Idled carabao promoted to milking cow

MANILA, Philippines - Long enslaved to the plow, the sturdy carabao has been freed from its yoke by advances in technology.

The two-wheeled hand tractor, known among farmers as “kuliglig,” has taken over its job.

Thanks to farm mechanization and the dollar remittances that gave farming families the means to buy the hand tractor, the carabao has lost its traditional job.

Like the carriage-pulling horse in the West made irrelevant by the automobile, the carabao has been replaced by the more efficient machine that can plow one hectare in one day, a job that used to take five carabaos and five farmers to accomplish.

The old beast of burden found itself having almost nothing to do, sidelined to wallowing in the mud and chewing its cud. Its prospects were not so bright, the most likely of which is ending up in the slaughter house.

It made a comeback last year when prices of diesel fuel zoomed up. But that proved to be short-lived as prices of petroleum products again slid down this year when the oil-guzzling developed world lost its appetite for gas when the economic recession lingered.

It was up to farm officials, particularly one of its arms, the Philippine Carabao Center (PCC), to find a new productive role for the retired water buffalo. Otherwise, the beast would end up extinct like the bird dodo.

The hard question the PCC had to ask itself was, why invest in carabao development when farmers are fast shifting to mechanization?

The easy answer is that, it will take time for the newly adopted technology to entirely replace the carabao, particularly in farms not reached by irrigation or are too small where buying a tractor to cultivate them may not pay at all.

But like the caleza that used to ply the streets of Manila, the wooden plow of old is fast becoming a museum piece.

“The carabao center saw few options for the carabao,” explains Agriculture Undersecretary for Operations Jess Paras who oversees the Carabao Development Program. “Carabao meat has been adjudged inferior to beef. It was because, due to an old law, only old and disabled carabaos were allowed to be slaughtered.”

Some local food processors are now importing carabeef from India to be used as the main ingredient in making cheaper corned beef. This opens up the prospect of raising carabao for its meat which is now allowed under a new law that replaced the old, no slaughtering of healthy carabaos law.

The native variety of buffalo has a natural disadvantage over cattle for meat production. The she-carabao only bears a calf once every three years while a fast-growing heifer can bear a calf every year. Most farmers now prefer female cows to carabaos for profitable backyard breeding.

An other option is to raise carabaos for their milk, Paras expounds. Farm officials have long realized the need for the country to develop an indigenous dairy industry. It has been spending millions of dollars a year on milk imports that averaged 1.8 billion liters a year and keeps on growing.

We have had many false starts at developing a dairy industry. Importing the most prolific breed of milking cows from cold countries, we found that they get less prolific in hotter and more humid places like the Philippines.

Then officials found the riverine water buffalo Murrah, more suitable for milk in the Philippines. A lactating Murrah carabao yields eight liters a day. The carabao development center has focused on upgrading local breeds of carabaos by importing their better milk-producing cousins. To hasten the upgrading of local carabao breed for milk and meat, the center, Paras said, has adopted gene pooling and artificial insemination as its technological support to developing better milking cows out of the former beast of burden.

The program is still at its development stage as farm officials partner with local governments and farmers at building a bigger herd of milking carabaos in the hope that those beasts will not only go the way of the dodo, but will provide the nutrients that make Filipino babies healthier while weaning the country from its overdependence on imported mil.