From 1895 onward the number of flocks of sheep on the Pampean plain decreased rapidly. The number of sheep had sunk from 34,000,000 in 1908 to 18,000,000 in 1915 for the Buenos Aires province; from 2,800,000 in 1908 to 2,300,000 in 1914 for the central Pampa. The reduction was general, and found in every district; but it was not equally great everywhere, and did not begin at the same date in every district. Sheep-breeding has almost entirely disappeared from the eastern belt, east of the Salado, which was its cradle. South of Buenos Aires the sheep are giving place to horned cattle, and they had almost disappeared by 1908. North of Buenos Aires they survived long, but the reduction of the flocks has only been the more rapid since 1908. This corresponds with the advance of maize-growing. In six years the Bartolome Mitre and Pergamino departments have lost, respectively, four-fifths and five-sixths of their sheep. In the north-west of the Buenos Aires province the sheep began to be reduced at the time when the lucerne farms were founded, about 1900. The decrease has since gone on uninterruptedly. The actual flocks represent one-fourth of the flocks of 1895. In the south-west (wheat belt) there was a rapid shrinkage before 1908, but it seems to have almost been arrested since then, thanks to the combining of sheep-rearing with wheat and oats. The actual flocks are about one-half the flocks of 1895. Finally, in the area north of the Sierra de Tandil the sheep retreat before the cattle, as they do further north, but they are not so completely wiped out as in the lucerne belt, and the flocks are still two fifths of the flocks of twenty years ago.
In the province of Entre Rios and south of Corrientes the number of sheep continued to rise until 1908, but the increase is only in the northern departments, outside the agricultural belt. The southern departments, which are large growers of wheat and flax, lost one-third of their flocks between 1895 and 1908.
Cattle-breeding was restricted for a long time by the difficulty of disposing of its products. The hides alone found ready buyers. The making and export of salt beef dates from the eighteenth century, and it was to help this industry that the expeditions to the salt-beds of the Pampa and the journeys of salters to the Patagonian coast were organized. From 1792 to 1796 no less than 39,000 quintals of jerked beef were sent from the Rio de la Plata to Havana. But the market for salt meat (tasajo) was always limited. It consisted only of the Antilles and Brazil, and the saladeros never fully exploited the meat-producing capacity of the Argentine herds. The crisis of the saladeros occurred before the time when the refrigerators began to compete with them. By 1889 there were only three left in the province of Buenos Aires.
Although the price of cattle was not very remunerative, and provided no incentive to improve the breeding; although the saladero was not at all exorbitant, merely asking for animals in good condition, the improvement of the herd by introducing selected pedigree-breeders had begun about the middle of the nineteenth century. The Basque dairies established in the district near Buenos Aires sold pedigree-calves to the ranches, and these were used for breeding purposes.[93] About 1880 the advance of sheep-breeding pressed the cattle-ranches back and disputed the space with them more and more, within the ancient Indian frontier. The smallness of the market for cattle and their slight mercantile value were very favourable circumstances for the occupation of the new lands, thrown open at this date by the submission of the Indians. The herds which found no buyers were sent to the campos de afuera. The ranches developed very rapidly. Daireaux has very accurately described this period of pastoral colonization, and the starting of convoys that were intended to give a population to the west of the Pampa. Cattle were there several years before sheep. As a matter of fact, breeders do not regard cattle as having a value of their own. They are merely auxiliaries that must improve the pasture and prepare the ground for sheep. The cattle themselves are preceded by troops of half-wild horses which first take possession of the virgin field and begin the transformation of it.
The number of cattle increases rapidly. In 1875 it was estimated that there were 5,000,000 head of cattle in the province of Buenos Aires. In 1889 there were 8,500,000. Since that date the variations have been comparatively slight. The Census of 1895 gives 7,700,000; that of 1908 gives 10,300,000; that of 1914 gives 9,000,000; and that of 1915 gives 11,300,000.[94] But the value of the cattle has gone up rapidly. The exports of live meat, which lasted from 1889 to 1900, were the beginning of the rise. It was strengthened when the refrigerators ceased to confine themselves to killing sheep and began to buy cattle. The exports of chilled or frozen beef increased after 1898. The value of them rose to 10,000,000 gold piastres in 1904, double that in 1909, and more than quadruple in 1914.
The difference between the price paid by the refrigerators for pedigree-cattle and the price of animals of creole blood, which the local market takes, hurries up the transformation of the herd. In order to watch reproduction and nurse the pasture, the ranches put up wire-fences. But the breeding methods are especially modified by the introduction of lucerne. It spread in the south of Córdoba and west of the Buenos Aires province from 1895 onward, and from 1905 onward in part of the San Luis province. There were already small lucerne farms in the Buenos Aires province. A description that was written at the end of the eighteenth century speaks of lucerne farms round the town which were reserved for feeding draught cattle.[95] But the area from which the cultivation of lucerne started at the close of the nineteenth century is the district of the Córdoba province that is crossed by the line from Rosario to Córdoba, completed about 1870 to Bellville and Villa Marina. The lucerne farms there were not created by the breeders, and the lucerne was at first intended for export to Rosario and Buenos Aires in the form of dry fodder. The trade in dry fodder has remained good there. The 1908 Census gives 128 square kilometres of lucerne for cutting in the Tercero Abajo department (Villa Maria) and 267 square kilometres in the Union department (Bellville).[96]
MAP III.—THE CATTLE-BREEDING AREAS.