Adventures All Over: Casa Buenaventura

Salta Area, Argentina

When most people retire and feel the need to re-invent themselves they buy a Porsche, get a bad haircut or have an affair. My dad decided to be a farmer, in South America. In high school I hated this because all of my friends joked that he was a drug lord so I eventually just avoided mentioning it at all costs.

My dad spend a large chunk of his early life between Uruguay and Argentina, (mostly Uruguay) and later when he worked in the fishing industry he helmed the South America operations so the whole family moved down to BA for a short period of time. We returned to Argentina for two-ish months when I was 9 and we were traveling.

It was during this last trip that my dad met a young argentine guy who was looking for partners to buy a farm with. After a few years of looking, they had two other partners, one argentine and one american who were interested as well. In 1998 they bought the farm and embarked on organic production. The focus crop is soy, but they also produce corn, safflower, wheat and some other crops in rotation to keep the quality of the soil. Irrigating in very uncommon given the sizes of argentine fields and lack of water, and so all moisture comes from capturing rainfall in terraces and dikes to spread it around the fields evenly.

There have been rocky points in this enterprise such as the crisis and Christina's wonderful retentions last year, but I think on the whole it has been a sound investment. Three years ago we began to build a house, because there was nowhere to stay at the farm and you had to drive 40 minutes to the nearest town. This house has caused my parents a million headaches since every aspect of it is a pain in the butt. Its built up on a ridge, so it was necessary to drag all the building materials up a steep twisty road, there is not cell service or internet, water has to be piped in, there is no electricity in the area, etc, etc.

After three years of hell for them, the house is finally done. The garden still needs to go in and the problems of power and internet need to be figured out, but other than that, its good to go.