Mary Valley's buffalo award

Arthur Gorrie | 3rd July 2009

THE Mary Valley's newly-named Churchill Fellow, Margaret Thompson, expresses a kind of fatalism about the research-based fellowship she has just been awarded - and the new agricultural industry it is helping to launch.

“Do you ever feel circumstances have put you on a path and you just can't get off?” she laughed this week, after being named as one of 106 Australians, 19 of them from Queensland, who have been awarded this year's Churchill Fellowships.

Mrs Thompson, who will travel the world next year researching buffalo genetics and finding out about products and markets while she is at it, is a foundation member of the Mary River Catchment Co-ordinating Committee and is still an active member.

At the head of the valley, she and her husband Mal operate one of Australia's only three buffalo dairies on their Witta property, at the head of the Mary Valley, but the information she intends to gather overseas will not just be for the benefit of her own business.

“You can't start an industry all on your own, or at least it would take a very long time,” she said.

As president of the Australian Buffalo Industry Council, she intends to put all the interviews, information and contact details she can gather on a CD to send to other council members and distribute through the council newsletter.

“Buffalo are among the most influential animals in the world,” she said. “They are farmed and found in South and North America, Europe and Asia.

“Real buffalo are the same species and can interbreed, but they are not bison (the North American herd animal often mistakenly referred to as buffalo) and they are not the African buffalo, which is also a different species.

“There is the Asian variety and the riverine type, which you find in Italy and Bulgaria.”

Mrs Thompson's research tour begins next April with a buffalo conference in Argentina, where she hopes to make important industry contacts around the world.

At the fellowship interview, she experienced what she says was very incisive questioning.

“They wanted to know why I was visiting Florida and I said 'because that professor there has a herd of 450'.

“People have no idea what a big industry this is elsewhere.”