With the support of your donnations we were able to bring back the first buffaloes to Movile for more than three decades.
In historical times, buffaloes had been a common animal in many regions of Transilvania for centuries. The robust and strong animals helped ploughing the heavy soils of the farmland, they gave milk an meat in an extraordinary quality and enriched the landscape due to their positive effects on grassland biodiversity. Unfortunately, most of the farmers gave up to keep those impressive animals in the second half oft he 20th century and the numbers decreased rapidly. Moreover, the same phenomenon can be seen nowadays regarding the numbers of common milk cows because more and more villagers sell their animals due to decreasing milk prices. But unlike cow milk the white gold of buffaloes shows a high content of fat (8 – 9 %) and vitamins, and therefore more and more people in Europe ask for buffalo mozarella, kefir or meat.
One of our aims is to show up another possible landscape develpoment in Transilvania and thus help villagers of Movile to generate sufficient income with high quality products produced by traditional farming methods. Therefore, we started the „Buffalos for Movile“ project and were able to finance two buffalo cows and a little bull already in 2017. With great support from our friends Stefan Vaida from Altina and Mihai Barbu from Villa Abbatis in Apos, the little group of buffalos appeared this winter at our castle and found shelter at the beekeeper‘s stables to acclimate until spring, when they may walk together for the first time with all the other animals to the tasty green commons next to the hundred hills.
If you want to support the „Buffalos for Movile“ project, please feel free to write us a message. We are able to arrange contacts with families of the village who are willing and able to care about those impressive and helpful animals and become an important part of the churchfortress project.
