Backyard Buffalo
Specialty Food Artisan
Markets
About
Backyard Buffalo is a specialty food business incubated at Beaches Green Farmers Market. We make Indian style cultured treats, condiments and more. Stop by our farm stand and see how your support helps us grow.
Programs and Partners
Location
Ponte Vedra Beach, FL
Manager
When you are living a storied life, the narrative changes with time. Here is our story so far…it will take a few minutes to read so grab your drink and a comfy chair.
What would you do to find happiness? In my case, I went all the way to a farm, my farm. Because when you think about it, happiness is a fresh cup of tea in the morning. With buffalo milk, naturally.
Since leaving India at the age of 17, I had only been back once or twice. In 2007, during my longest stay, I enjoyed family, sights, food, and drinks. Oh, the food and drinks! Tea is the mainstay in my part of India. For an entire month, every morning began with a cup, sometimes two. After I returned to US, I was living in the Midwest, buying all manners of organic and grass-fed cow milk only to verify that none could recreate the experience I had back home. I needed buffalo milk. Just half a cup. Every morning. I looked near and far to no avail. During almost ten years of an obsessive search, which included calling farms all the way in Vermont, and even trying to convince local dairy farmers in Missouri to keep buffaloes, I started joking that I was just going to have to get a buffalo myself.
The grand break came in two parts. With some unexpected luck, my family and I moved to Northern Florida to live on a small parcel of open rural land. And after those years of obsessing some diligent research led me to a buffalo farm in New Jersey, where the owner was willing to sell me a gentle buffalo.
Goldie arrived in our backyard during Christmas week of 2017. I was, finally, a buffalo keeper. The following spring she gave birth to her first calf and a week later, I had my first half a cup of milk! For me Goldie’s milk was worth its weight in gold and more.
It didn’t take long for me to learn that most people also shared my obsession, once they tasted our buffalo milk, and so Backyard Buffalo was born.
The early days were much more of a struggle than we have now. As I was learning more about running a small (micro) dairy business, I was asked by my dairy inspector to visit Windmill Dairy as a good example to follow. I learned many things from Alan and Vonnie, the owners of Windmill Dairy. Perhaps the most important lesson of all that they taught me was "Do the farmers markets.” They explained, “That’s where you will find your customers.”
After some more stumbling, I brought some plain buffalo yogurt and mango lassi to Jarboe Park farmers market. There I also met Jessie, the farmer/owner of Juicy Roots. When I was discouraged those first few weeks with my sales she explained to me that I have to keep showing up. ‘People here like consistency’, she explained. So I kept showing up and learning from everyone. One day, my mom had used Goldie’s milk to make this authentically Gujarati dessert for my kids. I decided to bring it to the market on a whim. My mind, along with my customers’ minds, was blown. They fell under the spell of the light taste and rich, creamy texture. And I was flabbergasted because they loved Shrikhand, which I thought was “too Indian” to sell in our local markets. Slowly, I started to understand that First Coast people loved authentic Indian foods, even if they had never tried them before.
I wrote this version of the story in March of 2020. A year and half since beginning, our menu has expanded as you can see here on our online store. Some of our products are now made using cow’s milk. Yes, buffalo milk is the only milk one should ever use to make Indian chai. But high quality cow’s milk that we get from Wainwright Dairy still deserves a place on our tables; it makes some darn good lemon curd, mango lassi, and other products.
I hope you will try some of the deliciousness from our small batch dairy now and again. Come along and be part of this journey with me. There are many, many more pages to be written in this story.
-Punita
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