Hello!
I remember reading about how German immigrants in Argentina brought with them the knowledge of wheat harvesting. Before the German immigrants the Argentinians didn't produce much wheat, after they were one of the top wheat exporters. I am having trouble finding a good source for this.
Does anyone have any insight to confirm or deny this?
Thanks in advance!
Hi. While we wait for someone more qualified, I can give you some basic guidelines on the period:
Argentina's adoption of an agricultural economy towards the last two decades of the XiX century were mostly impulsed due to the necesity of creating the conditions for higher quality cattle, which was quickly becoming the country's main export thanks to frozen meat techniques.
As a result, the conversion of the countryside from ranches to farms was mostly directed privately by big landowner-ranchers and not by colonies. This meant that low paid new inmigrants were responsible for working on those fields in exchange for a daily salary. Not all of them stayed in the country once the harvest was over and just a few of them were able to acquire their own property, allthough some were quite succesfull leasing the land and working it for themselves. This part of Argentinian history starts at around 1880 when the big waves of inmigrants come to the ports and ends with the first world war or even a bit earlier when the capitalization of the farms gets to similar levels of that of Australia and New Zeland, meaning that the extraordinary benefits were over.
I haven't studied anything about german inmigration specifically but I can tell you that the inmigration from that period came mostly from southern and eastern europe. Within that context, german inmigrants are usually associated to their role in urban industries, not so much in the agricultural transformation. The german colonies were more or less a thing of the past by this point and they had never really been all that important as opposed to say, british colonies.
Some basic sources. Again, none of them deal with the germans in particular:
Beyhaut, Conde, Gorostegui, Torrado, "Los inmigrantes en el sistema ocupacional Argentino" en "Argentina, Sociedad de Masas" (Bs As, EUDEBA, 1966)
Bejarano, "Inmigración y estructuras tradicionales en Buenos Aires (1854-1930)" en "Los Fragmentos del Poder" (Bs As, Alvarez, 1969)
Ferns, "Gran Bretaña y Argentina en el siglo XIX" (Bs As, Solar / Hachette, 1969)