Breeding the Italian water buffaloes today

Still now in old archives we can find old documents regarding the trade of buffaloes, of their price, confirming the use of the buffaloes meat; their meat wasn't much appreciated, because the animals were usually slaughtered in advanced age, and therefore their meat resulted very hard with marked musky taste. The buffaloes’ meat trade, instead, had a good market in Constantinople and on the coasts of North Africa. At the beginning of 1800 the breeding of the buffalos was tied still to systems of primitive breeding;

         Types of Mozzarella

in fact it was still widely used a half-wild system which reduced to the minimum required investments, expenses and risks generating a real fortune for the marshy territories which otherwise could not have found other alternative forms of exploitation and income. The breeding, production and use of buffaloes products differentiated in the centuries in the different regions of the Italian peninsula; in the South the buffaloes were bred almost exclusively for milk production, transformed then subsequently in cheese and keeping the ancient tradition of producing buffalo milk cheeses; in the zones of Toscana, meat and hide production were the most in demand. In the XX century, with the new modern agricultural technologies and the work of marshland repossession, the breeding of the buffaloes diminished.

Climate and natural environment are important factors as buffalos are accustomed to living especially in damp and marshy zones, even if today, some ancestral behaviors have been modified by modern cattle-breeding techniques. The experimentation for new breeding techniques accomplished in the first post-war period, and subsequently in the 40s, showed that the transformation of the breeding of water buffalos was possible without excessive difficulty and without the need of the animals to bathe in natural or artificial ponds during summer; this helped to stop the need of bathing provided they had been sheltered from the solar radiations and from the punctures of the bugs;

Here in southern Lazio the reclamation of Agro Pontino, of lowlands and valleys of the rivers Sele, Volturno, Garigliano and of other zones of Italy in the pre-war period, and the agrarian reform of the second post-war period reduced the area of breeding of the water buffaloes to a very few territories of Campania, of Lazio and of Puglia. In this period, the breeding had a decisive turning-point of renewal, changing from a traditional half-wild and traveling form, to another one compatible with the new territorial order and therefore ending the traditional breeding techniques based on a cyclical winter-summer transhumance. Transhumance was a rather picturesque display of southern Italy rural life.

Only 20 years ago’ it was a common scene in southern Italy to see herds of hundred of big black water buffaloes countryside roads from an edge to another with amused car drivers waiting in their cars. Today a new generation of entrepreneurs shows a renewed interest in investing in buffaloes breeding for the production of milk to create the queen of cheeses, the mythical buffalo mozzarella. The new buffalo breeding techniques and modern machineries make this traditional rural wealth ready for new challenges and horizons while continuing an ancient tradition.