Only one per cent, of its cultivable area is so
far occupied.
The Gaucho is no farmer, and all his land is given up to cattle
grazing, so chacras are worked generally by foreign settlers. The
province of Entre Rios has been settled largely by Swiss and Italian
farmers from the Piedmont Hills. Baron Hirsch has also planted a
colony of Russian Jews there, and provided them with farm implements.
Wheat, corn, and linseed are the principal crops, but sweet potatoes,
tobacco, and fruit trees do well in this virgin ground, fertilized by
the dead animals of centuries. The soil is rich, and two or three
crops can often be harvested in a year.
No other part of the world has in recent years suffered from such a
plague of locusts as the agricultural districts of Argentina. They
come from the north in clouds that sometimes darken the sun. Some of
the swarms have been estimated to be sixty miles long and from twelve
to fifteen miles wide. Fields which in the morning stand high with
waving corn, are by evening only comparable to ploughed or burnt
lands. Even the roots are eaten up.
In 1907 the Argentine Government organized a bureau for the
destruction of locusts, and in 1908 $4,500,000 was placed by Congress
at the disposal of this commission. An organized service, embracing
thousands of men, is in readiness at any moment to send a force to
any place where danger is reported. Railway trains have been
repeatedly stopped, and literally many tons of them have had to be
taken off the track. A fine of $100 is imposed upon any settler
failing to report the presence of locust swarms or hopper eggs on his
land. Various means are adopted by the land-owner to save what he can
from the voracious insects. Men, women and children mount their
horses and drive flocks of sheep to and fro over the ground to kill
them. A squatter with whom I stayed got his laborers to gallop a
troop of mares furiously around his garden to keep them from settling
there. All, however, seemed useless. About midsummer the locust lays
its eggs under an inch or two of soil. Each female will drop from
thirty to fifty eggs, all at the same time, in a mass resembling a
head of wheat. As many as 50,000 eggs have been counted in a space
less than three and a half feet square.
During my sojourn in Entre Rios, the province where this insect seems
to come in greatest numbers, a law was passed that every man over the
age of fourteen years, whether native or foreigner, rich or poor, was
compelled to dig out and carry to Government depots, four pounds
weight of locusts' eggs.
