Last one in is a smelly Buffalo!
Yesterday, Dave and I visited the Ontario Water Buffalo Company farm and store in Stirling, Ontario.
We were greeted in the farm store by a young girl, who handed us a self-guided map and invited us to take a tour of this working farm.
Our tour guide was an Australian shepherd who led the way from paddock to pen to the various barns and milking stations.
The farm has a massive herd of 800 water buffalo and the paddocks are organized by age, with the adults, tweens and babies separated in the calf barn.
I was very taken by these interesting creatures. The babies in the calf barn were either very curious and friendly, eager for a pet or very shy, backing away from the stall when you went to touch them.
The adults were HUGE with massive teats, broad girths and some with devil horns that twisted around their head.
The farm operation was very modernized, with robotics in the milking barn that steered the cows into their stalls and automatic milkers that disconnected immediately as soon as the cows gave their 8-10 litres per day of milk.
We learned 15% of the world's milk comes from water buffalo and an adult water buffalo can reach weights up to 2600 pounds.
After our tour, we shopped in the farm's Buff Stuff Store which carries every type of buffalo meat you can imagine from testicles (limit one per customer!), to liver, to beef patties and steaks and cheeses made from the buffalo milk, their most popular being their mozzarella di bufala, as well as jewelry and steins made out of buffalo horns.
After buying some buffalo burgers for the barbecue, we chatted with owners Martin Littkemanna and Lori Smith, whose young daughter was selling lemonade and homemade cookies to raise money for a friend whose mother was fighting cancer.
Dave asked about the different species of water buffalo, since when we were in Tanzania we had been warned that they could be aggressive. Martin explained there are two main types of water buffalo, river buffalo and swamp buffalo and the ones found on their farm are domesticated with a much more docile personality than the ones we saw in Africa.
Fall is a great time to tour a farm and many local communities host farm events. If you live in eastern Ontario, Open Farm Days in Frontenac County run from September 1 to October 15 and offer a huge array of back-to-the-farm experiences, some free for the whole family. For more information, see openfarms.ca.
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