Letter From Europe: Water buffalo get a foothold on north European farms

Sunday, August 10, 2008

Only 10 years ago, few would have taken these animals seriously as a livestock enterprise in the north. Now buffalo herds are proving profitable as providers of tasty and healthy meat

by NORMAN DUNN

In the not too distant past, livestock farmers in Europe tended to stay lifelong with the same species.

Once a dairy farmer, always a dairy farmer. When a young farmer went down the swine production road, he tended to follow it to retirement.

But that's an attitude changing fast due to disappearing margins and the sometimes desperate search for diversification when competition gets too hot in traditional enterprises.

I mean, just imagine your neighbour telling you 20 years ago that he was selling his cattle and changing over to ostrich meat production.

Such a pioneer would have been filed immediately under "eccentric, maybe dangerous." The bank's reaction would have been even more wary. Nowadays, ostrich farms may be still fairly unusual but, from Ireland to Italy, they're definitely an accepted part of the rural scene. And the same goes for llamas, exotic laying fowl, yaks and nowadays even water buffalo.

"Exotic" is in fashion, and hard-headed business farmers have found that there's a growing market out there for what might appear the most unlikely of beasts.

Take young entrepreneur Steve Mitchell, for instance. While this innovator from Fife in Scotland readily admits to being a dedicated and traditional Aberdeen-Angus breeder with a 20-cow purebred herd on his rolling pastures overlooking the Firth of Forth, he also sought something different.

"My Uncle Tom had already decided to start direct marketing of the pork from his pig herd and I saw this was the way to go with the Angus beef I was producing," explains Steven. "But there are already literally dozens of very good producers of Angus meat in my area of eastern Scotland. I needed something different: an easily-managed animal that could produce a tasty, and preferably very healthy, meat."

Looking around further south, this young farmer noticed a few water buffalo herds kept for meat and sometimes milk production in Britain.

He learned that buffalo were not only robust and healthy but were easy to handle and put on weight efficiently on the roughest of pastures and bushland. He also saw that the dark red meat was already regarded as something of a delicacy in a few upmarket London restaurants. And he heard gourmets praising its tenderness (fibres being generally shorter than those of beef) as well as its unique game-like taste and fat content averaging at least 17 per cent below beef and cholesterol more than 40 per cent less.   

"This looked like being a meat that would give a direct marketer like myself something unusual and still be very attractive for our farm butcher shop and the 12 different farmers' markets we sell at," recalls Steve. He brought the first buffalos onto his farm in
2005 and now has around 140 breeding animals, plus followers. "We're looking for a total of 400 head by the end of 2009," he says.  

Easy to manage? "You bet!" enthuses Steve. The proof is that there's only one full-time stockman running cattle and buffalo on the farm. He says that his buffalo seem to be immune to most cattle health problems and so far no help has had to be given at any calvings. While female offspring are all retained for herd expansion or sold in-calf for breeding – attracting prices equivalent between $3,700 and $3,900 just now – the bulls are kept entire and raised on grazing and grass silage only to about 600 kilograms at 30 months or so, giving a 290-kilogram to 300-kilogram meat carcass.

The taste and health status of buffalo meat means this Scottish farmer can charge a small premium over his Angus steaks when selling direct. "But nothing much more than 10 per cent!"

Now, European farmers are used to getting some sort of support from the European Union for nearly all their enterprises. But in Scotland buffalo are still not really established as farm animals, so there's no cash help.

In Germany, on the other hand, farmers running water buffalo on extensive grazing land can get a small bonus from the state. Buffalo's role in keeping extensive pastures free of undergrowth and young trees is recognized and the farmers involved in such "landscape care" programs can earn at least something in grant aid – the equivalent of $7 per acre in some areas. But German graziers have also found that there's a growing demand for buffalo meat with good returns from the market.

Farmers Rita and Peter Biel from Hatten, near Oldenburg, run their herd of up to 80 buffalo outside year-round and this means that calving sometimes takes place on the pastures at minus 20 C. Peter started his Hatten herd in 1998 with purchases from Berlin Zoo and later from farms in Romania.

He is a founder of the German Buffalo Association, which now includes around 100 farmers with a buffalo headage that should top the 2,000 mark this year.

"We also have a demand for buffalo milk for mozzarella production here in Germany. But most of the animals kept for landscape care are for beef production and we find we can hit liveweight targets of 600 kilograms within 30 to 36 months on rough grazing only."

"There'll certainly be more buffalo soon in Germany," Peter Biel adds. "Maybe they were once seen as exotic. But now they're starting to earn a useful place in north European farming." BF

Norman Dunn writes about European agriculture from Germany.