and Setting up the Laos Buffalo Dairy has been an adventure for four expats.
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By Sally Pryor
t was an innocent question about buffalo curd that started four expats on a life-changing journey to rural Luang Prabang. Australians Susie Martin and Steven McWhirter, and Americans Rachel and Matt O’Shea were living as expats in Singapore, half high-flying executives, half trailing spouses. Yearning for a quieter life, Rachel and Susie came to Laos on a reconnaissance mission, taking in a cooking class in Luang Prabang with an eye to opening a hotel. Wandering through the morning markets with their instructing chef, Susie asked, casually, where they could buy buffalo curd. She was met with stares of horror. It turned out that, incredibly for them, residents of Luang Prabang had no idea, in a land full of buffalo, that the beasts could be milked. A more concrete idea began to take
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shape, even as the foursome moved their lives – including four children between them – to Luang Prabang in 2014, where they rented and ran a guesthouse. After “some sleepless nights and much research”, the team decided that they could set up the country’s first buffalo dairy themselves, and that the local community could benefit in the process.
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Their combined training was about as contemporary as you can get – lots of Googling and plenty of YouTube tutorials – before they negotiated to rent three buffalo from a local farmer. There followed six weeks of enthusiastic and much-talked-about daily milking – with a milling audience each day – before they finally had enough milk to bring back into town and start making some cheese. 4
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