Five years ago, when Sarah Roland set out to start Louisiana’s first water buffalo dairy herd, she was being passed between the Department of Health, and the Department of Agriculture, and the Food and Drug Unit, and then back to the Department of Health. After sitting on hold for ten minutes, one woman told her, “Have you ever considered raising pheasants?”
Breaking ground, it turns out, comes with a lot of red tape. Roland, who runs a one-woman farm operation, couldn’t find any USDA facility to process the meat from her herd (who are reproducing, quickly!). The problem was that water buffalo are not listed as a livestock species under the Federal Meat Inspection Act, and there was no existing protocol for inspecting and processing them. Finally, someone from the Department of Agriculture instructed Roland to process the animal at a custom facility, and to sell it that way. Shortly after, a health inspector raided one of the stores selling her meat and forced the owner to pour bleach on all of it. “That was like half a year of earnings,” said Roland, who after calling the Department of Agriculture, learned that she would have to sell direct to consumers. “That’s like nine hundred pounds of meat that I now have to sell pound by pound,” she said. “And it’s just me.”
This is what she did for a few years, until this past summer, a new bill was passed in Louisiana that makes water buffalo eligible for Voluntary Exotic Inspection—allowing Roland (and other potential water buffalo farmers) to sell their meat to stores and restaurants. “We got the first animal done under that inspection a couple months ago, and I just dropped off the second today,” said Roland when we spoke in December.
It's not a perfect scenario for a small farmer, she admitted. This new inspection requires that she pay the inspector $60 an hour and a travel fee, which greatly increases her costs. She is also unable to keep the heads and hooves of her animals, which provided income via taxidermy mounts. “But it’s a start,” she said. The long journey has resulted in her buffalo meat finally being available to consumers at select Louisiana establishments, including Audubon Market in St. Francisville, St. James Cheese in New Orleans, and via a burger at The Saint Restaurant in the St. Francisville Inn. “And it’s a pretty damn good burger,” promised Roland. bayousarahfarms.org.
