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The Pampas
Soil deep enough to feed continents, flat enough to bore a surveyor
Argentina is rich, when it is rich, because of this grass. The Pampas are the flat, humid, treeless lowlands fanning out from the Rio de la Plata across central Argentina and into Uruguay and southern Brazil: some 750,000 square kilometers of soil so deep and even that a plow can run all day without striking a stone. It is one of a handful of places on Earth capable of feeding whole continents, and for a century and a half it has done exactly that — beef, wheat, maize, and now soybeans by the shipload. Nearly two-thirds of Argentines live on or beside it, and the country's politics have been argued out between this countryside and the port that drains it.
The Pampas divide roughly in two. The humid Pampa near the Atlantic gets enough rain to grow crops without irrigation; the dry Pampa to the west and southwest shades into scrub and gives way to grazing. The whole surface is loess, wind-blown silt laid down over a slowly subsiding basin, and it is astonishingly level — Buenos Aires province rises only a few meters over tens of kilometers. Two low ranges, the Sierras de Tandil and the Sierra de la Ventana, interrupt it, the latter holding Cerro Tres Picos at 1,239 meters, the highest point. The Parana and Uruguay rivers meet in the muddy Rio de la Plata estuary, the region's outlet to the world.
Before Europeans, the Pampas belonged to hunting peoples and to no cattle at all. The animals arrived with the Spanish, went feral, and multiplied into the herds that made the gaucho. Barbed wire, refrigerated ships and British capital converted that free-ranging economy into an export machine by 1900, when Argentina ranked among the wealthiest countries on Earth and Buenos Aires filled with Italian and Spanish immigrants. Soy has since displaced much of the pasture, and most of the harvest now sails to China. The native grassland, meanwhile, is among the most converted biomes anywhere: less than a tenth of the original Pampa survives, which makes the surviving fragments unusually precious.