Descripción del hardware
2.1. Procesamiento de la señal
transportation costs will determine a pattern of land use in concentric circles, from horticulture and dairying, to cereals, and finally cattle grazing. Taking Montevideo (which at the time was home to about a third of Uruguayan population) as the central city in von Thünen’s model helps account for the spatial distribution of agriculture around . These results resonate with Griffin’s geographical analysis which found that this model provided a useful framework for understanding the intensities of land use in Uruguay in the late s.35
The geography of landholding was to an extent explained by the differing land requirements across arable and pastoral agriculture, and their distribution across the territory: the ratio between pastureland and cropland was higher in districts with larger average estate sizes. Section below will explore these correlations in detail and discuss their implications for the ‘inverse relationship’ thesis, i.e. the negative correlation between estate sizes and land productivity, which has been argued over by economists and economic historians of Latin America, Asia, and Africa.36
2.3. Cattle crossbreeding as technical innovation
Against this background, the key question for the long-term development of Uruguayan export agriculture is how estate sizes related to the geographical distribution of ‘modern’ ranching production techniques. The improvement of the ‘native’ criollo cattle via systematic crossing with British breeds (particularly Hereford and Shorthorn) offers a useful measure of the adoption of agricultural innovations. The process of crossbreeding of cattle had begun in the s, and was still underway two decades later, with Uruguayan producers importing expensive pedigree animals from Britain in increasing numbers.37 The effects of this process of agricultural intensification were very unevenly distributed in the countryside, with leading areas already having ‘improved’ almost all of their cattle through crossbreeding, while there were more than two and a half million purely ‘native’ cattle being raised in other regions. Livestock producers had to invest in order to acquire purebred or half-blood Hereford or Shorthorn animals or hire their services and, year after year, improve the genetic makeup of the herd. The result were the mestizo cattle: crossbreds who grew faster,
35 Ernst Griffin, ‘Testing the von Thunen theory in Uruguay,’ Geographical Review , ().
36 For the pioneering paper in the literature on the ‘inverse relationship’, see Péter Tamás Bauer, ‘The economics of planting density in rubber growing,’ Economica , (). The thesis was famously applied to Latin American cases by Albert Berry and William R. Cline, Agrarian Structure and Productivity in Developing Countries (Baltimore,
). For an overview and a critique, see Graham Dyer, ‘Redistributive land reform: No April rose. The poverty of Berry and Cline and GKI on the inverse relationship,’ Journal of Agrarian Change , ‐ ().
37 In , to take the year of our main benchmark, more certificates for pedigree Hereford animals were granted for export to Uruguay than to any other country. UL, The Hereford Herd Book Society, The Herd Book of Hereford Cattle Vol. XXIX (Hereford, ): -.
gained weight quicker, and resulted in beef of a superior quality than ‘native’ animals. They were also hardier than purebred imports, and hence better suited than them to year-round outdoor grazing.
Selective livestock breeding was, as historians of science and environmental historians have shown in other contexts, part art and part science; book knowledge and everyday experience both played a part.38 While some rich breeders could travel abroad or benefit first hand from veterinary expertise, many producers relied on word of mouth, or on learned advice they could get through the Rural Society or even from the written press. Individual animals were more valuable than they had ever been in Uruguay, and because both the Montevideo market and the external demand were aware of lineages and qualities, individual cattle could not be perfectly substituted by others. Letters to the editor of El Siglo’s ‘countryside page’ (‘La Página de la Campaña’) asked specific questions about how to look after purebred bulls and received detailed answers:
Question—I would be grateful if you could answer me this query: I have two bulls in my stable, animals that are for me a considerable capital suffering from foot-and-mouth disease, what must I do to heal them? (signed) A rural man.
Answer—Keep both animals stabled with a good hay bed that you will change often. Wash their mouth ulcers with antiseptic solutions. There are many useful solutions: here are some you can easily prepare in your estancia, all of them efficient (…) Keep the animals on a light diet of tender fodder and cooked grain.39
As contemporary press and livestock producers themselves noted, the label ‘crossbred’ (mestizo) could refer to very different degrees of ‘improvement’ and breed purity.40 The signature red coat and white face of Herefords, for instance, were dominant traits transmitted even to animals who were only / Hereford,
38 Margaret E. Derry, Bred for Perfection: Shorthorn Cattle, Collies, and Arabian Horses Since (Baltimore,
): -; Rebecca J. H. Woods, The Herds Shot Round the World: Native Breeds and the British Empire, c. -
(Chapel Hill, ): -.
39 ‘Pregunta—Señor Redactor de la “Página Rural de EL SIGLO”—Agradecería me contestase á la siguiente pregunta: Tengo dos toros á galpón, animales que para mi representan un capital considerable atacados de aftosa ¿qué debo hacer para curarlos?--Rural. Respuesta—Tenga los animales á galpón con buena cama de paja abundante que renovará á menudo. Lave las llagas de la boca con soluciones antisépticas. Se emplean muchas: le citaremos algunas de las que con seguridad se pueden preparar en una estancia, todas eficaces: (…) Téngase á los animales en una dieta liviana de forrajes tiernos y granos cocidos.’ BN, El Siglo, October , .
40 Barrán and Nahum, Civilización, -. Cattle breeds themselves are of course entirely a human construct, a case of ‘flesh made word’, as Harriet Ritvo puts it in The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Cambridge, MA, ): -.
which led to the results of the agricultural census being criticised as excessively optimistic.41 But despite genetic disparities within crossbred herds, the distinction between ‘native’ and crossbred cattle was validated by specialist markets, the former usually sold by the head and the latter by their weight.42 The geography of cattle improvement shows large and revealing regional divides (Map ., right), which did not follow the same north-south axis as the changing patterns in land tenure, reproduced here again in the left-side map.
MAP 4.2. Mean estate size and percentage of cattle crossbred by district, 1908
Sources: ‘Ganado por especies, departamentos y secciones’, Censo General , T.II, P.II: -; ‘Establecimientos agropecuarios por secciones’, Censo General , T.II, P.II: -.
41 The official publication of the Uruguayan Rural Society was the main forum for these debates; see, for example, BN, ‘La producción de ganados puros y mestizos en el Río de la Plata,’ Revista de la Asociación Rural, May . The same concerns occupied cattlemen in the United States: Woods, Herds, .
42 This market situation was disseminated by rural newspapers: see, for example, FB, ‘Las exposiciones ferias’, La Campaña (Departamento de Río Negro), April , . See also Millot and Bertino, Historia económica, .
The economic geography of agriculture and innovation in reveals much of interest about the relationship between latifundia and agrarian capitalism in Uruguay during the First Globalization. For the purposes of this chapter, two insights can be underlined. Firstly, as historiography has long argued and our data now proves at a much higher spatial resolution, very large holdings became more common the farther north one went. Secondly, the spatial location of large holdings did not correspond to geographical divides in the degrees of innovation in ranching (cattle crossbreeding), which were in general higher in the west than in the east, with a mixed picture in the north and south: different interactions, revealing diverse economic strategies, seem to have predominated in each region. The existence of latifundia in a district made some strategies more likely than others, but it is by itself not enough to account for differences in crossbreeding rates, which were crucial in explaining differing levels of agricultural productivity. To understand the impact of large landholdings in Uruguay’s rural economy we need to explore the effects of different patterns of land tenure in the context of other variables in a more systematic way.