A curious feature of the camp are the large carts, with wheels 8 feet high, on which the wheat is taken from the camp to the railway station. They are drawn by oxen, ten or twelve being required for each cart, which will carry several tons. As the axles are never greased the noise made by these carts is frightful.
Labour, especially at harvest time, is scarce, for owing to the lack of granaries and elevators the grain must be gathered and threshed quickly, and though the latest reaping machines are, of course, used, the best of them require much auxiliary labour. Even in the busy harvest time, however, the midday siesta for everyone in the camp is not omitted, as the sun is extremely hot for two or three hours about noon.
The huge flocks of sheep, varying in size from 12,000 to 80,000, are mostly owned by New Zealand ranchers who have settled in Argentina in recent years. They are shepherded on the open pampas by gauchos on horseback, whose chief duty is to keep the flocks apart, and so prevent confusion of ownership or the spread of contagious diseases. Formerly the mutton was burnt as fuel, only the wool, tallow, and skins being sold; but since the advent of cold storage it has been exported. The wool is not washed before sale, and therefore fetches a low price. The shearing, which used to be done by hand, is now nearly all done by machinery. Travelling from ranch to ranch each shearer deals, on the average, with about a hundred sheep a day.
There is one farm where a flock of about 13,000 Lincoln ewes are milked in dairies, and a considerable profit made. The milk is made into cheese, which finds a ready sale. It is only in exceptionally rich pastures that this is done, and the utmost care is taken that the lamb does not suffer from the deprivation.
One of the most important changes of recent years has been the introduction of windmills for pumping water. In the absence of rivers and lakes a well worked by hand was used in the old days to draw water for the house, while the cattle would drink at the shallow lagunas in the hollows of the plain. But as the best land is higher up wells and troughs had to be made. First there was the "jaguel," worked by a horse and rider. Next came an arrangement of buckets on an endless chain, which brought up water and emptied it into the troughs or reservoirs. This was the "noria," and was worked by a horse or mule. But when the water level began to fall—some say through the introduction of alfalfa—and the lagunas to dry up, it was found necessary to dig deeper wells, and to adopt the use of semi-artesian wells. The water, which often is saline, is specially so when drawn from these semi-artesian wells.
The great scourge which the camp has to fight, as already shown, is the swarms of locusts which have come down annually from the north since 1905. Previous to that there had been freedom from this pest for five years. The invasion usually begins in October, when a few flying locusts may be seen. In a day or two they are arriving in millions, and at the worst are so numerous that they form a cloud over the face of the sun, and make a shadow beneath them. The principal damage is done by what is left behind by the locusts—for millions upon millions of eggs are deposited in the ground. In about six weeks the young are hatched. They cannot fly, but jump like grasshoppers, which, indeed, they very much resemble, except for their bright colouring—red and yellow, black and green. They move in swarms from stem to stem, and every fragment of green leaf disappears before their devouring energy. After they have visited a cornfield nothing is left but naked stalks. Six weeks later they develop wings, and swarms of them begin to fly across the sky like clouds or smoke from some great conflagration. They will alight in such heaps on a railway track that they sometimes stop a train.
Reference has already been made to the way in which the Government assists the landowners to fight this plague. Under penalty of a fine every landowner must maintain men to fight the locusts. But even if it were possible to exterminate all those on one estate, they might arrive in equal numbers from adjoining land, and a million are not missed from a thousand million. Unanimous action alone would be effective, and this the Government are trying to bring about. Meanwhile, a commission has been appointed to deal with the subject. It is probable that if the northern source from which they come could be found the country could rid itself of the trouble within a few years.