Balls' Nuffield Trip: AGRO URANGA

The following day I went South again to see a corporate family farm at San Nicolas and caught up with Frederico Arostegui and Jorge Staffolani. Frederico is the specialist seeds manager and Jorge is the overall farm agronomist/manager. Even though the farm is a family farm it must operate in a hard and fast business way with profits returning to the family shareholders. The farm only owns a few utes and one utility tractor. All of the operations are carried out by contractors who have been regulars over the past years. The farm pays over the award rates for these contractors which ensures that they get to Uranga at the right time. I think this is a good strategy. They also supply the contractors with letters of agreements for future contracting which helps them when buying new machinery and when seeking funding.

The Agrometal Assembly

On this particular day there were 3 different contract seeders there all seeding corn. One Bertini, one Georgio and one Agrometal. The Agrometal certainly looked the biggest and best constructed machine but I thought that the seeding positioning and singulation was not as good as the others.

A New Planter Sowing Horizontal Precision Box

To keep getting a good return the managers and farm company attracts a premium for the crops that it grows in its seed selling role played by Frederico. Some of the seed crops that they grow are popcorn, yellow corn, green peas, chick peas and beans. They like using these crops as they are still classed as a specialty grain and do not attract the same export tax for commodities such as wheat. This is one of the issues the farms have in that even though they are attracting money from overseas, if they grow wheat they have to pay the 30% tax to the government.
As mentioned in the APPRESID visit, there is a lot of problems with soyabean over use as it is an easy cheap crop to grow and most of the land owners want the soy beans as their payment. This means there is too much grown in the rotations in Argentina. At the Moment the specialty crops haven’t attracted this tax although Frederico feels that in the near future they will start to. The best rotations are with green peas, soy then corn or wheat, soy then corn or utilising popcorn instead of the normal yellow corn. At present 70% of the farm is double cropped and they want to have 100% double cropped by 2015. At the moment they are even getting 5 crops in 2 years in some areas. The farm is looking to find a good spring crop replacement for wheat and they feel durum might be an option but not while the US have their subsidies in place.