🇵🇾 The cattle breeds of Paraguay

Cattle in Paraguay are animals of wide spaces. Ranching and beef sit inside a farm economy that has long been the country's mainstay, with the semiarid Chaco carrying two-fifths of the herd on vast holdings, many in foreign hands. Soybeans and cotton now lead exports.

• The semiarid Chaco holds about 40 percent of Paraguay's livestock on 60 percent of its land.
• Many of the largest farms, averaging almost 7,300 hectares, are cattle ranches in the Chaco.
• In 1981, 1 percent of farms covered 79 percent of the farmland in use.
• Livestock took up about 26 percent of the land in 1981, up from 22 percent in 1956.
• By the late 1980s, cotton and soybeans contributed over 60 percent of exports.

Cattle in Paraguay

Paraguayan cattle keeping is a story of space and of uneven hands. Ranching and beef production belong to a large livestock subsector within an economy where farming has long been the mainstay. Herds graze extensively, above all in the semiarid Chaco, whose open grazing land carries two-fifths of the national livestock while holding only a sliver of the people. Ownership is concentrated: the biggest farms, many of them cattle ranches in the Chaco, average nearly 7,300 hectares, while smallholders work tiny minifundio plots. Foreign money has shaped the trade since the 19th century, when land went to Argentine buyers to settle war debts; later Brazilian and American agribusinesses bought enormous tracts for cattle, cotton and timber. The pattern is a familiar Latin American one, big ranches beside small farms.

Regions and communities

The country divides into three farming regions, and cattle matter most in the west. The Chaco, a semiarid plain covering 60 percent of the land mass, supports two-fifths of the national livestock while holding just 3 percent of the population; apart from the Mennonite settlements of the central Chaco, cropping there is slight. The central region around Asunción has long been small-farm crop country, where since the 1960s policy has worked to break up the tiniest holdings. The eastern border region, with rich soils and well spread rain, is the newer centre of farming; surveys score 40 percent of it as suitable for livestock and another 20 percent for moderate agriculture or grazing.

Milk, butter and beef

Beef is the cattle product the country's farming is known for. Ranching and beef output form the core of a large livestock subsector within agriculture, which in the late 1980s earned 98 percent of export income. Cattle did not lead that trade, though: by the late 1980s cotton and soybeans alone contributed over 60 percent of exports, and soybeans had overtaken cotton as the top crop. Cattle raising shared the land with these cash crops, taking up roughly a quarter of the national territory as livestock ground, with much of the beef coming from the big Chaco ranches.

Today

Livestock activity swung with weather and prices in the 1970s and 1980s, when flooding in 1982 and 1983 and severe drought in 1986 hurt farming broadly, yet grazing generally expanded, its share of the land rising above the 22 percent recorded in 1956. Growth overall slowed from 7.5 percent a year in the 1970s to about 3.5 percent by the late 1980s. Agriculture still employed nearly half the workforce and earned almost all export income, with ranching and beef among its pillars.