Finding Cheese Where You’d Least Expect It
Laos Buffalo Dairy
Two women who met in Singapore while living there due to career and business commitments have found an interesting way of acting out their midlife crises—opening a dairy to make cheese and ice cream in a most unexpected place, a farming village in Laos some 12 kilometers outside of the country’s ancient spiritual capital, Luang Prabang. Susie Martin and Rachel O’Shea launched the Laos Buffalo Dairy in 2013 and, two years into their first five-year plan, their pioneering effort was going very well.
Luang Prabang, a town of roughly 50,000 on the banks of the mighty Mekong River, is home to more than 30 Buddhist temples and was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1995. Since then, it has become a major international tourist destination and a favorite place to chill out.
Like much of Asia, Laos has virtually zero dairy or cheese culture. But it does have plenty of water buffalo who roam lush pasturelands around its picturesque rural villages. Luang Prabang’s high-end hotels and restaurants offer French-inflected colonial cuisine to augment their traditional Lao dishes. Laotian farmers don’t milk their buffalo; they put them to work pulling carts and plows, and also slaughter them to eat. Anything labeled as “beef” on the local menus—from noodle soups to larb (ground meat salads) to hamburgers—is actually water buffalo.
O’Shea and Martin had gourmet culinary standards—the former has background as a chef—and identified potential and demand in the area; their husbands Matt O’Shea and Steven McWhirter supported their efforts and in fact the latter works at the dairy.
Though water buffalo represent wealth and prosperity for Laotian farmers, there’s a fatalistic approach to animal husbandry, understandable in a country with scant resources and infrastructure. An estimated 50 percent of newborn calves don’t survive beyond a week or two. There’s a high rate of attrition and no vaccination programs to stave off disease. The animals free range and are susceptible to wandering off and disappearing at the edge of rainforests or being washed away in floods.
This is where Martin and O’Shea’s business plan comes in: A major part of it is to lease animals from local farmers—the annual fee of approximately U.S. $110 goes a long way in these parts—and to provide vaccinations and veterinary care in exchange for milking rights. Not only does their dairy employ local workers, it also palpably demonstrates to the community how their cattle can be more sustainably managed and efficiently exploited.
We were on a Southeast Asian trip (November, 2017)—my fiancée Cora Wen was hosting a yoga retreat in Luang Prabang and I was along for the ride. It was a working holiday and she was the one working. One of our guests had an insalata caprese for dinner at the hotel and I didn’t pay it much mind, figuring the mozzarella was shipped from afar via one of the 10-odd international flights per day into Luang Prabang. The next day, on a side trip up to the gorgeous Kuang Si waterfall about 50 minutes by van from town, we zoomed past what was unmistakably a dairy with a creamery on site.
Just when I thought I could get away from cheese...! So, taking one for the (cheese) team, I scheduled a tour for the following day. The dynamic, focused and marketing-oriented Martin showed us around the open barns, introduced us to the young animals and their mothers and took us through some of the technicalities and challenges of water buffalo cheese-farming in this particular environment; there were quarantines to be observed and crossbreeds, with Thai buffaloes, to be created.
We caught up with O’Shea working the kitchen, and she clued us in on her cheese and ice cream-making. The locals have much more of a taste for the latter; school children frequently stop by for a scoop or a cone on the way home. O’Shea was hand-making 11 kilos of mozzarella per day a year ago and was in the process of developing blue cheeses. She shared with us the challenges of obtaining recipes from buffalo cheese makers; much of her R&D was done by trial-and-error.
To cap our tour, Martin and O’Shea sat us down outdoors under the shade of a breezy thatch-roofed pergola for a tasting of their lineup. There were several variations on mozzarella, a feta, a ricotta and some blues that were admittedly works in progress. The ricotta was the most flavorful. I kept coming back to the notion that this was not only a remarkably pleasant surprise—not just finding cheese but really good cheese—in a place like this, but also cause for optimism about the possibilities of sustainable development. [Where there might be some trepidation about the advent of the new high-speed railroad from China and the construction of large resort hotels all around the outskirts of town to receive mass busloads of tourists.]
It’s a win-win situation for the O’Shea-Martin business partnership--giving the local farm economy a boost, demonstrating some of the principles of sustainability and dealing with your midlife crisis in a highly constructive manner. After nearly three years of hard work, the wonder and enthusiasm don’t seem to be waning: Said Martin, “I can be sitting here in my office working with my cat on one side, look out the window and there’ll be an elephant walking by on the road: it’s kind of crazy when you think about it.”