Why buffalo. Why Scotland. Why me.

I grew up in the back of a wheelbarrow.

My grandparents were farmers in the Bresse, in eastern France — the only place on earth allowed to raise the famous Poulet de Bresse, the white chicken with the blue legs that chefs cross oceans for. I didn't know any of that at five years old. I just knew that mornings smelled of hay, that my grandfather's hands were the size of dinner plates, and that food came from animals you knew by name.

What the Bresse teaches you, before you're old enough to realise you're learning it, is that quality isn't an accident. It's a place, a breed, patience, and a farmer who gives a damn. My grandparents didn't call it "premium produce." They called it doing things properly.

My parents settled a little further east, near Geneva — and, as luck would have it, down the road from a herd of water buffalo grazing with the Alps behind them. Most kids had a football pitch; I had buffalo. I never stopped thinking they were the most magnificent, unlikely animals I'd ever seen.

I always said I'd be a farmer. My parents, like good parents, wanted something safer for me — an office, a career, a path with handrails. So that's what I did. And for years, the wheelbarrow waited.

I'm 32 now. I've lived in Scotland for six years — long enough to know this is home, long enough to notice that this country has world-class grass, world-class rain to grow it, and almost nobody raising water buffalo on it.

So I'm doing the thing I was always meant to do. From absolutely nothing: no inherited land, no tractor, no safety net. Just a plan, twenty boxes at a time, and everything the Bresse taught me about doing things properly.

The first drops are sourced from an established Scottish buffalo herd and cut by a master butcher, while every box sold builds toward a herd of our own. The people who buy them aren't just customers — they're the twenty people who started a farm.

My grandfather never saw Scotland. But he'd recognise what's happening here immediately: an animal worth raising, done properly, sold to people who care.

That's the whole plan.

— Nicolas C.