Fernando Bianchi is a cattle producer who is part of the so-called Alianza del Pastizal (Pasture Alliance) and thus assumes a commitment to the care of the environment that is consistent with his own history.

“In 2003, 2004, 2005, with the soybean craze, we had rented fields for cattle raising in General Las Heras and they took them away to make soybean, with disastrous results. But we had to leave, and at that time we looked in the Cuenca del Salado, which also had the soybean prices for cattle rents. Soybean raised the prices of everything,” he recalls.

As a consequence of that run and in search of a place to continue raising cattle, he even had to migrate to Uruguay and began to produce in Paysandú. “It was quite a challenge. It was a very different productive environment to the one we were used to; agricultural fields very degraded by a hundred years of traditional agriculture. Now we are in the process of regenerating the countryside,” he says decisively.

-What does it mean to be a “pasture” cattle rancher? Is it a productive or an environmentalist definition?

-It is a mixture of everything. It is a holistic vision where everything involved in the productive process is taken into account. For us, the forage bases have always been natural pastures. At the beginning we did some pastures (in General Las Heras) with very different results because the soils have many physical limitations that did not allow a stable production of implanted pastures”.

In the same answer, he recalls that in 1995/96, when they started with rational grazing, “we took the whole field to natural pasture; all the forage base of that field, which was degraded, overgrazed, which was the main problem”.

“Then we started to give the necessary rest times, we started to move the animals through different productive environments throughout the year, we started to generate positive changes in the production and in the quality of the pasture we were starting to achieve”, he said. That defined them to ‘turn’ to the natural field completely.

Watch the complete interview with Fernando Bianchi on Youtube by clicking here.

Source: Bichos de Campo