The water buffalo is the classic work animal of Asia, an integral part of that continent's traditional village farming structure. Probably the most adaptable and versatile of all work animals, it is widely used to plow; level land; plant crops; puddle rice fields; cultivate field crops; pump water; haul carts, sleds and shallow draft boats; carry people; thresh grain; press sugar cane; haul logs; and much more. Even today, water buffaloes provide 20-30% of the farm power in South China, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Indochina77. Here is a nice graphic of a typical "Chinese tractor".
In India water buffaloes contribute much less to farm power (6-12%); bullocks are more commonly used. In Pakistan buffaloes are little used for farm power (1-2%) but provide much of the road haulage. Papua New Guinea has no tradition of using any work animal, but villagers are increasingly using buffaloes for farm work and the government is employing Filipinoes to train them. Millions of peasants in the Far East, Middle East and Near East have draft buffalo. For them it is often the only method of farming food crops. As fuel becomes scarce and expensive in these countries, the buffalo is being used more frequently as a draft animal. In 1979 water buffalo prices soared in Thailand because of increased demand. Although Asian farms have increasingly mechanized in the last 20 years, it has often proved difficult to persuade the farmer to replace his water buffalo with a tractor since the buffalo produces free fertilizer and does not require expensive diesel fuel. Now there is a renewed official interest in draft power. Sri Lanka has opened up large new tracts of farmland in the Mahawali Valley, creating such a demand for work animals that the buffalo shortages have become a national development problem. Indonesia's transmigration schemes are also handicapped by shortages of animal power.
For many small farmers the buffalo represents capital. It is often the major investment they have. Buffalo energy increases their productivity and allows them to diversify. Even small farms have work animals that, like the farmer himself, subsist off the farm. Tractors usually require at least 4 hectacres for economical operation, which precludes their use on most peasant farms. Further, the infrastructure to maintain machinery is often not readily available. Buffaloes are also used for hauling. Buffalo drawn carts carry goods between villages where road surfaces are unfit for trucks. The animals easily traverse ravines, streams, paddies, and narrow rocky trails. In the cities, carts can compete economically with trucks where the road surface is unprepared, where loading or unloading take longer than the journey itself, or where the loads are too small and distances too short to make trucking economical. For road haulage buffaloes are generally shod; the shoes are flat plates fitted to each hoof.
Here is a beautiful graphic of a water buffalo cart on a islands of Japan.
Capacity for work
The water buffalo is a sturdy draft animal. It's body structure, especially the distribution of body weight over the feet and legs is an important advantage. It's large boxy hooves allow it to move in the soft mud of rice fields. Moreover, the buffalo has very flexible pastern and fetlock joints in the lower leg so that it can bend back it's hooves and step over obstacles more easily than cattle. This water loving animal is particularity well adapted to paddy farming because it's legs withstand continual wet conditions better than mules or oxen. Australian animal scientists working in Bogor, Indonesia, found that the puddling effect of buffalo hooves on the soil was critical for rice cultivation in the local soils. Tractors produced fields so porus that they drained dry78. On one research station near Darwin, Australia, buffaloes were used to prevent water drainage from a dam79. Although buffaloes are preferred by farmers in the wet, often muddy lowlands of Asia, mules, horses and cattle move more rapidly and are preferred in the dryer areas.
Water buffalo do not work quickly. They plod along at about 3 km per hour. In most parts of Southeast Asia they are worked about 5 hours a day and they may take 6-10 days to plow, harrow, and grade one hectacre of rice field. Their stamina and drawing power increase with body weight. Because they have difficulty keeping cool in hot, humid weather, it is necessary to let working buffaloes cool off, preferably in a wallow, every 2 hours or so. Without this, their body temperature may rise to dangerous levels. A pair of buffaloes costs about the same as a small tractor in Thailand. But many farmers raise their own calves and there is no investment beyond labor. The "fuel" for the animals comes mainly from village pastures and farm wastes such as crop stubble and sugarcane tops. Buffaloes have an average working life of about 11 years, but some work to age 20.
Harness
According to the work of J.K. Garner in Thailand and Vietnam,the yoke used on working buffalo in Asia has changed very little in the last 1.500 years. It is doubtful that the working buffalo can exert it's full power with it. The hard wooden yoke presses on a very small area on top of the animals neck, producing severe calluses, galls and obvious discomfort. The harness tends to choke the animal as the straps under the neck tighten into the windpipe. Since the traditional hitch is usually higher than the buffalo's center of gravity, the animal cannot pull efficiently. Considerably more pulling power and endurance can be obtained by improving the harness. The situation is not unlike that in western agriculture in the twelfth century when the horse collar ...one of the most important inventions of the Middle Ages ....first appeared. Before that, the horses were yoked like buffaloes and the harness passed across the windpipe and choked them as they pulled. Use of the horse collar improved pulling efficiency and speeded the development of transportation and trade.
The curved yoke now universally used on water buffalo contacts an area of the neck that is only about 200 cm2, (little more than one forth the size of the average computer screen) The entire load is pulled on this small area and causes the wood to dig into the flesh. A horse collar is a padded leather device that encircles the animal's neck. One modified in Thailand for use on water buffalo had a contact area of 650 cm2, more than 3 times that of the yoke it replaced. The collar's padding pressed against the animal's shoulders, not it's neck and therefore did not choke it. Attached to the collar were wooden hames with the traces for hitching the animal to the wagon or plow. In trials, a buffalo pulled loads 24% heavier with the collar than with the yoke, and the horsepower it developed increased by 48%. In the maximum load test the yoked buffalo failed to move a load of 570 kg, but it moved a load of 640 kg when fitted with the horse collar. In an endurance test the yoked animal took 35 minutes to pull a load 550 m, but harnessed with the collar it took only 21 minutes80. Another potentially valuable harness is the breast strap, a set of broad leather straps that pass over the animal's neck and back. One breast strap modified for water buffalo use had a contact area of 620 cm2, almost as much as that of the horse collar, and in trials the buffalo pulled a load 12% heavier than with a yoke and the horsepower it developed increased by almost 70%. The same animal used in the horse collar trials pulled 700 kg with the breast strap; in the endurance test it took 18.5 minutes to travel the 550 m distance. These seem to be very good innovations. In the humid tropics, however, leather collars and breast straps may decay rapidly. To make them more widely practical may require experimentation with, or development of, special leather treatments or more durable materials.
Heat Tolerence
While the buffalo is remarkably versatile, it has less physiological adaptation to extremes of heat and cold than the various breeds of cattle. Body temperatures of buffaloes are actually slightly lower than those of cattle, but buffalo skin is usually black and heat absorbent and is only sparsely protected by hair. Also, buffalo skin has one-sixth the density of sweat glands that cattle skin has, so buffaloes dissipate heat poorly by sweating. If worked or driven excessively in the hot sun, a buffalo's body temperature, pulse rate, respiration rate and general discomfort increase more quickly than those of cattle. Failure to appreciate this has caused many buffalo deaths in northern Australia when the animals were herded long distances through the heat of the day as if they were cattle. This is particularly true of young calves and pregnant females. During one trial in Egypt, 2 hours exposure to sun caused temperature of buffalo to rise 1.3 degrees C, whereas temperatures of cattle rose only 0.2-0.3 degrees C.
Buffaloes prefer to cool off in a wallow rather than seek shade. They may wallow for up to 5 hrs. a day when temperatures and humidity are high. Immersed in water or mud, chewing with half closed eyes, buffaloes are pictures of bliss.
In shade or in wallow buffaloes cool off quickly, perhaps because a black skin rich in blood vessels, conducts and radiates heat efficiently. Tests at the University of Florida have shown that buffaloes in the shade cool off more quickly than cattle81. Nonetheless, wallowing is not essential. Experience in Australia, Trinidad, Florida, Malaysia, and elsewhere has shown that buffaloes grow normally without wallowing as long as adequate shade is available.
Cold Tolerance
Although generally associated with humid tropics, buffaloes have been reared for centuries in temperate countries such as Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and in the Azerbaijan and Georgian republics of the FSU. In 1807 Napoleon brought Italian buffaloes to the Landes region of southwestern France and released them near Mont-de-Marsan. They became feral and multiplied prodigiously in the woods and dunes of the littoral, but unfortunately the local peasants found them easy targets, and with the fall of Napoleon the whole herd was killed for meat. In the twelfth century Benedictine monks introduced buffaloes from their posessions in the Orient to work the lands of their abby at Auge in northeastern France. in the thirteenth century a herd was introduced to England by the Earl of Cornwall, the brother of Henery III. Nothing id known about how well either herd survived. Buffaloes are also maintained on the high, snowy plateaus of Turkey as well as in Afghanistan and the northern mountains of Pakistan.
The buffalo has greater tolerance of cold weather than is commonly supposed. The current range of the buffalo extends as far north as 45 degrees latitude in Romania and the sizable herds in Italy and the FSU range over 40 degrees N latitude. Philadelphia and peking are at comparable latitudes. In the Southere Hemisphere the 40 degree line of latitude easily encompasses Cape Town, Buenos Aries, Melbourne, and most of New Zealand's North Island. Cold winds and rapid drops in temperature, however, appear to have caused illness, pneumonia, and sometimes death. Most of the animals in Europe are the Mediterranean breed, but other River type buffaloes (mainly Murrahs from India) have been introduced to Bulgaria and the FSU, which indicates that the River breeds, at least, have some cold tolerance.
Altitude
Although water buffaloes are generally reared at low elevations, a herd of Swamp buffaloes is thriving in Kandep in Papua New Guinea, 2,500 m above sea level. In Nepal, River buffaloes are routinely found at or above 2, 800 m altitude.
Wetlands
Water buffaloes are well adapted to swamps and to areas subject to flooding. They are at home in the marshes of southern Iraq and the Amazon, the tidal plains near Darwin Australia, the Pontine Marshes in south central Italy, the Orinoco Basin of Venezuela and of course in India and the Near and Far East. In the Amazon the buffaloes (Mediterranean and Swamp breeds) are demonstrating their exceptional adaptability to flood areas. Buffalo productivity outstrips that of cattle, with males reaching 400 kg in 30 months on a diet of native grasses82. The advantage of water buffaloes over Holstein, Brown Swiss, and Criollo cattle was demonstrated in a test at Delta Amacuro, Venezuela, when the cattle developed serious foot rot in the wet conditions of the Orinoco Delta and had to be withdrawn from the test.The area of Venezuela is flooded 6 months of the year and creates constant problems for cattle, yet the buffalo seems to adapt well83. High humidities seem to affect buffaloes less than cattle. In fact, if shade or wallows are available, buffaloes may be superior to cattle in humid areas. In southern Brazil, trials comparing buffalo and cattle on subtropical riverine plains have favored the buffalo also. This work is being carried out on native pastures, mostly in the State of San Paulo.
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david j. ligda
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Last Updated:Wednesday, December 18, 1996 4:27:49 PM