'Rural land, Chacras and Estancias' Real Estate

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Rural land, Chacras and Estancias

Does anyone have any experience in setting up a chacra or estancia here in Uruguay? A lot of people have been asking me about it lately... is there anything they should be warned about? or does anyone have any tips?

I chose east Colonia because most of the farms along the litoral are small so there are agricultural co-ops in place as well as rather more rural infrastructure than you find in big farm or ranch country... though the beaches and a couple of restaurants are nice too :-) The traditional farming is mostly dairy, fruit and vines with some beef cattle fattening and arable.

Having decided that I didn't want anything that was for sale in the area, I found my ideal bit of land by 3 months of systematic grid searches and asking people who owned what. Luckily, the weather was very wet so I avoided the easy error of buying a place which can be cut off by floods. Sad to say the owner of my heart's desire was the most "iron elbowed" man in all Valdense and because it wasn't for sale, he hit me for 30% above the going rate at that time. However, Sterling was mega-strong back then and I'd just sold my seaside beach hut for an eye-watering sum, so I smiled and paid him what he asked.

The chacra has roughly 1 km of road frontage and the fencing was poor or non-existent so my first task was to get it fenced (with 7 strands of plain wire as specified by the law.)

I've been busy refurbishing and extending the old house and as the usable land is one big field, I opted to go arable though I have plans to plant pecan and walnut orchards in the future. I'm too old and lazy for livestock.

If the weather is kind, its possible to grow two arable crops a year. Winter wheat, barley, oats and alfalfa do well with the popular summer crops being sorghum, maize and soya. Last summer wasn't kind and the drought zapped the sorgo crop... but that's farming for you.

Over the last 3 years we have experienced good to excellent grain prices and this seems to have triggered a bit of an arable revolution in the form of expert agronomists-for-hire and machinery contractors well equipped with quality 1st world kit (though you need to be beside a good road as some of their machines are enormous.) Such services make small scale arable farming much more attractive by doing away with the need for owning and maintaining machinery.

Judging by results so far, there is no way we could support ourselves on 30 acres of arable but the research and sums I've done show various orchard options on 10 hectares to be quite promising. The downside is no income for the first 4 to 6 years while the trees are growing and not knowing what the price of olives, walnuts or whatever will be by then.

Patrick.

The first is not really a moan... its just taxes. Ownership of a Uruguayan farm renders the owner liable to pay BPS contributions. On my place these amounted to approximately 11, 000 pesos/annum (about 500 U$S.) However, once I got my cedula, my lawyer registered me as a unipersonal farmer. This increased the BPS payments to 14, 000 pesos per annum (about 640 U$S) but saved me 13, 000 pesos in health care subscriptions. I use a local gestor (a sort of public accountant/private tax collector) to administer the BPS contributions and currently pay them 4 monthly. Annual land tax is collected by the Junta Local but being Colonia, these were halved this year leaving me with a bill of 810 pesos (about 37 U$S) for the year. Unlike the urban and suburban areas, on rural farms any houses are ignored for land tax purposes so you pay the same "contribucion rural" whether you live in a tent or a half scale copy of Windsor Castle. Whether this happy state of affairs will continue as more people take up rural residence remains to be seen.

Number two concerns the ants which are incredibly destructive. My efforts in planting 22 citrus trees a year ago came to naught because of them. One evening the little trees were fine but next morning not a leaf remained. They are just as destructive with field crops, hedges, veggies etc and are currently creating bald patches in the winter wheat. There are methods of fighting them but they are costly and time consuming.

My third moan is the strange attitudes of local well drillers. My land lies next to the Rio Rosario valley and 15 meters down there are apparently inexhaustable supplies of water. I have an old hand-dug well which didn't dry up in last summer's drought but with very low UK deposit rates and our vulnerability to drought, I set aside money to drill 3 new 25 meter wells to provide irrigation water and (hopefully) a sweeter supply for the house. 2.5 years ago I called on the three major well drillers in the departmento and since then I've been phoning them every 2 or 3 weeks but in spite of endless promises, none of them have appeared yet.

Whinge number 4 concerns the speed (or rather the lack thereof) of local construction work... probably made to seem worse by my former life in the construction business. On the plus side, the lack of planning and building regulations on rural property is wonderfully refreshing after a life time of working under strict regulation. I can't criticise the labour prices and I can't in all honesty call the workers lazy. The underlying problem in ROU rural areas is the lack of prefabricated materials like reinforced concrete beams, septic tanks, soakaway lines etc, the lack of plant hire companies and my workers preference for hand tools over power tools. Thus a concrete roof which takes 3 days to build in places where reinforced beams and infill bricks are available requires nearly 2 months and huge amounts of shuttering here.

There again, such problems are small beer when compared to the clean vapour-trail-free sky, our quaint customs like waving to people from your car bike or horse, the fireflies, asado, tranquility, pace of life etc as well as the lack of traffic, surveilance, hostile youth, annoying wars against various things and high tech control freakery.

It would take artillery to force me out of here now that the Norman-esque tower is nearing completion :-)

Further more, double check the paperwork. A lot of chacras/campos have (or more often) don't have a registered 'camino vecinal'. You need that to access your land legally. It has to be in the papers and if not, you have to arrange that with your notary, the neigbours and the municipality. So you might want to check out the neighbours as well. Good neighbours are very important over here. They even mention it in some advertisements. You will need them (or not, but then it's good to know that they are OK).

Ask around for the prices per ha. I think that a lot of websites like the one Elaine mentioned are quite expensive in their offer. Real estate agents are just people who sell the house and not real experts on real estate.

It's better to find a place where you would like to live, find the piece of farmland (INDICE Coneat) which suits your bussiness and ask around at the locals. We asked taxi drivers, store owners, ladies from the Antel (phone) office (the best ones..old ladies from the village, they know everyone and everything). But take care, take nothing for granted from the Uruguayos.

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