{"id":64119,"date":"2019-06-09T22:17:26","date_gmt":"2019-06-10T04:17:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/rancher-works-to-establish-water-buffalo-in-colorado\/"},"modified":"2019-06-10T04:17:26","modified_gmt":"2019-06-10T04:17:26","slug":"rancher-works-to-establish-water-buffalo-in-colorado","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/rancher-works-to-establish-water-buffalo-in-colorado\/","title":{"rendered":"Rancher works to establish water buffalo in Colorado"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"Jos\u00e9
Jos\u00e9 Miranda pulls the unwilling Caroni, a frequent escapee and the most persnickety of his water buffalo herd, back into the pasture.<\/span>Luna Anna Archey\/High Country News<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

\u201cIf more ranchers knew about water buffalo, they would forget about cows,\u201d Jos\u00e9 Miranda, a Carbondale rancher, said one morning last January over breakfast. He listed their advantages: The milk tastes great and it\u2019s healthier, with less cholesterol, 11% more protein, 9% more calcium and 37% more iron than cow\u2019s milk. Water buffalo have environmental benefits, too; they\u2019re able to thrive on more marginal pastures and less resource-intensive foods than dairy cows.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Still, Miranda has encountered plenty of skeptics. How, they ask, does an animal from the tropics survive winters \u2013 especially a hard winter like the last one \u2013 at over 6,000 feet in Colorado\u2019s Roaring Fork Valley?<\/p>\n

Miranda, who came from a hot climate himself, merely replies, \u201cIt\u2019s harder for them, just like it is for many people and other farm animals.\u201d<\/p>\n

In any case, he has always been drawn to difficult things.<\/p>\n

Miranda, who has an unruly black beard and intense green eyes, was born and raised in Venezuela\u2019s Los Llanos, the central flatlands, where his family owned a water buffalo ranch. \u201cCows were foreign to me,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Cows didn\u2019t thrive in Venezuela\u2019s native grasslands, so for decades, cattle ranchers planted non-native grasses at great cost. When water buffalo were introduced in 1976 \u2013 the year Miranda was born \u2013 Venezuela\u2019s ranchers started realizing that they didn\u2019t have to remove native grasses anymore. It\u2019s ironic, he admits, that a foreign animal could help preserve the natural landscape.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Venezuela was descending into political and economic turmoil under the Hugo Ch\u00e1vez 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 \u2013 even the kids\u2019 bicycles.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s wife was from, and Miranda got a job as a ranch manager at the Tybar Cattle Ranch.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cexotic,\u201d the state was hindering dairy commerce.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t accepted. \u201cIn Venezuela, we say (you need to be) encamburado,\u201d Miranda said. \u201cI came here as a foreigner, so I\u2019m not part of the club,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Access to land is another challenge. Across the West \u2013 and especially in the Roaring Fork Valley \u2013 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 \u2013 just enough to use as a winter base camp for the buffalo \u2013 but the cheapest he could find was $700,000. Farther up the valley, closer to Carbondale, it was at least $1.5 million.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Still, even Wheeler, the man who got water buffalo off Colorado\u2019s exotic species list, remains skeptical of the animal\u2019s ranching\u2019s potential.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a niche market,\u201d he said. \u201cMaybe some local cheese stores would be interested, but it\u2019s mostly a novelty.\u201d<\/p>\n

Miranda has learned to ignore the skepticism. After all, he does not give up easily.<\/p>\n

This story was originally published at High Country News<\/a> on June 7.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Roaring Fork Valley provides challenges, possibilities<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":64120,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[281,28,1398,29],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-64119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-agriculture","tag-headlines","tag-livestock-farming","tag-newsletter"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64119\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64119"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=64119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}