Well, that’s us (daughter Margaret and I ) heading back to the UK. Ten days in Chile (!) and in a couple of weeks it’ll seem like a distant memory, I’m sure.
We arrived here in Santiago as they go into their spring. Equivalent to our April, I think. It was the week before the IDF (International Dairy Federation) annual conference. We’d arrived early in order to get over the jetlag, see a bit of the city and experience the Chilean heritage and food culture!
We walked pretty well everywhere, being slightly daunted by the thought of using our scant (my non-existent) Spanish on Chilean public transport. We clocked – on Margaret’s pedometer – over 50 miles. Five miles a day! First to Santa Lucia, a relatively small, but steep sided, volcanic plug that gives a good panoramic view of the city - but not half as good as the view from the top of San Christobal the following day.
Of course, Chile is on the Pacific ‘Ring of Fire’ with several active volcanoes along its 4,000km of length. None erupted while we were there, and though we were quite close to one when we travelled south in our second week, we couldn’t see it for cloud. And drizzle. They did warn us, in Santiago, that Valdivia and Osorno is a lovely part of the country, but the weather was like Scottish weather!
Our expeditions to buy food were very revealing. Even in a little deli-type shop, there was no sign of ‘organic’. Artisan, grass-fed, sustainable and high welfare was a common claim on the packaging, but not organic. Apparently 15 years or so ago, organic was being talked about but since then it has completely disappeared. Fragmented into some of the individual components that, in our experience, make up the ‘organic’ way of farming as a whole.
Another venture was to the Vega Central Market, which was quite an experience. It was vast, covering several acres in a fairly run down area in the centre of town. It was mobbed! This was where many of the locals and street food vendors got their supplies. It was very much, stack ‘em high and sell ‘em cheap. I don’t know if the refrigerated meat display cabinets actually worked but the overwhelming smell of rancid meat suggested they were struggling. If those displays were in Scotland, our environmental health officers would have had kittens!
But it was cheap! You could buy a slab of some kind of steak for £8 a kilo. Half chickens were £3 a kilo. The cheese on offer was what was called, ‘fresh cheese’. Pretty tasteless, rubbery and full of little air bubbles but seemed very popular, at about £5 per kilo. Good for cooking I’d guess. Rarely did we see ‘matured’ cheese except in the classy restaurant at the conference. We also visited the Natural History Museum and Museum of Memories and Human Rights, which described in detail the horrific incidents of the Pinochet years and the ‘Disappeared’. So, we’d kind of got familiar with some of Santiago by the time of the conference.
The conference organisers made a big thing about networking and set up all kinds of platforms and chat rooms for that purpose. All that would have passed me by but for Prof Dan Weary of The University of British Columbia (UBC), who ‘reached out’. It turned out he was on the same panel, and we had a contact in common; his colleague, Prof Nina von Keyserlink also from UBC who I had given a virtual tour of our dairy set-up to, a few years before.
Dan’s speciality was animal welfare, he had moved to UBC in 1997 to co-found the University’s Animal Welfare Program. At the IDF conference, his talk centered around public perceptions of the dairy sector, and how the industry should respond. We all met up for a grand chat a few days before the conference, and Margaret regaled us with some of her stories from her time as a cowhand on a ranch in upper BC.
Time rolled on and the day arrived. I wouldn’t be on until 4pm so we sat in on a couple of earlier presentations. One of them was about communicating with your customers. It seems that folks are getting a bit weary of slick marketing campaigns, promising instant gratification. They want authenticity and to hear it from the farmer! Well, that might bode well for the documentary and maybe even the book.
Four pm approached and we’d been guided to the auditorium. There were three streams of talks going on simultaneously and delegates could choose which ones they attend, if any. Ten minutes to go and there were a few folks wandering in. We were invited to focus on the laptop with our talks on the podium and familiarise ourselves with the technology. All seemed well.
Two minutes to go and we turned to take our seats. And wow! There were about 300 people here (I’d counted the seats, as I do – 350). This was serious stuff - and didn’t help my nerves any!
Dan kicked off. He’s a really experienced professional and gave a simple, clear presentation of the work they were doing at UBC. I was on next. We had 15 minutes per presentation, and there was a large digital clock counting down the seconds at the back of the room.
I knew it was possible to stay within the allotted time if I stuck to the script, which Margaret had insisted I do, because she knew my habit of going off at tangents.
My IDF coordinator, Alejandra, was lovely; so very helpful and supportive. She had hoped to show the trailer of the documentary after my talk. I stuck faithfully to the script but just as I was finishing, there was some kind of WiFi/technical outage. By the time it was all back up and running there was no time for the film trailer, which was a shame. I think Alejandra had felt the documentary film trailer might add some kind of gravitas to my talk. But hey…
I’m never very sure how my talks come over, but Margaret reassured me it had come over well. There were four of us on the panel and fifteen minutes for questions. It was all in English and AI was doing simultaneous translations into several languages.
We hadn’t booked ourselves on any other days of the conference. At $800 per day per person, it seemed a little steep! There was a farmers’ dinner that night but as we were leaving at 5.30am the following morning, I skipped that as well. The days of burning the candle at both ends are well and truly behind me!
The flight was from Santiago to Valdivia, 500 miles to the south and Margaret is a stickler for being on time, if not early. I don’t know where she gets that from, certainly not me – perhaps that’s why! But that was her job here in Chile, to get me to the talks on time, which I must admit, she achieved admirably…!
The talks in Valdivia were to students, staff and farmers at the School of Veterinary Sciences, in the Austral University of Chile. There were to be 80 attendees plus some online. But first we were whisked off to visit a very interesting farm where the son (Ignacio) had returned home from working as an engineer with a firm (Lely) that manufactures robotic milkers.
The farm already had a very simple and impressive dairying system where the 140 Norwegian Red (Ayrshire genetics) cows calved mainly in the early spring (August/September!). The farm was split into many small grazing blocks, and the cows chose when they would come into the open-sided parlour for milking by one of three robots. The herd averaged 2.5 milkings per day, Ignacio pointed out, from the host of data collected by the computer. After milking they would either return to the original block or be directed off to a new one, depending on the pre-programmed grazing periods. The cows were so relaxed and curious of the visitors. One older girl came round to each of us on the group for a scratch before sauntering off to her paddock. Disease and foot problems were minimal. The calves were removed from their mothers a few hours after birth… and reared by Ignacio’s mother. They looked healthy and well cared for.
However, Ignacio had plans. They were building a new barn that would house a further 180 cows and four robots, and the cows would be housed all year. We discussed this plan at some length. Ignacio’s dad Edmundo was not keen on it. As we were leaving, Ignacio and his dad approached me and asked, ‘Do you think cow-with-calf might work with robots?’. Well, I believe it can. Charles has heard of a farm somewhere where it seems to be working well. I promised I’d send on details.
Back to Valdivia and dinner with Prof Tamara Tadich of the vet school (Tamara is a professor at the Austral University of Chile's Faculty of Veterinary Sciences, where she researches applied animal welfare) and her mother, Carmen (a retired professor and the instigator of the animal health department in Chile).
On our way to the restaurant some figures were pointed out to me lying in the narrow strip of grass between the road and the river. ‘Sea lions.’ said Tamara. ‘Very life-like.’ I replied. ‘That’s because they are real!’ she said. Apparently they were drawn there by the local fish market, where they feasted daily on discarded fish heads and other delicacies. We were warned not to go too close - they like their space!
Next day, my first talk would be the same as the one in Santiago – the holistic, agroecological farming system we had developed and what we had found from farming this way. Which was followed by a Q&A session. Then a second talk drilling down into the detail of cow-with-calf dairying and our experiences of 9 years of that. Again, followed by a Q&A session. There were then exchanges of small gifts and photo ops and selfies.
We were then whisked further south for lunch at a pub with a grandstand seat overlooking a large lake, at the foot of a dramatic snow-capped volcano that had last erupted in 2016, we were told. Unfortunately, as we had been warned in Santiago, this area was beautiful, but the weather was like the weather in Scotland. Yesterday at the farm had been a glorious spring day but now mist and drizzle! So, we had to be content with photographs of the volcano from posters and from Google.
On to Osorno (120 miles SE of Valdivia) and a quick wander round before a brief but very welcome sleep. We were being given a lift to the very modest Osorno airport for our flight back to Santiago at 7 am the next morning. I got my wake-up call from Margaret at 6.15… I was never a morning person!
Our first week in Chile was a very relaxing holiday, doing the tourist thing in gloriously warm weather. But the second week has been an exhausting whirlwind. I thought I should get it down on ‘paper’ before the mists of bonny Scotland blur the memory. So, I whiled away some of the 14-hour flight back to Heathrow doing just that.
Here’s to Chile and Chileans. A wonderful country and wonderful, friendly people!!