The first portion of the tour was spent looking at their seed drill. On there drill you are able to adjust the depth and width of rows which allows them to use it for all crops. Nearly 100% of the farms in Argentina no-till all of there crops in order to preserve the moisture in the ground. Keeping the ground covered is essential when the annual rainfall is around 18 inches and the soil is primarily made up of sand. 18 inches per year is about the same as in Miller, SD the difference between Miller and Argentina is the soil. The first crop we looked at was alfalfa. They are able to use a group 9 hybrid, which means it is able to grow for a large period of the year. On average they are able to get 270 bales off of there 40 hectares, this translates to 2.7 bales per acre. There bales are slightly smaller than ours, weighing around 1,500 pounds. On the rowcrop side of things they use 2 different types of rotation depending on the soil. The soil on the top of hills is 80% sand and on the flat parts it is 75% sand. On the hills they use a corn and sunflower rotation along with planting rye as a cover crop. The other rotation consist of sunflower, soybeans, and the cover crop. The potential production for crops is 3 times greater on the bottoms of hills than the top, causing them to use better seed and more fertilizer to maximize there production.
They plant there corn at a population of roughly 23,000 seeds an acre for the first planting and slightly less for the second. Nacho, our host, primarily uses Dekalb seed with 120 day maturity. Almost all farmers plant GMO crops due to the higher profit and the fact that non-GMO seed is more expensive. They plan to combine this crop in April or May. We concluded the tour by looking at his feed set up and having a snack.
We are all adjusting well to the culture down here and learning a lot. Our Spanish is expanding to small phrases, and words like windchill and hungry have been removed from our English vocabulary. We hope everyone back in the states is doing well and staying warm.
Written by: Jacob Meyer
Ty Littau translating to the students information about alfalfa crop grown on the Don Lado Farm
Wild Watermelon - a weed in Argentina that is hard for the farmers to control.
A drill used in Argentina to result in seeding into no till. Due to the light sandy soil the farmers try to turn over the soil as little as possible and the residue build up is helpful to prevent erosion
Tyler Morog and Riley Canham were very interested seeing the no till drill and how it gets through the heavy residue.
