Bridging time: Patagonian family farm defies the odds with newfangled notions. (Executive Travel).

Think Patagonia and the mind almost immediately journeys to a place of wind-swept plains and endless sky. A push is underway to fashion Patagonia into the world's next exotic tourist destination, hut for David Fenton and his family, cashing in on their sheep ranch's end-of-the-world mystique is an afterthought. Instead, this Argentine estancia at the entrance to the Magellan Strait is making gains the way it has for more than a century, through hard work. Unlike neighboring ranches, however, the Fentons have added a twist: 21st century innovation.

At first glance, everything about Monte Dinero seems anachronistic in the modern world of urban living and always-in-touch Internet connections. It's isolated, sitting along a bumpy, gravel road 114 kilometers outside Rio Gallegos, the provincial capital of Santa Cruz, Argentina's southernmost mainland province. From the outside, the 26,000-hectare ranch with a corrugated-iron house fenced by low-lying broom sedges and thorn bushes looks much like it did a century ago. But it's not.

For starters, the Fentons have done away with that most sanctified of Argentine rural icons, the gaucho. Instead of galloping off on horses to monitor the ranch, as their predecessors did, rural hands at Monte Dinero tend the ranch on off-road motorcycles. Gore-Tex jackets and walkie-talkies replace the traditional ponchos and extra-long facon knives. And come shearing time, the Fentons' 20,000 animals will be spared the mechanically powered razors used by most ranchers. Contemporary studies have shown that manual trimming with oversized scissors--although more costly and time consuming--leaves a thin layer of insulating wool that makes the animals better able to withstand Patagonia's frigid winters.

To obtain an improved race of fine-fibered sheep, workers at Monte Dinero--literally, Mount Money--artificially inseminate select ewes with semen from prize-winning rams from Australia and other far-flung spots. Once pregnancy is confirmed, veterinarians transplant the embryo from that sheep to another ewe to carry to term. The original ewe is then impregnated again; ewes earmarked for insemination may undergo the treatment 15 times in two months.

The end result of such strategies, considered avant-garde for these parts, is sheep swathed in one of the finest fibers anywhere in Patagonia. The wool belongs to the Corino, a crossbreed developed at Monte Dinero; the ranch produces 70,000 kilos of wool each year. In other markets, like New Zealand and Australia, where Fenton and son Richard spent long sabbaticals working on modern sheep ranches, such techniques became standard decades ago. Not so in Patagonia.

"Through the introduction of new technologies, they're just as much pioneers today as the first Fenton was a century ago," says Joaquin Allolio, a Buenos Aires agricultural consultant with several decades experience in Patagonia.

In many respects Monte Dinero, despite the Fentons' push to stay on the cusp of change, is an anomaly: a Patagonian family farm. By one count, more than half the 1,200 estancias in Santa Cruz province, once Patagonia's main wool-producing region, have been abandoned, their picturesque main houses, or cascos, left to rot or vandalized by unemployed farm hands. The reasons for the neglect are varied and range from second-generation disinterest in ranching to the land's unstoppable shift to desert--a result of generations of overgrazing. Furthermore, the surging popularity of synthetic fibers has pushed down international wool prices and made ranching even harder.

The land that hasn't been abandoned now sits in the hands of well-capitalized commercial outfits. The largest landowner in the region is the Compania de Tierras Sud Argentino, a holding company of Italian textile magnates Luciano and Carlo Benetton. In the past decade the Benettons have acquired 900,000 hectares of prime Patagonian grazing land, where they manage 300,000 sheep. One of their biggest properties, 60,000-hectare Estancia Condor, borders Monte Dinero. Although Rockefeller-style cartels are not new--wealthy ranchers have always held large tracts of land here--the Benettons have sparked considerable resentment from other landholders struggling to make ends meet.

But the Fentons and the Benettons share a common language: a strict work ethic and a no-nonsense approach to farming. In the case of the Fentons, hard work is what makes them able to support the family and 10 employees. "I can't remember the last time we took a vacation," says 26-year-old Sharon Fenton, the youngest of the 10-member family and one of the next generation of caretakers for the ranch.

Although the Fentons may be too busy to travel, they're more than willing to welcome curious outsiders for a visit. Unlike many dude ranches in Patagonia, however, tourism is a complement to Monte Dinero's other activities, not a savior. Only 10% of its income is generated by tourism. In addition to providing rustic, but comfortable, accommodations in the same "Big House" that Sharon's great-great grandfather shipped in pieces from London 115 years ago, visitors ride horses to the historic lighthouse at Cabo Virgenes and trek through a nature reserve populated each summer by Magellan penguins. A small museum in the house conserves family heirlooms, early maps of the area and items rescued from shipwrecks when the Magellan Strait was a major thoroughfare for adventure-seekers en route to California during the 1849 gold rush.

But more than these inanimate historical relics, it's the farm's living heritage, as embodied by the Fentons, that serves as its greatest legacy.