MAGDALENA, Argentina — Cattle once ruled the seemingly endless grasslands here, delivering decades of prosperity for Argentina and producing a brand familiar to the world — natural, grass-fed beef.
But a quiet revolution has arrived on the famously fertile pampa, a swath of plains bigger than Texas.
Instead of roaming freely and eating to their hearts’ content, a growing number of Argentine cattle are spending a third of their lives in U.S.-style feedlots. There, crammed in muddy corrals, they are pumped with antibiotics and fed mounds of protein-rich grain, which fattens them up fast but hardly conjures up the romantic image of the Argentine cowboy, the iconic gaucho, herding cattle on the plains.
It is an image ranch hand Tomas Leclercq cherishes. The strapping, 58-year-old has been working with cattle since boyhood.
Like any Argentine, Leclercq knows his beef. The reason Argentina’s meat is so lean and juicy, he contends, is that cattle here have traditionally grazed across miles of plains.
“There’s a big difference between grass-fed beef and feedlot beef,” said Leclercq, who manages about 250 head of cattle for a Buenos Aires businessman and eats meat daily. “Beef raised on the plains is better, but there is less and less of it because the land is going for agriculture, so the feedlots are multiplying.”
All over the pampa, ranchland that was home to Angus and Hereford cows has in recent years been replaced by fields of soybeans, corn and wheat as commodity prices skyrocketed by more than 300 percent. This year, a third of the 15 million animals expected to go to slaughter will fatten in the now-ubiquitous feedlots, three times as many as in 2001.
The Argentine government established export restrictions and price controls to keep beef prices artificially low, and a currency devaluation made exporters of cash crops more competitive.
Agricultural subsidies also helped make corn feed affordable for cattlemen, allowing them to move their animals off the land. Many farmers have switched from cattle to crops over the past decade.
At the same time, Argentina has slipped from the dominant position it had long enjoyed in the international beef market. Once the No. 1 meat exporter, Argentina today is seventh. The vast majority of the meat it produces is consumed domestically.
It’s all enough to make an old gaucho grieve for the past — but there are no laments in Rodrigo Troncoso’s fashionable offices in Buenos Aires.
General manager of the Argentine Feedlot Chamber, Troncoso has a master’s degree in agribusiness and travels to other major cattle-producing countries, including the United States, to study their latest techniques. Troncoso said he expects that more than 60 percent of Argentina’s cattle will pass through feedlots in five years.
Troncoso said that if Argentina wants to take advantage of the world’s growing appetite for meat, then it, too, must become a more efficient producer.
Critics say all mass-produced meat tastes the same.
“Of course, the taste is very different,” said Claudio Schonfeld, a member of the Argentine Angus Association, considered among the most traditional of all the cattlemen’s groups. “There’s a lack of cholesterol in the meat because the cow that feeds on grass has to roam great distances to eat.”
