Drought Cuts Tierra Verde Harvest by a Quarter

The dry season came early to Tierra Verde this year, and it stayed. From August through October, the interior valleys received less than half their normal rainfall, leaving soil moisture depleted across the coffee belt and yerba mate stands. Harvest crews working the high country around Salto and the central cooperatives reported yields dropping sharply in the final weeks of October, a pattern that repeated across three separate growing zones.

Cooperative Council leaders in San Vicente convened an emergency session last week to assess the damage. The preliminary count suggests the region's total output will fall to roughly seventy-five percent of last season's volume—a loss that ripples directly into smallholder household income and into the federal commodity exchange where Tierra Verde's exports set the regional price floor.

The crisis arrives as the region's farmers are still absorbing the cost of last year's land-registry backlog, which locked hundreds of smallholders out of federal fair-price schemes. Now, a second consecutive shock threatens to destabilize the cooperatives that have anchored the region's economy since the founding.