Emily posted on September 28, 2011 08:45
Recently, Robert and I travelled to Costa Rica at the request of Jose Albertazzi, owner of the magazine Desarrollo Agropecuario, which focuses on the registered beef cattle industry of that country. Many of you may remember Victoria Lambert (Caballo Rojo Publishing) brought Jose to our annual membership meeting in Houston, where he gave a brief presentation on the need for good Santa Gertrudis genetics in his country. From this meeting developed the recent exportation of semen to a breeder of commercial Santa Gertrudis in Costa Rica, which Robert and Jose were instrumental in completing. While there are not many registered Santa Gertrudis herds located there, certainly many commercial cattle we saw had some Santa Gertrudis influence in their pedigree.
During our trip, we visited two of the largest purebred and commercial Santa Gertrudis breeders in Costa Rica. Julio A. Sanchez is president of a family-owned company that in addition to cattle, rice and rum is also the largest sugar cane processor in Central America and the sixth largest of Mexico, and Central and South America combined. Julio is focused at this time, as are most Costa Rican ranchers, on producing a dual-purpose animal for meat and milk, as the value of beef only animals has decreased to a level of unprofitability as never seen before in Costa Rica. However, the males and cull females are grown and processed for human consumption. Despite the dual-purpose need, the ranch maintains a nice set of purebred Santa Gertrudis bulls and females. I would be remiss not to mention Julio’s primary complaint, which he took about two minutes after meeting Robert and I to express, there is no semen catalog for SGBI and most animals in the SGBI have no data.
Our next visit was with a young man named Gonzalo Sanchez of Cortijo El Baden. This young man and his crew deserve special recognition for the impressive fact they all had matching shirts with the SGBI logo, their ranch name and their SGBI herd number 39268 on them. This ranch maintains a nice group of registered cows from which they selected their best, haltered, tied to trees in the yard and showed to us one at a time as Gonzalo read their pedigrees. As with Julio, I would be negligent if I did not point out that Gonzalo has all fifty head of their seedstock herd registered with the SGBI.
In addition to these fine gentlemen, we met many breeders of various breeds during an expo in the state of Guanacaste near Liberia, Costa Rica. Some of the best parmesan cheese and steak I have tasted was at this expo, produced by a breeder of dual-purpose water buffalo. To a breeder, these men knew their financial numbers, their genetic data and were very much performance-based. There was a string of Gyr-Brown Swiss cross cows of which the lowest producer gave 50 liters of milk per day. Realize that this is on a forage-based diet as there are not a lot of cereal grains grown in Costa Rica; I believe in the six days we were there I saw only one combine.
The take home message for me was if we are to have a presence and any influence in Costa Rica, and other Central American countries, we must have the product they desire and it must have the data to validate its worth.
Written by SGBI President Scott Moore