Dairy family farmers from the west of the Buenos Aires conurbation: their logics of production, reproduction and their pluriactive strategies

Abstract

In Argentina, family farm production has an important relevance, both for the number of farms that exist, as well as for the generation of employment, settling in a place and food for internal consumption. In the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires (AMBA) there is a large number of "smalls dairies" - defined as their own, whose main activity is milk production, they have up to 100 cows per herd, the workforce is predominantly familiar and they can have some facility for milking-. The following study is framed in a Special ProHuerta Project (N° 989/2017), awarded to seven familiar dairy producers from La Matanza, Marcos Paz and Virrey del Pino. The aim of the project was to identify access to safe water for human and animal consumption, but it is also known as an input to deepen the study of the productive logics that familiar dairy producers in a complex territory such as the AMBA.
According to the case-based method, the information was collected through semi-structured interviews and
secondary information. The information collected shows that the dairy farms have between 7 and 45 cows per herd, land holding is a conflicting factor, their resources for trackers are impaired and the insecurity and
uncertainty condition of the continuity of the activity. Pluriactivity is highlighted -understood in terms of activities within the farm, as well as the combination of agricultural production with extrapredial income- as one of the strategies used for the sustainability of these productive systems.