SEVENTEENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART VII 405 



the only country today that is producing any considerable surplus of 

 beef. iWe have been exporting some since the war broke out, on ac- 

 count of the stimulus of high prices. Prior to that time, we were not 

 exporting, and under normal conditions, with labor fully employed, it 

 will probably take about all the beef produced in this country to supply 

 our own market. But the Argentine exported in 1913, 366,000 tons of 

 beef, which was more than four times as much as all the other beef- 

 exporting nations combined. You can readily see the strong position 

 they are in, and they are gradually extending and increasing it. They 

 are putting larger areas into alfalfa, with a view to increasing the out- 

 put of beef from year to year. 



They are also increasing the output of their grain to quite a re- 

 markable degree, but farming as such is an incidental business down 

 there compared to this other great business of raising and marketing 

 live stock in the form of good beef. Notwithstanding that, however, 

 the output of export product of corn in 1903 was 82,000,000 bushels; In 

 1913 ■ it had increased to 189,000,000 bushels. Wheat increased in the 

 same time from 61,000,000 bushels to 103,000,000 bushels; oats from 

 2,000,000 bushels to 61,000,000 bushels, and flax from 23,000,000 bushels 

 to 40,000,000 bushels. If you go back ten years previous to 1903, the 

 exports of these products v.ere scarcely enough to be taken into con- 

 sideration. They will undoubtedly continue to increase the output of 

 their grain products, but it will be many years before the farming in- 

 dustry — by that "l mean the grain-growing industry — will assume any- 

 thing like the proportions that the beef and mutton industry have 

 there. 



I believe that some day they will get into the hog business on an 

 extensive scale, and become a great factor in supplying the world's 

 markets with pork. When the Armour packing house went in there, 

 the manager, Mr. Finney, started a campaign to encourage and promote 

 the raising of hogs on a large scale, and, he said he had met with a 

 ready response, that seme of those men were willing to go into it, not 

 on the basis of a few hundred or a thousand head, but would guarantee 

 to produce 50, COO head as an output from some of those big estanchios. 

 But about the time they got that well under way, the European war 

 broke out, and they had no space on their boats for carrying hogs, and 

 the hog men have suffered severe discouragement. 



That whole country has suffered by lack of an outlet for their prod- 

 ucts. They have in the entire Argentine Republic only about eight million 

 people, and 1,800,000 of them live in Buenos Aires; so that there are 

 only a little over six million people for all the rest of the cities and 

 towns and the entire country district, and, naturally, they do not have 

 a large consuming population. These wealthy people live in the cities, 

 and the business life congregates there. The taking out of commission 

 of all of the German boats, practically all of the French, and a great 

 many others, and reducing the number of British boats in service, left 

 them without a means of marketing their products. The grain products 

 and the wool suffered most. The only product that they have continued 



