40 Argentina's Agricultural Progress. 



the dairy trade. Existing freezing factories have been enlarged, 

 new ones have been or are about to be made, and capital has 

 gone out to the River Plate to be engaged in all the sections 

 connected with the economical handling of animal food-stuffs. 

 There is no occasion in this place to discuss the respective 

 merits of dead meat and meat exported on the hoof. But what 

 is of importance to Argentina, and of considerable interest to 

 the British consumer, is that the capital introduced to the River 

 Plate connected with the dead meat and allied trades has gone 

 there to stay, and is not only the factor by which the output of 

 food from that country is going to be very largely increased, 

 but it will find a sufficient supply at the South American end 

 to justify the enterprise of those who have so employed it. 



Another not less important feature derived from the experience 

 gained by the recent epizootic outbreak is the improved system 

 under which stock intended for the foreign market is inspected 

 and provision made for its shipment under the best sanitary 

 conditions. Live stock is officially inspected both on the estancia 

 from which it is sold for export and again on arrival at the port 

 of shipment, and again when it is embarked. Any outbreak of 

 disease, or symptoms suggesting that the live stock of a farm is 

 in an unhealthy condition, or deaths which cannot be traced to 

 an ordinary cause, are at once reported to the nearest municipal 

 authority, and thence to the Live Stock Department of the 

 Ministry of Agriculture. These, and other regulations derived 

 from the new Argentine live stock sanitary law, have served to 

 spread a better knowledge of the state of the country's 

 herds and flocks, and the object-lesson they provide for the 

 breeder impels him to take a keener interest in the welfare of his 

 animals, and to study not only their health, but the other con- 

 ditions in which they are reared, with an increasingly competent 

 knowledge of the economy of his business. 



It is already known that in the zone lying to the north-west 

 of Buenos Aires the inferiority and sparsity of the indigenous 

 grasses led to the cultivation of the land for three to five years 

 with crops of wheat, maize, and linseed, and thereafter laying it 

 down permanently in lucerne for cattle raising. 



The alfalfa zone now includes not only the rich loam of the 

 Province of Santa Fe, but has pushed south and west from there 



