Today, Sunday January 12^th is my last day in Chile and it began with a 2 hour flight from Puerto Montt back north to Santiago.  I was met at the airport by Jaime Bascuñan Senior and his wife. Jaime is a partner in a large agricultural company that includes a 3 site pig farm with 2500 sows farrow to finish. From the airport we drove 1 hour and 40 minutes south through several fertile irrigated valleys, producing a wide variety of fruits, vegetables and wine. Grain corn was once the dominant crop here and although it is now growing a little further south, there are several large plants processing and bagging hybrid seed corn destined for North America. Our destination is the town of San Fernando, where Jaime’s son (also Jaime) manages Las Garzas, a Christian agricultural school that offers local children a free education from grade 7 up to college age. The school also operates a laboratory that provides soil and plant testing services to the fruit and vegetable industry. The 300 students get a general education up to grade 10 and then start into an ag business stream that includes a lot of practical training working on the school’s 250 acre farm and in the lab. The school has a 480 cow dairy herd, housed in very simple barns that do little more than provide shade over the free stalls. Production is 42 liters per cow on 3 times milking with 35% of the cows receiving BST. This area is heavily dependent on irrigation and with 30% less rainfall than normal for the last 10 years, there is a shortage of water. As a result, the school left a third of its land fallow this year. Most of the water comes directly from rivers fed by glaciers in the Andes and there is no real infrastructure in place to hold back high spring flow with dams or reservoirs. After touring the farm I had the pleasure of having lunch in Jaime’s home and meeting his young family, before heading back to the airport for the long overnight flight home to Canada. All in all this was a great learning experience and I am eager to get started on planning a PDO trip to this country. It will most likely happen the last week of February and first week of March 2021. This is my last post to this blog, but if you are a PDO member you will receive tour updates from PDO. If you are interested in this tour but you are not a PDO member, I encourage you to join, see website http://www.pdo-ontario.ca/   because I am sure it will fill quickly and members are given priority.        

Simple steel and fabric rooves keep cows shaded at the Las Garzas School