has never paralysed initiative; as is proved by the continuous increase in the area of sown soil. Very fortunately, too, this plague, like that of Egypt’s in Pharaoh’s dream, is intermittent, and an interval of seven years often passes before its return. Moreover, various means are being put into practice for defence against this formidable evil; means for preventing the reproduction of the insect, or of checking its development before the period of flight.
A special organisation has been formed under the name of the “Commission of Agricultural Defence,” in order to coordinate and direct the work of protection from the devastations of the locust, and considerable sums are devoted to this object every year. Regiments, mobilised along the line of passage, sweep the agglomerated masses of insects, in dense ridges, towards the ditches full of quicklime in which they are buried. Hundreds of tons of locusts perish thus, but unhappily the plague seems neither cured nor diminished.[17]
[17] See Le Correspondent of the 10th of February, 1905, containing an article by M. Emile Daireaux.