SHEEP MILKING
A false start to success By Tony Benny
A Canterbury farming couple tried to do it all from milking the sheep to making and selling their cheeses, but were working long hours so they changed tactics.
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hen Canterbury farmers Guy and Sue Trafford decided to start milking sheep to make ice cream for export, everything seemed to be falling into place nicely, but those early hopes were dashed and it’s been a long road learning how to make cheese and more importantly, how to market it profitably. Their Charing Cross Sheep Dairy brand is now well established and after years of doing 90-hour weeks to milk sheep, make cheese, sell it at farmers’ markets and to some supermarkets, as well as both holding down jobs as lecturers at Lincoln University, they’ve now found a way to make it all work – and reduce their hours. Their interest in milking sheep goes back to when Guy was manager of a 3300ha property near Gisborne, owned by Māori incorporation, Wi Pere Trust. They considered sheep milking and went as far as buying some of the first East Friesian sheep embryos brought into New Zealand. In the end, that venture wasn’t pursued but the Traffords could see a future in it – when the time was right. That didn’t happen immediately as Guy wanted to finish the agriculture degree he’d been doing part-time from Massey University. They moved south and he enrolled at Lincoln University, finished his BComAg undergraduate degree plus a masters, then took a job lecturing in farm management. Sue transferred her fire investigation officer job to Christchurch, then took a job at Lincoln teaching communications. But they pined for more hands-on farming and were looking for a small holding when the 2011 Christchurch earthquake struck. Their home in Christchurch was damaged but liveable and out of the blue someone offered to buy it, so they said yes and bought a 10.3ha block at Charing Cross, about 30
60
Guy and Sue Trafford were milking 220 Awassi-East Friesian cross ewes to make labneh and cheese but have reduced numbers to 98.
minutes east of Christchurch. “I could see, just from my dealings at Lincoln, that cow dairying was going to be in for some really significant change, compliance-wise and water-wise, so I kept thinking we could do sheep dairying,” Sue says. “It had to be a whole new paradigm – sustainability, ethicality, new protein, new products, nutritional profiles – and I thought, ‘We can do that here,’ and I thought ‘We could make enough money’.” Their plan was to milk sheep and make ice cream, but then a story about them was published by the university’s communications department that was picked up by news media throughout NZ. As a result, Deep South ice cream approached them about a joint venture under which the Traffords would produce the milk and Deep South make the ice cream. They spent money on Awassi-East Friesian cross ewes and infrastructure, Ministry of Primary Industries (MPI) compliance requirements and a $30,000
milk tanker, but with a change of ownership at Deep South, the venture didn’t happen. “So we went to Hanmer Springs, sat in the hot pools and drank a lot of wine and came home and said, ‘We’ll just have to do it ourselves’,” Sue says. “We built a little production unit – it was far too small but all we could afford.” They thought yoghurt would be the best product to start with, but they were wrong. “Cantabrians have an aversion to sheep milk products, particularly the fresher they are,” Guy says. The thousands of pottles and labels they bought still lie unused. It was clear another product was needed. “We rapidly realised in the domestic market, I think, that you need to have a scattergun approach – a bit of this, a bit of that, a bit of the other – and Sue came up with the idea of making labneh, a yoghurt-based cheese,” he says. Labneh is a Middle Eastern cheese, and is essentially drained, pressed yoghurt balls.
DAIRY FARMER
February 2021
