The sowing of the grain is record and is once again the star of the Argentine countryside.
It accompanies us from breakfast to dinner, but not only on the plate.
It is also in gasoline, gas and even soda.
The secrets of the boom.
Hector Huergo
Mauricio Bártoli
07/30/2021 6:00 AM
Clarín.com
Rural
Updated 07/30/2021 6:00 AM
Corn accompanies us
from breakfast to dinner.
We are not as fond of grains as the rest of humanity, but we all know that "it is good."
The corn flakes, the "zucaritas", often accompanying the yogurt, or in boxes, whatever.
In the hotels they cannot be absent.
But it is also in milk.
Because for thirty years corn has been playing an
increasingly important role
in feeding dairy cows.
At first, the technicians considered that the dairy farmer that gave less grain to the dairy women was more efficient, since grass seemed the cheapest resource.
Until they realized that each kilo of corn that was added to the diet meant
one more liter of milk
.
So
when you're cutting the latte
, what you're adding is corn.
The same when you spread the toast with butter, or you add a slice of machine cheese, fresh or salty.
You finished breakfast.
You have to change the baby's diapers.
After cleaning it, and before putting on the new one, it was a good habit to put talcum powder on it, "fresh tails with feculax".
Well,
those starches are cornstarch
.
Like the polyethylene covering the
disposable diaper
, which in the big brands is already produced from bioethanol, which is made with sugar cane or corn.
The
bioethanol
is a biofuel -used when gripping the car to go to work -
which
is mixed with 12% gasoline.
That in Argentina, because in Brazil, for example, the cutoff percentage is 27%.
Well, you arrive at work and the first thing you do, upon entering, is go through the gel alcohol dispenser, or simply the alcohol spray.
It is a by-product of ethanol production
.
Among so many utilities,
corn was consolidated as the grain with the highest production volume
in Argentina, above soybeans and with more than
50 million tons of grains with commercial destination
(that is, not counting what is chopped or consumed within each field).
In the last 6 years it practically
doubled its harvest volume
and in a decade it is on its way to triple the volume.
According to the records of the Ministry of Agriculture, in the agricultural season that is about to end there was a
record sowing
of 9.7 million hectares and there will be a harvest of 60.5 million tons of grains.
v 1.5
Corn numbers in Argentina
Last campaign concluded 2019/20
Tap to explore the data
PLANTING AREA BY PROVINCES
- In hectares -
HARVEST IN EACH DISTRICT
- In tons -
NATIONAL PRODUCTIVITY
- In tons per hectare -
EVOLUTION OF EXPORTS
- In thousands of tons -
DESTINATION OF EXPORTS
- In tons -
Source:
MAIZAR - Julián Martínez Quijano
Infographic:
Clarín
Within two months, it is planned to start the wheel again and the implantation with this cereal would exceed 10 million hectares:
500 times the surface of the city of Buenos Aires
.
Corn has not only become the
main crop in Argentina
, in volume, but also in the world.
Its origin is typically American, but it is sown all over the planet.
And although it was born in temperate climates, the permanent trend has been to advance over all types of environments.
The great engine of corn expansion, since the beginning of the twentieth century, was the use of livestock as food.
He was the king of fodder grains.
Every bug that walks and ends up on the grill is corn
that comes out of the field walking on two or four legs.
A stop to load gasoline
Every time you fill the tank, you are putting a mixture of gasoline with ethanol.
This is not new, it has been going on for ten years.
At the beginning it was 5%, then it went up until it reached 12%
.
A great benefit for the environment and for health.
Alcohol has a better carbon footprint, reducing CO2 emissions by 75% compared to gasoline.
Throughout the world, naphtha is cut with alcohol, from corn or sugar cane, in some European countries also from wheat or beet.
Noon comes.
Lunch.
Sometimes you delight yourself with some
explicit corn
: a corn, which, as the author of the emblematic tango, Angel Villoldo said,
“is the best of the pot
”.
It was a great discovery for Lorena Basso and Ana Fernández Mouján, when they were invited to open the recent Maizar congress, to show a section of a film with Tita Merello singing “El Choclo”.
What did they find?
That in these times of rift, it is convenient to know that
the corn is a bridge between the countryside and the city
.
Corn unites us.
It takes about 7 kilos of corn to produce a kilo of meat
.
Ah, the fried egg is also corn, which makes up 80% of the feed consumed by a layer.
Each egg "costs" 100 grams of corn
.
Egg!
But there is nothing better, because there is the energy that the hen needs, and also the color of the yolk.
And to fry the milanesas, or the french fries, or the egg itself, corn oil is often used.
At noon, it came no. Some soda.
Did
you
know that the sweetener in most drinks is fructose syrup?
For more than thirty years it has been replacing cane sugar.
Fundamentally, for a reason of convenience for the companies that make these beverages.
And also in jams.
We come back home.
A beer with friends.
Not everything is barley, or wheat.
It can also be corn.
We arrived.
In the round trip we spend 8 liters of gasoline.
One was ethanol.
To obtain
a liter of alcohol you need 3 kilos of corn
.
Of the residual two kilos, one returns to the field as feed for livestock.
There are some customs that we lost.
For example, ironing the boys' overalls with starch.
Or the collars of the shirts.
Sometimes the sheets.
The number of uses for "technical" starches is impressive.
Corn is not the only source, because there are also potatoes, cassava, even bananas.
And they are used in all industries, even in the oil industry to line wells.
To dinner.
A chick.
2 kilos of corn
.
A salmon.
Also corn, because it comes from a hatchery, luckily since everything is more controlled.
Maybe sushi delivery?
More salmon.
And Philadelphia.
A pork butt;
3 kg of corn per kilo.
To sleep.
In the United States there is a fabric with fabulous properties, which I was able to test here a while ago.
Very soft and absorbent, ideal for pajamas.
It's called PLA (polylactic acid).
It is biodegradable.
It is a fiber that is obtained from corn.
It is also the plastic that 3D printers use.
It is what it is.
Actually, there is much more, but just one button is enough to show you.
From PLA, of course.
Engine of change
Soybeans became the main product of the Argentine economy, produced by a
new generation of
highly trained
farmers
.
But the enormous economic benefits for the countryside and for the country were met with a paradox: "soybeanization" appeared as a phenomenon that put the health of the soils at risk.
They started talking about "sustainability".
Something had to be done to balance the rotations.
It was always clear to the avant-garde that it was best to build a succession of crops that intercalated grasses (corn and wheat) instead of continuous soybeans.
But for this, it was necessary to
improve the yields of these cereals
, which had lost competitiveness against the ease of soybeans.
One of the factors that most affected the soybean expansion was a consequence of the previous monoculture.
Precisely, that of corn.
In the agricultural heart of Argentina, with its epicenter in Pergamino, since the middle of the last century
corn made its way with the same strength that soybeans would later exhibit
.
But that cycle was broken when rents were frozen.
So, the settlers continued to sow corn on top of corn on the plot rented to the ranches, with two consequences: the weeds of the fields, and the erosion of the soils due to over-tillage.
Direct seeding and pre-emergent herbicides, which allow weed control without mechanical tools, were not known.
The use of fertilizers was also unknown.
And consequently, geneticists designed hybrids capable of performing in increasingly poorer soils, where the nutrients that the cereal was carrying were not replaced.
A negative and unsustainable spiral.
But soybeans had come in with a novel technology package.
A pre-sowing herbicide (trifluralin) was applied, which prevented the birth of several of the main weeds that affected corn.
Except for two, perennial, Aleppo sorghum and grass.
Mandatory combat had been decreed, but there were no tools.
Until the genetically modified soybeans arrived to have resistance to glyphosate, which did control Aleppo and Gramon.
In a few years,
millions of hectares were cleared of these true pests
of agriculture, all of exogenous origin.
In the clean fields, corn could be planted again
, which came with a new technological baggage.
In 1990, corn produced, at the national level, just 4 tons per hectare.
It was half the productivity of corn in the United States.
In the main global power -also agricultural-,
since 1980 they began to cut gasoline with bioethanol
: another "driver" that re-fueled corn.
The Americans implemented the "clean air law" to solve two issues: break free from dependence on oil and mitigate the unfavorable impact of traditional fuels.
It was a geopolitical issue.
But the paradigm was changing towards the environmental question:
"Before the oil runs out, the air runs out", a
metaphor that refers to climate change.
The North Americans, and also the Brazilians (although with cane alcohol), he took them doing their homework.
We Argentines caught up on the fly
, starting in 2010, when we also started with biofuels.
The expansion of bioethanol in the United States was
crucial to international prices for all grains
.
40% of the corn produced in that country - by far the world's largest producer: 350 million tons - is used for this energy purpose.
Cutting with biofuels, both ethanol in naphtha and biodiesel in diesel, was the
main Argentine contribution to the commitments made by the whole world in Paris
, in December 2015, to retrace the dangerous path of global warming.
It unleashed a strong flow of investments, for more than 1,000 million dollars,
mainly in the province of Córdoba.
Now Congress has taken a step back on that path promoted by the presidencies of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner, in a sinuous strategy of the ruling party, which loses opportunities and relegates Argentina to environmental sustainability.
v 1.5
The main fodder grain in the world
Global figures and by countries.
USDA Projections for 2021-2022
Tap to explore the data
- In thousands of tons -
EVOLUTION OF WORLD PRODUCTION
- In thousands of tons -
WORLD TRADE EVOLUTION
- In thousands of tons -
Source:
MAIZAR - Julián Martínez Quijano
Infographic:
Clarín
Let's go back to the batch.
Erosion had to be stopped.
That's where he
plays a key role in
the
emergence of direct seeding
to
.
Not only did the plow, the implement with which agriculture was born, disappeared.
The tools that crumbled the rubble that were left when the earth was turned also passed away.
The disc harrows, or teeth.
And they stopped using mechanical tools to eliminate the weeds that grew between the furrows: the "escardillos" in all their variants.
RR corn also arrived, with which the weeds could be controlled by pulverizing the corn already born.
And the seeds incorporated, by genetic engineering, the ability to
control insects
without the need for very cumbersome applications in developed crops.
The new hybrids came with a loaf under the arm.
But they needed the yeast, which was the fertilizer.
Large plants for the production of nitrogen fertilizers were built, such as the urea plants of Profértil in Bahía Blanca or Bunge-ACA in Campana.
They are counted among the largest in the world.
The raw material is natural gas.
When we export corn, we are exporting natural gas in dragees
.
We also export diesel, polyethylene from silobags (a key input for a country that does not have storage capacity), steel that is consumed in the act of sowing and harvesting, paint, tires.
Cement.
Last year, two port terminals were inaugurated in the Timbúes area (50 km north of Rosario)
to ship mainly corn
.
Because the logistics had been insufficient to stop the flood that was already arriving.
The world is waiting for us.
DB