From sheep to cattle: A radical change advances in Río Negro's cattle farming

"That displacement came from the east and is running away," says Rocío Álvarez, when asked about a radical change happening in the fields of the southern region of Río Negro province, where there is a shift from sheep farming to cattle farming, despite the fragility of the natural environment, marked by lack of rainfall and poor soils. Rocío is an agricultural engineer who joined the INTA Extension Office in Los Menucos in 2008 and knows the dynamics of the fields in this area of the province in detail. The origin is "multicausal," but a determining weight has been "the plague," as the predation by the red fox and the puma is called here, a factor that made many small ranchers give up, leading to the abandonment of many fields, something that this technique could confirm when participating in the national agricultural census of 2018. "There was a lot of abandoned land already at that time. Fields without animals and without people too. So, when you talk about wanting to face the ...