Go to a restaurant that has meat-based dishes on its menu and choose a churrasco of Uruguayan Criollo Beef it will be possible. It is early to venture when it will happen, but it is a goal that began to be closer, after a venture activated by the businessman Paul Carrasco.
To communicate it, on the social network Twitter he posted the following message: “A dream come true, I am happy. I have my first 10 Creole bulls equal to the ones that Hernandarias brought. he is coming Uruguayan wagyu”.
Carrasco is the founding partner of the company Livestock Connection, created in 1999, which provides the service of managing investments in livestock made by people from the city, without them taking care of the livestock or paying the cost of an apprenticeship. This company is also a large producer of cattle, in leased fields, with its own rodeos. Another business unit is the marketing of branded meat –Stradivarius–, from young animals raised on grass, a business that began in 2012 in the United States and landed in the local market.
Those first 10 animals that Conexión Ganadera acquired, explained Carrasco, are cattle with origin more than four centuries agoin the animals introduced to the then Banda Oriental by Hernando Arias de Saavedra, “Hernandarias”, animals for their part descendants of the Iberian breed.
Those cattle during the nineteenth century began to crossbreed and over time were absorbed, to the point that they almost disappeared.
Fortunately, Carrasco noted, in 1974 the Army recruited what was left and he installed it mainly in the Fortaleza de San Miguel, also somewhat in the Fortaleza de Santa Teresa.
There they were kept in quite hostile conditions, because the rodeo is in low-quality fields and based on excessive numbers.
P. Carrasco
Uruguayan Criollo Cattle.
A very big risk
“The story was transferred to me by a biologist working at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Eyleen Armstrong. He works almost alone, with few resources, with a lot of enthusiasm and he told me all about this jewel that remains to us, a wealth with a very great risk, because you have to imagine what can happen if there is, for example, an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease and there is that killing what was maintained for more than 400 years would be something terrible, it would be something unforgivable for our country,” he said.
Carrasco, motivated by Eyleen, eagerly began to investigate the history, reality and potential of the Uruguayan Criollo Cattle.
“I was impressed by the quality of the meat, they did a trial comparing it with a British breed, inside the San Miguel field, they slaughtered animals of that British breed and of the Uruguayan Criollo Bovine and the Criollo has more muscle, less bone, more intramuscular fat and less peripheral fat”, he highlighted.
In addition, “they did a test, they tasted the meat and the Criollo also surprised them there.”
All of this, Carrasco said, “reminded me enormously of what happened in Japan with the meat of Wagyu cattle, which is not a consequence of any genetic management, it is a work animal in Japan that someone discovered and it became the most face of the world.”
Carrasco reflected that “any genetic improvement will make an animal adapt, if you put it to make a bigger calf, for example, it will surely work, but it will never be as adapted as the one you never touched, because the one you never touched is the one that nature created to survive”.
P. Carrasco
Uruguayan Criollo Cattle.
Other grazing habits
At the same time, he noted, “has very interesting grazing habitsfor example, it is capable of moving much further from the water to look for food and return than our cattle, that means that you can occupy a plot of land with more staff because our cattle are fat and more than 300 or 400 meters from the water they do not move away, so there is plenty ungrazed field.
Another “obvious” strength is its resistance to parasites, plus it has no dockingthere is no dystocia, “what was docked in the past died,” he said, alluding to a natural selection that left the best on the court.
P. Carrasco
Uruguayan Criollo Cattle.
a breeding machine
The Criollo cattle, he affirmed, “is a breeding machine, there you realize that all the improvement was much more for the greenhouse and the refrigerator than for breeding, these Criollo cattle are always pregnant, they have an adaptation to very adverse situations that make you think that it is super adapted to climate change.”
P. Carrasco
Uruguayan Criollo Cattle.
High value germplasm
Carrasco defined that we are, from the scientific point of view, “in the presence of a germplasm such as that of our natural pastures, such as Paspalum dilatatum, any of those, a germplasm that is essential to preserve”.
On the other hand, there is what he defined as “a commercial hope”, for which the support of Conexión Ganadera is being articulated to the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine so that everything scientific is studied, “hopefully under the blessing of the National Research Agency and Innovation (ANII)”.
The purpose is that the faculty advances in experiments on aspects such as fertility, behavior of the meat and others.
What the Livestock Connection will do is multiply these cattle, spreading them around the country, offering the project management for slaughter in refrigerators and marketing under the umbrella of Stradivarius, “so that in two or three years we can see the potential of the Uruguayan Criollo Cattle, following the path of the Wagyu”.
10 copies have already been acquired, from a partner producer of the Uruguayan Criollo Cattle Breeders Association. The intention is to involve other producers, in order to have enough material for all the studies that have to be done, even an agreement will be signed with the Army, which has a large number of rodeos.
In all this, Conexión Ganadera puts resources, “and if we do it, it is because we are convinced of the potential of the Uruguayan Criollo Bovine, which is not only a beautiful story.”
Then began a path that has as its destiny to see a barbecue with almost 500 years of history on a plate.
P. Carrasco
Uruguayan Criollo Cattle.
