ARGENTINE CHILLERS

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXVI, Issue 143, 2 June 1936, Page 11

ARGENTINE CHILLERS

High Quality Attained The high standard of quality and condition that Argentine has achieved is the result of over 30 years gradual improvement in handling facilities and breeding. In many instances cattle producers breed and fatten on their estancias or stations, but a proportion have adopted the procedure of breeding in cheaper outside country and bringing the young cattle in to the rich province of Buenos Aires for fattening purposes. A great many breeders specialise in producing young steers for sale to fatteners, the steers usually being offered st about 18 month* of age, and are in good forward condition and always dehomed. These steers are all by purebred bulls and straight bred, being either Shorthorn, Hereford or Aberdeen Angus. Cross-breeding is not adopted for the production of grade chiller quality cattle. Argentina still dominates the United Kingdom bull trade by buying at least 80 per cent, of the highest grade stud cattle available each year. For years. South American breeders of chilled beef have given the English market continuous supplies all the year round of young tender beef in regular weekly shipments and in quantities sufficient to satisfy the most fastidious retail butchers' requirements. This has been brought about by the lavish importation of the best early maturing stud cattle procurable, allied with climatic conditions, soil, and a practically assured rainfall that permits lucerne being grown over an immense area without the aid of irrigation, and assisted by length of voyage, which is less than half the time it takes to deliver Australian beef. Continuous supplies all the year round have made it not only possible but reasonably profitable for the railway companies operating in Argentina to install a network of transport rail facilities that dispenses with long distances having to be travelled by cattle to railway stations, and this feature in itself has a very great bearing on the retention of bloom, condition, and tender quality being assured in the delivery of ths beef on to the market.