Agropastoral Production Systems, Intra-household Resource Allocation and Household Member's Domains

IV. FIVE FAMILIES IN SAN JOSÉ LLANGA (continued)

Case Study Three

This family is part of the growing trend of families who are leaving San José Llanga within the next two years. This trend is becoming more and more evident among younger families who are just beginning agricultural production.

1. Demographics

This young family lives in one of the remote zones of the village, Espiritu Vilqui. They have been married for six years and have four boys under the age of six. All of the children, except the youngest, are able to assist in some way with the agricultural tasks. As table 3-1 indicates, both parents have attended school and all family members live together in San José Llanga.

The family lives with the wife's father and his second wife, both of whom assist the family with agricultural and household tasks. Although the families herd their livestock together, they each retain separate income sources and cropland.

The family landholding in Espiritu Vilqui originates from the wife's parents, therefore classifying her as an originario. In addition to her parents, she still has sisters and aunts living in the community. The husband on the other hand, an agregado, moved to San José Llanga from the neighboring community of Copan to marry the wife six years ago. His brothers and sisters now have land in another department, southwest of La Paz. They rely on the sale of both live animals, crops and sheep manure for their cash income. There were no other forms of supplemental cash income for this past year.

This family plans to move to another department in Bolivia in the coming year. Because of its close proximity to Argentina, they will be growing cocoa and other crops to sell over the border at much higher prices than found in Bolivia. They plan to have both cattle and sheep that can be bought at much lower prices when they arrive in the new community. The husband has traveled twice this year to the new village for two week periods to plant and harvest the crop started this past year. All that needs to be done is to build a house and the family will be ready to leave. All livestock will be sold in order to finance the move.

2. Land Resources and the Crop Enterprise

The family owns approximately twelve and a half hectares divided among crops, fallow, and native rangeland land (table 3-2). The seven rented hectares are divided between both crops and pasture land. The family pays 200 bolivianos ($50) to rent the range land and 20 bolivianos ($5) for two years of cropland rental. The management decisions in crop production are mainly done by the husband. When asking the wife about crop production, she always referred those questions to the husband.

The crops shown in table 3-3, produced over the last crop year can be used in four different ways: human consumption, animal consumption, sale, and seed. The crops that were consumed by the family include potato, quinoa, barley, wheat and canawa, while those consumed by the animals include forage wheat and forage barley. The family saved seed from all crops (except the forage barley) to be used for next year's planting season and sold about half their potato crop, almost all of their quinoa, a little over half of their barley, and a fourth of the canawa this year.

3. Sheep Production

The family grazes approximately eighty native breed sheep. Thirty-two of the sheep belong to them, forty-eight to other people (32 belong to the in-laws, 10 to the wife's sister, and 6 to the wife's aunt).

The sheep products that this family used during the year included milk, meat, and wool. In total they used about twenty-two liters of milk to make cheese and for tea and soup, fifty pounds of wool to make bed covers and clothing, and eight sheep that were slaughtered during festivals.

The decision to sell sheep products is jointly made by the husband and wife depending on the need for money. Live sheep, manure, hides, cheese, and wool were the products this family sold for the purchase of other goods. Last year they sold a total of thirteen sheep to a middleman to be butchered. About one hundred and twenty quintals of sheep manure were sold to an independent buyer that frequently travels to San José. During January, the wife made and sold thirty sheep cheeses (30 liters of milk) to community members in San José Llanga. Finally, they sold eight hides and about fifty pounds of wool at the Sunday Patacamaya fair. Part of the money earned from the sale of these products was used to buy household products, medicines, and food. The money earned from four of the sheep sales will be saved to cover expenses related to next year's move.

4. Dairy Production

At the time of the case study, the family grazed two young bulls and three dairy cows, two of which had male calves. The animals were native breeds and the family owned all but one of the cows and her calf. Three months later, when asked during the survey, the family had sold one of their cows and her calf.

Although this family maintains a herd of dairy cattle, during the study period they had not sold milk to PIL because, for most of the year, they had no lactating animals. Their reason for maintaining a dairy herd was to provide an extra source of income (from the sale of live cattle) that could be saved to finance their move. Live cattle was the only thing the family sold last year from their dairy enterprise. Four animals were sold. The money was used to rent rangeland

The products the family consumed or used during the year were milk and manure. Although the family had not been selling milk to PIL, they had been using milk for their own use in tea, cheese and soup. The family consumed sixty-four liters of milk from their cow herd, and they also used ten quintals of cow manure as cooing fuel.

5. Herd Dynamics

Until recently, the number of cattle pastured over the past four years has been relatively constant, while the sheep herd size has decreased by about forty. This year the family sold four of their cattle to save for the move. Sheep numbers had been decreasing as the family needed to use the money from those sales to cover household expenses and rent land for cattle grazing.

They intend to sell all the animals. When they settle in their new location they would like to expand their sheep herd to approximately one hundred and their cattle herd to twelve. They will accomplish this by buying and breeding livestock once they have settled. One of their reasons for moving to this area is to expand their herd faster because livestock is cheaper in that region.

6. Intra-household Labor Allocation among Enterprises

Intra-household labor allocation can roughly be divided among the different agricultural enterprises this family maintains. In general, the husband is in charge of the dairy and crop enterprises, while the wife is in charge of the sheep enterprise and lends some assistance to the crop enterprise. The family's child labor force is mainly used to care for the sheep. Person-specific tasks within each agricultural enterprise is broken down and addressed in the following sections.

a. Crop Production

Crop production is one enterprise in which the husband and wife share the labor tasks between them. In general, as shown in table 4-4, each phase of production can be broken down according to specific family members who are needed to complete each task. Task specific activities will be described for each family member in the following paragraphs.

The first phase of production, tilling, is the only phase in which the family hires outside labor. The second phase, cleaning the land of debris, was only done for potatoes and was completed by the husband and wife. The third phase, planting, has three separate stages, all of which were completed for potato production only. The husband does the plowing, leaving the wife responsible for both seeding and fertilizing.

The couple worked together to complete the weeding and fertilization (with urea) for crop production, but the husband completed the fumigation. These three phases were not completed for any other crop except forage wheat, which received periodic weeding whenever the husband or wife was near the field.

The last phase, harvesting, was completed by the husband and wife with additional labor from hired workers for potatoes, quinua canawa and forage wheat harvests. For both forage crops, the husband tethered the cattle near the field being harvested. While he worked, the animals ate the forage he provided while he worked in the field. In the early afternoon the couple would return home with the herds and then harvest food crops until dusk.

b. Sheep Production

Sheep production is the enterprise to which the wife allocates most of her labor during the year. The primary responsibilities are herding, milking and selling. The tasks shared between the couple include: shearing, bathing, cutting the newborn female tails, and collection of sheep manure. The principal task identified by the wife is herding. The wife and the two oldest boys provide the labor for this task.

From January through April the second task, milking, is done by the wife and/or her stepmother before the animals are taken to graze. It usually takes them about thirty minutes to obtain one liter of milk from fifteen sheep.

Whenever the family had sheep for sale it was the wife's responsibility to transport and sell the animals at the Patacamaya Sunday fair. She started early Sunday morning (about 1:00 a.m.) and walked the seven hours to market with the sheep. Because they sold the sheep to a middleman, she did not need to spend more than a few hours at the market. Once she received the money she was in charge of spending it on household goods.

Shearing, bathing, cutting the newborn's tails, and collection of sheep manure were tasks shared by the wife and husband. In general, animals were shorn in the corral before going to graze. Both the husband and wife participated jointly in this process about every three months. After the sheep had been sheared, they were bathed in a medicated sheep dip to control external parasites.

The other two tasks associated with sheep production, cutting the newborn females' tails and collection of sheep manure, were not readily identified by the family as directly-related tasks. The first task is shared by both the husband and wife who spent one afternoon cutting the tails of the newborn female sheep. The last task, collecting sheep manure from the corral, was carried out by either the husband or wife once a month in the afternoon. The process involves raking the manure into piles, scooping it (by hand) into a piece of cloth and throwing it over the corral wall into a large pile for later collection by truck.

c. Dairy Production

The husband allocates his labor mainly towards the production of dairy cattle. His responsibilities include: herding, breeding, buying and selling. The husband and wife work together to collect the cattle manure and feed forage at home. The wife is primarily responsible for milking.

Usually the husband herds the livestock together during the day, but he is also the primary caretaker of the cows while grazing at pasture. When the husband is away or attending to other activities, the wife or children are responsibile for watching and re-tethering the cows. The animals graze from 9:30 a.m. until 2:00 p.m., when they are returned and tethered in an area close to the house. The husband can leave to work on other activities.

Breeding is a task for which the husband solicits outside help. In the past, they have brought a bull from another zone. The family bred one cow this year using a native breed bull. The service cost them 25 bolivianos.

The husband takes care of the transport and sale of their cows to the market. It takes him seven hours to walk with the cows to reach Patacamaya for the Sunday market. On the three occasions he sold cattle to a middleman he was finished by the early morning, but the other times took longer to negotiate prices with farmers. He would also be responsible for choosing and negotiating the price for any cattle bought.

The wife took the responsibility of milking one cow each morning for four months before the herd was taken to graze. It usually took her less than a half hour to get two liters from the cow twice a week. Feeding dried forage at home and collection of cattle manure for cooking were the two dairy production tasks shared between the husband and wife. Usually between June and October the family feeds cut forages to the cows each evening. The other task, collection of cow manure, is generally done once a month or when needed for cooking.

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