Half way across the world and we found a piece of South Dakota
Today we had the opportunity to see the equipment used by a farm manager named Santiago Narbaiz and his brother Joaquin who operate an agronomy consulting business called Servi Charca. They manage about 18,000 acres of crop land in southern Uruguay, doing both consulting advice for the farmers all the way to putting in the crop, doing the fertilizing and harvesting.
The equipment used by Santiago was very modern and practically identical to what many producers in the United States would use. In almost all equipment Santiago owns he has monitors that he uses for GPS steering. His preferred brand of equipment is John Deere and along with his equipment he was even wearing boots with the John Deere logo on them.
Santiago likes to keep his equipment for 5 years before replacing it. Equipment in Uruguay is much different than Argentina where the equipment is much older and not nearly as modern. The reason for this is that Uruguay allows for the importation of equipment from the United States and other countries and has very reasonable financing available from local banks.
Santiago showed us a piece of equipment which he imported from the United States. The reason for this is the purchase of the equipment and the cost of shipping the equipment even though it's almost 6,000 miles it is still less than purchasing the equipment and the taxes paid in Uruguay on new equipment. In reference to the first sentence Santiago had a sprayer he bought from Madison, SD and was shipped down to Uruguay. It has been fun to see the connections we have made in Argentina and Uruguay.
Taylor Jensen
