CHAPTER VIII
AGRICULTURE
Area under Cultivation.—Oases in the Desert.—Farming in Central Chile.—Vineyards.—Wheatfields, Orchards and Sheep Farms.—Irrigation Canals.
“Agriculture in Chile and Buenos Aires has formed their population, while the mines of Peru have extinguished almost all the Empire of the Incas.” So wrote David Barry in his preface to the Noticias Secretas in 1826.
I think that no one who knows Chile today will dispute the suggestion that her fertile soil has chiefly contributed to her social well-being. It has brought white European settlers, able to rear families in a magnificent temperate climate; it has offered permanent homes and not a temporary field for the fortune-hunter. There is a spring of life about the farming region of Chile, a sense of energy, health and freshness that is extraordinarily exhilarating. Much of this land is still but newly opened: one may pass through hundreds of miles of land where the tree-stumps of the primeval forest still stand among the vigorous corn, where the farmhouse is but an impermanent thatched hut. But the dark rich earth, the lusty crops, the blossoming orchards and hedges, the green pastures with their sleek cattle, create a scene of genuine content. The holdings may be new, yet they are plainly homes. Chile possesses mines, but they drain rather than create populations; growing industries—weaving factories, grain mills, and a score of new employments which tend to concentrate wealth and culture; but it is in her farming lands that the truest cradle of the race, the frankest and strongest people, the most cheerful spirit, is found.
In actual figures the amount of land under cultivation in Chile is not immense, yet the farmlands produce not only sufficient grain and fruits to serve the needs of the inhabitants of both fertile and arid regions but also ship a surplus to the exterior markets of Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia.
Government statistics add up the total of land assigned to “agricultural properties” or farms to 18,000,000 hectares, or about 45,000,000 acres. But not all this land is under cultivation. The area devoted to cereals, beans and peas, potatoes and vegetables, is reckoned as about 4½ per cent of all Chilean territory, or 750,000 hectares, equal to two and a half times as many acres; vines and orchards, 111,000 hectares; planted woodland, 32,000 hectares. The cultivated pastures (grass, alfalfa, clover, etc.) attain the figure of about 520,000 hectares; while there are nearly 7,000,000 hectares of natural pastures. Twenty-two per cent of all national territory is ascribed to forest and woodland, much of it either utilisable for industry or at least covering the ground with a rich vegetable detritus of great future value to the farmer. Twenty-nine per cent of Chilean land areas is regarded as completely sterile, or at least negligible under present conditions.
This proportion of uncultivated or barren country appears high at first sight, but three great areas must be practically excluded from possible cultivation, although unlikely and long-neglected regions have of late triumphantly proved their worth as sheep pastures. The great, diversified and topographically fantastic Territory of Magellanes, comprising 71,000 square miles, has little to offer to the agriculturist.
Sheltered country as that in the vicinity of Punta Arenas produces certain field crops, while the limit of cultivable land both in Eastern Patagonia and upon the islands of Tierra del Fuego, Navarin, Brunswick, and other smaller groups, has not been reached with the establishment of sheep farms; but the barren and rocky lands on the borders of many channels, where blue glaciers creep to the edge of the water, and that part of the Strait region where the freezing gusts of the “williwaws” bend the heads of the drenched forests, is outside consideration until the climate changes.
Also beyond the vision of the farmer are the widespread, sun-scorched and waterless districts of the three northerly provinces of Atacama, Antofagasta and Tarapacá, covering more than 95,000 square miles of land: as well as most of the 9000 square miles of Tacna, whose final ownership is still undetermined. The third considerable region which is apparently destined to remain uncultivable is that of the rugged and broken foothills and heights of the Andean slopes of eastern Chile, where nothing lives but wild mountain birds and the hardy guanaco.
Reckoning in hectares, Magellanes counts an area of 3,214,000 hectares, or about 8,000,000 acres: yet only 133 hectares were under crops in 1919. At the same time the Island of Chiloé, with a surface of about 8600 square miles, had only 75 hectares in cultivation. As between the too-dry lands of the north and the too-rainy country of the south, agricultural advantages lie with the former, for wherever irrigation is possible the natural disabilities are at once overcome, and the rainless belt becomes magnificently fertile. The agriculturist of the Chilean lands below Puerto Montt is seldom able to risk planting a cereal crop, for even should the heavy rains not affect the fields adversely, the grain must be gathered green lest wind-storms should blow the ripened seed away. However, the discovery of the last few years that certain types of sheep (usually cross-bred Romney Marsh varieties similar to those reared in the Falklands) thrive in Chilean Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego and other once-despised Magellanic lands, has brought about an agreeable transformation in the agricultural industries, as in the revenue and population of the far south.