Susie Martin with one of the cheese-making machines. Courtesy Laos Buffalo Dairy.
Susie and Rachel, two new arrivals in Laos, loved the country but missed eating cheese. In Laos dairy simply isn’t part of the diet – local buffalo are only ever used for ploughing, even though they can be milked. So the two women built their own dairy, the first of its kind in Laos, and made their own buffalo cheese. By Timi Siytangco, from Foolish Careers.
Laos, March 2021. What if you craved cheese while living in the poorest country in Southeast Asia, where milk isn’t part of the diet and farmers didn’t even know they could milk their animals? If you’re the founders of Laos Buffalo Dairy, you do it all from scratch: build the dairy, convince farmers to rent you their buffalo, grow the animals’ feed, set up a breeding program, import the cheese-making equipment. Then of course, make the cheese — and yogurt and ice cream and cheesecake too while you are at it.
With co-founder Susie Martin, Rachel Rachel Elman O’Shea moved from Singapore to Luang Prabang with a plan to build a hotel, sell it, then maybe figure out what to do about cheese after that. “We wanted a midlife crisis with a purpose, not a Porsche,” says cofounder and trained chef Rachel. “But the Porsche would’ve been cheaper.”
How to make cheese, thanks to YouTube. Courtesy Laos Buffalo Dairy.
Still longing for cheese, the pair convinced a local farmer to lend them his buffalo for a while, then a guest at their guesthouse with 25 years of dairy experience said they’d help too. Rachel and Susie wrote down how to milk a buffalo, and with a Lao translation and a YouTube video, they managed to get a little milk. The first attempt was under way.
“Every three to four days, I would have enough milk to make cheese, and cry,” says Rachel. “There was a lot of crying going on because you can’t find buffalo milk cheese recipes online. Very few make it, and no one shares the recipes. I had to use cow milk recipes … I was just guessing.”
The first attempts were not a success, so she emailed dozens of dairies worldwide and explained what they were trying to do, and that they were also trying to help the local Lao community with a potential new income stream.
She received a single response from Shaw River Dairy in Australia, who shared their recipe, and some valuable tips. “I started with their recipe and it got me much closer and I adjusted again, and again. Then finally, we had a perfect little ball of mozzarella.”
Finally, a little ball of Mozzarella. Courtesy Laos Buffalo Dairy.
Next they needed to convince more farmers that their cheese-making idea was a good one, so they could get more milk. In Laos, a farmer’s buffalo is their bank account and worth 12 million kip or so (US$1,200), roughly the average annual salary. So when the duo said they would like to borrow and pay for a buffalo, take it to their farm, feed it, vaccinate it, take care of it, help breed and calf it, milk it, pay for the milk – then give the buffalo and calf back, they were met with disbelief.
“What’s wrong with you people?” the farmers asked sceptically. After all, it wasn’t uncommon for NGOs and charities to show up for a few years then pack up and take their initiatives on to the next big thing; the takeup was understandably very poor.
But luckily Somlit, the village chief where they were working, saw the potential. He rented Susie and Rachel his buffalo for a six-month milking season, and soon the other owners noticed how well they were doing. “Look at how fat these buffalo are compared to yours,” Rachel told them. “It’s because they are getting fed a proper diet, not like yours scratching for food because it’s the dry season.”
Village chief Somlit with Sophia, the first mixed-breed buffalo. Courtesy T Siytangco.
In addition, Susie and Rachel had started up their own breeding programme with the few buffalo they had borrowed. “Outside of our farm, 50% of the calves died before six months,” explains Susie. “On our farm it was less than 5% - that’s a big difference when this is your bank account we’re talking about.” As a result, more and more farmers finally realised the would-be cheese makers were offering a good deal. “They started saying I’m getting in on this,” says Susie. The number of farmers keen to rent out their buffalos rocketed.
But there was till a long way to go. Fortunately Rachel had Susie to lean on in the early dark days of failed mozzarella. “I would try and make cheese, and it would fail, and I would cry, and Susie would say, ‘Well, we can sell it as mozzarella crumble. It still tastes good. It’ll be great in a salad,’ which of course would make me laugh. And then I’d try again.”
Eventually, orders for their cheese started trickling in, and as well as supplying dairy products to local hotels and restaurants, the farm offered buffalo petting tours and lemongrass-flavored ice cream sales to visitors. Plus a deal to export Lao buffalo cheese to Japan was signed. The relationship prospered, and the dairy has now shipped some 300 kilograms of cheese to Tokyo over the last two years.
Now, Laos Buffalo Dairy is exporting to Japan. And saving children from malnutrition in the process. Courtesy Laos Buffalo Dairy.
“We’re in the process of trying to raise funds to expand our equipment,” says Rachel. “If we can get that up and running we could be delivering two tonnes of cheese to Japan every month – and that’s 163 buffalo that will need milking every month.”
There are other virtuous spin-offs. The team has started training Village Champions to train remote villages to better care for their buffalo. The newly-trained villagers can then sell their milk to the dairy for an extra income stream, along with an additional benefit: it helps cut down child malnutrition.
Susie and Rachel, thinking of cheese at their farm. Courtesy T. Siytangco.
In Laos, 44% of children are chronically malnourished before the age of two. By age five, it’s almost 50%. But as Rachel explains, the solution is easy: add buffalo milk to the diet. “All they need to do is put 500ml of buffalo milk in the rice pot every morning. The boiling rice will effectively pasteurize it, and the nutrition from the milk will then go to the entire family and help prevent them getting sick.”
All these great outcomes started with a simple, personal need for cheese. But it has now scaled up into a purpose-driven enterprise. “If you have somebody in your corner, like Susie, who can see outside the box, you will likely succeed,” says Rachel.
“But you have to be able to make something work when it seems like everybody’s trying to tear it down. You just have to find another way to keep going.”
Luckily for cheese lovers, those Buffalo Gals just won’t stop keeping going.
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