The “boy on the cover” of this edition of
Clarín Rural
is
wheat
, once again turned into hope.
The Buenos Aires Grain Exchange estimated that planting in 2023 will reach 6.7 million hectares, almost 10
% more than the previous campaign
and one of the largest in the last 40 years.
Although nothing dazzling if we remember that it is
what we sowed exactly 100 years ago.
Wheat planting in Argentina has always been
linked to good policies.
It's impressive to see the correlation
.
Since the National Organization, when the State was only present to accompany the development of the Revolution of the Pampas,
wheat was the great companion of the cattle expansion
.
Thus, gringos willing, we went from nothing in the mid-nineteenth century to the peak of
9.2 million hectares around 1930
.
There the world becomes complicated, and in Argentina we find
"the solution" of the first great state interventionism: the creation of the National Grain Board
.
Let's say everything.
It was encouraged from the sector itself, coupled with the international trend, in a world between the two wars, confused between the proposals of socialism/communism and fascism.
We were not oblivious to all this.
Facts:
since the start of the JNG, wheat planting has entered a gentle but persistent slide
.
That accelerated during the first government of Perón, when we hit the ground with just 3 million tons.
Between the dry and the lobster,
we ended up eating "black bread" back in 1953
.
We reach for the rye.
Of course,
the technology ran behind the bad policies
.
The only advances were concentrated in the continuous improvement of genetics.
Private breeders, primarily Buck and Klein, both owned by German families rooted in the early 20th century, provided almost all of the cultivars.
When I started in this, at the beginning of the '70s, the infallible Klein Rendidor dominated
in the core zone
and the excellent materials from
Buck in the southeast of Buenos Aires
.
When I was a boy, I used to spend the summer in Necochea, and my friends were farmers who arrived in mid-January.
They spoke to me
very proudly of the "30 bags" (18 quintals)
that they had obtained in the harvest.
Around 1960, the national yield was 10 quintals
.
And it wasn't going to improve much until the 1980s, when the Second Revolution of the Pampas began.
The first milestone that I remember was the
great leap in sowing and production in 1983
, when after the defeat in the Malvinas, the countryside was once again hope.
Society and the economy were in shambles
.
We reached 7 million hectares, very similar to the current area, and thanks to the new wave of genetics, with the
"Mexican" wheats developed by Rogelio Fogante's INTA
, and also adopted by Klein and Buck, we achieved a record yield of more than 2 tons per hectare.
Twice as much as 20 years earlier.
Thus,
15 million tons arrived in December, a gift for the return of democracy.
But it was a swallow of a single summer.
With the JNG and the deepening of interventionism, with withholdings and exchange rates that discriminated against the sector, promoting new economic chimeras, the countryside continued to deliver the donut.
Until
with convertibility and "one by one" - which had an enormous cost of adaptation and found one of its main enemies in the field - a new wave of technology arrived
, particularly fertilization.
The renders hit a start, with the arrival of the French materials from the hand of Nidera.
We exceeded 3 tons and the potential climbed everything imaginable.
We have seen
wheat of 10 tons per hectare, irrigated and dry.
Now, we add the biotechnological revolution, with the Argentine creation of wheat tolerant to water stress, which this year will have a decisive advance.
If 4 tons are reached, which is Russia's yield, 25 million tons are on the horizon.
It is
more than 5 billion dollars by the end of the year.
They are missing
.
look also
The revenge of the producers: the sowing of wheat is coming and everyone looks at the sky
Cristina Kirchner and the added value of the field
