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After six weeks of traveling, 17 flights and six countries, this is what I woke up to this morning. It's great to be home.

Beef

If there's one thing I've eaten allot of these past weeks in South America, it's beef. So it was great to finally get to see a cattle farm in Uruguay. They rely on the horses and carry 360 at any one time. The photo is of them bringing in the next weeks horses. They rotate the horses weekly with the 12 horsemen picking two horse each for the week. One for the morning and one for the afternoon.

All the cattle work is done on horse back including the yard work. Beautiful horses and similar to the Australian stock horse and very skilled stock men.

BBQ Uruguay Style. Beef and Beer, it doesn't get much better.

Grain Production in Uraguay

Corn, Soy, Wheat, Barley and Sorghum are grown in Uruguay in year round production. Soy, Corn or Sorghum through the Summer and Wheat or Barley during the winter, providing two crops per year.

With a rain fall of 1400 mm per year and a flat rainfall patten it very different to see crops in such different stages of production. Harvest the soy and plant the wheat the next day.

Irrigation is just getting started to try and even out the seasons. So far it's not been that successfull. In the past four years it's been turned on once due to not needing it due to sufficient rainfall to not being able to turn it on due to not enough rain to fill the dams. Look good but!

Wine

We had lunch at Bodega Irurtia the largest vineyard in Uruguay. We also had a bit of wine and it was very good. They have 340ha's of grapes under cultivation producing around 2.4 million litres of wine. By the looks of there store room most of in is sold in these flagons which are in most stores you walk into. Cheers

Uraguy

In his hand is a Mate'. It's a type of tea they drink here. The thermos under his arm fills the Mate' and he drinks the liquor. They walk around with these a bit like having a smoke? Men and women both. I think there's more than tea in there!!!

Soy Beans

We got our farming fix today. Three headers in the field, talking with farmers about grain, seeding equiptment and crap commodity prices, it was like being at home. Except it was soybeans they were harvesting. This crop was going about 5 T/ha. They have a simple rotation. soy, soy and soy.