ABOUT ANNABELLA
It begins with the place.
Grass-fed water buffalo from family farms across the Colombian Andes.
THE LAND
Green all year, in every direction.
Near the equator there's no growing season, because there's nothing for a season to interrupt. Rain comes, things grow, and that happens in January the same as it does in July.
The farms sit across a range of country — river lowlands, high pasture, hillsides that hold cloud until midday. They grow more than grass. What they share is that nothing ever stops growing.
THE ANIMALS
We don't ask much of them.
Water buffalo are native to the tropics. In the Andes they're in the climate they evolved for, which means most of what a dairy animal usually needs from people, they don't.
No supplemental feed. No barn to get them through a season that never comes. They eat grass, and the grass keeps growing.
They're also semi-aquatic, which surprises people. A water buffalo can't sweat the way cattle do, so it cools itself in water — a creek, a river, a shallow wallow it makes itself. The mud that dries on its back is sunscreen and insect repellent. An animal covered in it isn't dirty. It's comfortable, and doing exactly what its species has always done.
THE COOPERATIVE
None of this is ours.
The herds move between pastures rather than staying put, which gives the ground time to recover and keeps the animals on fresh grass. Nothing is pushed past what the pasture can carry. It's slower than the alternative. It's also the reason the pasture is still there.
That isn't a policy anyone imposed. The farms belong to the families who work them, and they bring their milk together through a cooperative — so the people raising the animals still have a stake in what that milk becomes. They aren't managing land for a quarter. They intend for their children to farm it.
None of it is ours. It was here long before Annabella and it will be here after. What we can do is make sure it pays: every order is a season of someone's work, bought.
GRADE A
Someone else checked.
Grade A under the FDA's Pasteurized Milk Ordinance is the standard fluid dairy has to meet to be sold in the United States. Earning it means the chain gets audited end to end — the animals, the milking, the transport, the creamery, the packaging, the logistics. Not a claim anyone makes about themselves. An inspection.
As far as we know, it's the only PMO Grade A certified water buffalo operation in the world.
Find Annabella.
Ships nationwide, packed cold.
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Restaurants, pizzerias and distributors.