Frigoríficos

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Frigoríficos

Frigoríficos (refrigerated meat-packing plants). On the traditional Estancia, workers killed cattle for their yield of hides, tallow, and dried meat. By the early nineteenth century, the processing of cattle moved from the plains to Saladeros, meat-salting plants. During the 1880s, frigoríficos began replacing saladeros. At the meatpacking plants, workers butchered animals and packed the meat for shipment in refrigerator ships to Europe. The frigoríficos required higher-quality meat, so ranchers introduced blooded bulls from Europe and planted alfalfa for feed to improve their stock. The British controlled the packinghouses of Buenos Aires until the early twentieth century, when the Chicago "beef trust" supplanted them. Meat packing remains an important industry in Argentina and Uruguay.

See alsoMeat Industry .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

David Rock, Argentina, 1516–1987, rev. and enl. ed. (1987).

Additional Bibliography

Valenzuela de Mari, Cristina Ofelia. Ganaderia y estancias En Chaco y Formosa (1888–1998). Chaco: Instituto de Investigaciones Geohistóricas, 1998.

                                      Richard W. Slatta