Bay Area water buffalo cheese business owner trying to secure permanent home for herd
Sonoma County is home to a lot of dairy farms. But few have a herd quite like Audrey Hitchcock's.
"This girl's gonna give me a hard time," she said, with a sigh, as she climbed out of her battered pickup.
Hitchcock owns Ramini Mozzarella, a line of authentic cheeses made from the milk of water buffaloes, Italian water buffaloes, to be precise. To meet the herd close-up, she said it's safer for a stranger carrying a camera to stay in the pickup bed, up on top of the haybales.
She said it's not that they're super aggressive. They just get a little pushy when the hay truck arrives and avoiding being pushed by a 1,500-pound animal is for the best.
"They're super sweet and super social," she said, as she stood among them, patting one on the back. "They love affection and human attention. They have no intention of harming me, but we're kind of doing this spontaneously, and they haven't been fed. The only danger I face is if I'm in the crossfire of a fight over food."
The whole idea began in 2009 when her husband, Craig, grew disillusioned working in the tech industry. His love of animals and the outdoors led him to purchase five water buffalo to begin a cheese-making business, offering tours to curious visitors. But Craig Hitchcock became sick and died in 2015, leaving Audrey Hitchcock alone to manage the farm.
Eventually, the herd got too big for its location in Marin County, and she moved the buffalo to the temporary site in Sonoma as she desperately searched for a permanent home.
"And my goal is to get it back into production as quickly as possible," she said.
Her commitment is not just to the animals, which she considers to be her family, but also to fulfill the dream of her late husband.
"Given it's the greatest gift he ever gave me, and he's gone, I value that probably more than most," she said. "My heart is completely committed to them. And it would devastate me if I had to give up. A devastation I never want to experience."
She's hoping an interested party may come forward to act as a partner or investor, because the business is a big job for one person to handle alone.
"We need to hang on to this, or it's going to go away," she said. "And it's too special to go away."
She said her dream is for dairies to become destinations for visitors, just like wineries. The ultimate goal for her herd is a new micro-dairy to create the savory cheeses that she said only buffalo can produce. And with it, enough land so her ladies and their children can live a life that most dairy cattle never know.
