Innovaciones tecnológicas productivas agrarias en el partido de San Cayetano: implicancias en la sostenibilidad del suelo

Abstract

Updating and incorporating new methods imply renewal of equipment as well as new procedures to be performed with them, resulting in a more dynamic, transformed and renovated territory. This work focuses on the analysis and study of the countryside real situation in Argentina at present, more precisely in the pampa's prairies region, and in the lands southwest of Buenos Aires province inside this region, San Cayetano district, emphasizing above all its agricultural outcome and the environmental sustainability of the rural productive systems. Subsequent to this first goal, the degree of inclusion of these new technologies will be scrutinized, in order to judge what adaptive strategies producers apply and how, by applying them, they modify their use of the land. Within the appointed range of analysis, i.e. San Cayetano district, a set of agricultural production units are considered as sample, and the farming producers who are responsible for such units are taken as the observation entities. With the purpose of meeting the appointed objectives, a combined methodology of qualitative and quantitative techniques is applied. Qualitative research is done on the basis of the information collected through half structured interviews performed to qualified informants, and to productive agents directly linked to the units of analysis. With respect to quantitative analysis, data came out of the Rural Society of San Cayetano and the Barrow Experimental Farm, the 1988 Agricultural Census, the INDEC 1999 National Farming Inquiry, topical letters and countryside cartography.