As with any type of business concern, estancias required different sets of tasks. Roundups, brandings, sortings, geldings, and dehornings were performed by peons on the fields. It is clear what that meant, and there are abundant descriptions produced by both travelers and experts on how they were carried out. But those peons had to be hired, supervised, and dismissed; food and tools for them had to be supplied; cattle had to be bought and sold; and improvements had to be maintained and expanded. Those were the tasks of management. A different set of tasks, aiming at the accomplishment of the overall business objectives, corresponded to entrepreneurship: decisions related to land purchases and sales, the obtention of title deeds, and the resolution of legal and fiscal problems. Rural production is cyclical, and so were the tasks demanded from peons, but natural and unnatural calamities made management and entrepreneurship far from automatic and repetitious. Droughts, rain, floods, locusts, and wild dogs affected production as much as Indians, bandits, rustlers, and montoneras. Action was required from managers and entrepreneurs to counter these calamities as well as to take advantage of favorable conditions. Estancias were a profitable business, but profit did not stem just from the workings of nature and the labors of peons. Profit stemmed from the skills of managers and the initiative of entrepreneurs, from their ability to combine the different factors of production and to cope with unexpected threats.

This chapter studies estancia management and entrepreneurship. The scarcity of sources and an ideological bias toward labor have kept scholars away from these key aspects of rural production.