“If more ranchers knew about water buffalo, they would forget about cows,” José Miranda, a Carbondale rancher, said one morning last January over breakfast. He listed their advantages: The milk tastes great and it’s healthier, with less cholesterol, 11% more protein, 9% more calcium and 37% more iron than cow’s milk. Water buffalo have environmental benefits, too; they’re able to thrive on more marginal pastures and less resource-intensive foods than dairy cows.
Originally from Southeast Asia, water buffalo have been imported to many parts of world, most famously Italy, where they are coveted for their milk, source of the soft and creamy cheese mozzarella di bufala. Water buffalo herds are now found in the Americas from the high Andes to the dry prairies of central Canada.
Still, Miranda has encountered plenty of skeptics. How, they ask, does an animal from the tropics survive winters – especially a hard winter like the last one – at over 6,000 feet in Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley?
Miranda, who came from a hot climate himself, merely replies, “It’s harder for them, just like it is for many people and other farm animals.”
In any case, he has always been drawn to difficult things.
Miranda, who has an unruly black beard and intense green eyes, was born and raised in Venezuela’s Los Llanos, the central flatlands, where his family owned a water buffalo ranch. “Cows were foreign to me,” he said.
Cows didn’t thrive in Venezuela’s native grasslands, so for decades, cattle ranchers planted non-native grasses at great cost. When water buffalo were introduced in 1976 – the year Miranda was born – Venezuela’s ranchers started realizing that they didn’t have to remove native grasses anymore. It’s ironic, he admits, that a foreign animal could help preserve the natural landscape.
At 22, Miranda left to study animal and range science at Montana State University. He never planned on staying in the U.S.; he hoped to take over the family ranch back in Venezuela. But when his father sold it, Miranda decided to go home anyway and start his own herd from scratch. He brought his then-wife (the two are now divorced) and two small children and bought 500 acres and 20 buffalo.
Meanwhile, Venezuela was descending into political and economic turmoil under the Hugo Chávez regime. For a few years, Miranda believed that he could avoid it out there on his ranch, but the turmoil found him. One day, in 2013, a group of armed men arrived at the ranch and robbed his family at gunpoint. They forced Miranda to the floor, tied him up and filled a pickup with his tools, saddles – even the kids’ bicycles.
A day later, his wife and kids were on a plane to the U.S. Miranda followed soon after, walking away from everything he had built. They moved to Carbondale, where Miranda’s wife was from, and Miranda got a job as a ranch manager at the Tybar Cattle Ranch.
Despite having no animals, no land and a young family to support, Miranda was not ready to give up on his dream. In 2014, Colorado delisted the water buffalo as an exotic species, and Miranda decided to begin building a herd. A hobby farmer from Fort Collins named Richard Wheeler spearheaded the delisting, after he pointed out that Asian water buffalo and African water buffalo had been incorrectly categorized as the same species. Asian Water Buffalo have been domesticated for longer than cattle, he argued, and by keeping them listed as “exotic,” the state was hindering dairy commerce.
The next year, Miranda bought his first two water buffalo calves from a Texas breeder. The next year, he bought a couple more. But buying his own property was too expensive, so he began leasing plots of land around Carbondale and transformed an old trailer into a portable dairy barn.
At the pasture, two water buffalo calves were suckling a pregnant heifer named Missouri that Miranda bought from the Texas breeder. The breeder artificially inseminated her with sperm he imported from Italy – the only country that meets USDA approval for imported water buffalo semen. With Missouri pregnant, Miranda had trained her to adopt the new calves as her own.
With the lack of an established water buffalo industry in the U.S., finding reliable animals has remained a challenge. So is capital: Miranda needed money to keep growing his herd. He tried to apply for a zero interest loan from 2 Forks Club, a local nonprofit that supports local farmers and food entrepreneurs, but wasn’t accepted. “In Venezuela, we say (you need to be) encamburado,” Miranda said. “I came here as a foreigner, so I’m not part of the club,” he explained, meaning the local ranching community whose roots in the valley go back generations. He ended up getting a regular loan from the bank.
Access to land is another challenge. Across the West – and especially in the Roaring Fork Valley – rising property values mean the cost of a mortgage far surpasses what a farmer or rancher can produce from agriculture. At one point, Miranda looked into buying a house on 40 acres – just enough to use as a winter base camp for the buffalo – but the cheapest he could find was $700,000. Farther up the valley, closer to Carbondale, it was at least $1.5 million.
Miranda would like to see a program in which more county-owned land is made available to farmers at low cost so they can provide some of the food they grow to food banks and low-income communities.
In the meantime, Miranda has been innovating his way around the challenges he faces. By renting land and building his mobile dairy, he can keep his costs low, buying time to grow his herd and make connections with future buyers. Chefs and foodies consider buffalo mozzarella a premium product, worth much more than regular mozzarella. One restaurateur from nearby Aspen invited Miranda to taste the mozzarella he made from buffalo milk imported all the way from Italy. The cheese regularly sells for $30 a pound in the U.S. and Miranda realized that his only competitors were the Italians; he could offer the same product locally and more cheaply.
Still, even Wheeler, the man who got water buffalo off Colorado’s exotic species list, remains skeptical of the animal’s ranching’s potential.
“It’s a niche market,” he said. “Maybe some local cheese stores would be interested, but it’s mostly a novelty.”
Miranda has learned to ignore the skepticism. After all, he does not give up easily.
This story was originally published at High Country News on June 7.
