🇨🇱 The cattle breeds of Chile

Chile's cattle belong to the wet south: beef and dairy herds graze the improved pastures of Araucanía and the Zona Sur, where crops gradually give way to livestock. Beef figures among the country's major farm products, though fruit and wine take most of the attention. Isolation and strict customs have kept the herds free of mad cow disease.

• Chile's isolation and strict customs have kept it free of mad cow disease.
• Suet, charqui and leather led Chile's 1600s exports to Peru, the century of suet.
• Araucanía's sown pastures carry beef cattle, pigs, sheep and horses, plus much milk.
• Only 2.62% of Chile is arable; mountains limit farming.
• Magallanes in the far south holds 1.5 to 2 million sheep on about 300 farms.

Cattle in Chile

Cattle keep a modest place in Chilean farming, where export fruit takes most of the attention. The herds belong mainly to the south: below the Central Valley, crops yield to sheep and cattle raising, and the Zona Sur counts cattle farming among its chief activities. In the Araucanía Region, once nicknamed Chile's granary for its wheat, natural pasture has shrunk while sown and improved grassland has spread; this carries a heavy stock of beef cattle alongside pigs, sheep and horses, and yields plenty of milk and goods made from it. Cattle keeping goes back far: colonial Chile lived largely on husbandry, shipping cattle suet, dried meat and leather north to Peru, and haciendas spread as the economy turned from mining to farming. Mountains hem agriculture in, leaving just 2.6 per cent of the land arable.

Regions and communities

The country splits cleanly from north to south. The Norte Grande is desert: cropping hugs small oases and river valleys, and on the high Puna plateau Aymara families herd llamas and alpacas in the old way. The Central Valley, walled in by the Coast Range and the Andes, is the agricultural heartland, given mostly to vines and irrigated crops. Cattle belong to the south. In Zona Sur they share ground with wheat, tree plantations and salmon farms, and Los Lagos Region lives chiefly from salmon. In Zona Austral sheep rule instead: Magallanes alone held some 1.5 to 2 million sheep on around 300 farms in 2006.

Milk, butter and beef

Beef stands on the list of Chile's major farm products, next to poultry, wool and fish. From the dairy south come milk and goods made from it. The trade is old: colonial herds were rendered into suet and dried as charqui, strips of dried meat, with hides alongside, and these filled most of the export ships bound for the Viceroyalty of Peru. Trade was so centred on fat that a historian dubbed the 1600s the century of suet. Some produce also went overland to Upper Peru through the port of Arica.

Today

Farming with its allies, forestry, logging and fishing, brought in 4.9 per cent of GDP and employed 13.6 per cent of workers in 2007. Chile's long isolation and strict customs checks have kept the country free of mad cow disease, a strong point beside a harvest season opposite to the northern hemisphere's. Beef, poultry, wool and fish now share the basket with fruit.