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.

When 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 Guy and Sue Trafford were milking 220 Awassi-East Friesian cross ewes to make back to when Guy was manager of a labneh and cheese but have reduced numbers to 98. 3300ha property near Gisborne, owned by Māori incorporation, Wi Pere Trust. They considered sheep milking and went minutes east of Christchurch. milk tanker, but with a change of as far as buying some of the first East “I could see, just from my dealings at ownership at Deep South, the venture Friesian sheep embryos brought into Lincoln, that cow dairying was going to didn’t happen. New Zealand. be in for some really significant change, “So we went to Hanmer Springs, sat in

In the end, that venture wasn’t compliance-wise and water-wise, so the hot pools and drank a lot of wine and pursued but the Traffords could see a I kept thinking we could do sheep came home and said, ‘We’ll just have to future in it – when the time was right. dairying,” Sue says. do it ourselves’,” Sue says. That didn’t happen immediately as Guy “It had to be a whole new paradigm “We built a little production unit – it wanted to finish the agriculture degree – sustainability, ethicality, new protein, was far too small but all we could afford.” he’d been doing part-time from Massey new products, nutritional profiles – and They thought yoghurt would be the University. I thought, ‘We can do that here,’ and best product to start with, but they were

They moved south and he enrolled at I thought ‘We could make enough wrong. Lincoln University, finished his BComAg money’.” “Cantabrians have an aversion to sheep undergraduate degree plus a masters, Their plan was to milk sheep and milk products, particularly the fresher then took a job lecturing in farm make ice cream, but then a story about they are,” Guy says. management. Sue transferred her fire them was published by the university’s The thousands of pottles and labels investigation officer job to Christchurch, communications department that was they bought still lie unused. It was clear then took a job at Lincoln teaching picked up by news media throughout another product was needed. communications. NZ. As a result, Deep South ice cream “We rapidly realised in the domestic

But they pined for more hands-on approached them about a joint venture market, I think, that you need to have a farming and were looking for a small under which the Traffords would produce scattergun approach – a bit of this, a bit holding when the 2011 Christchurch the milk and Deep South make the ice of that, a bit of the other – and Sue came earthquake struck. Their home in cream. up with the idea of making labneh, a Christchurch was damaged but liveable They spent money on Awassi-East yoghurt-based cheese,” he says. and out of the blue someone offered Friesian cross ewes and infrastructure, Labneh is a Middle Eastern cheese, and to buy it, so they said yes and bought a Ministry of Primary Industries (MPI) is essentially drained, pressed yoghurt 10.3ha block at Charing Cross, about 30 compliance requirements and a $30,000 balls.

“Sue made some labneh and took some samples along to the Riccarton Market and people’s response were indignant that we didn’t have any to sell and we realised we were on to something,” he says.

“People won’t buy yoghurt but they were buying labneh by the truckload, which was great.

Sue was learning how to make other soft cheeses, mostly from YouTube videos and admits she had plenty of failures.

“We had a lot of fat pigs to start with because we were feeding them all the bad cheese. Sometimes it was really awful,” she laughs.

But she learnt quickly and her success was recognised with a NZ cheese award and a NZ Artisan Food Producer gold medal.

“All of a sudden we became known. You can’t buy that marketing really,” she says.

One of their biggest battles has been compliance and getting MPI approval of their Risk Management Plans, for both the milking operation and the cheese production. They say it’s not only costly, but also took an inordinately long time, sometimes threatening the viability of the business.

Their stall at Riccarton Market was thriving but to keep it all going — milking sheep, making cheese, selling it, lecturing at Lincoln, as well as Guy writing regularly for interest.co website — they were having to work long hours and the strain was starting to tell.

Then the market allowed a cheesemonger who sold imported product to set up there, something the Traffords believe was against the farmers’ market principle of fostering locally-produced food. That impacted their profitability but then another opportunity arose with the setting up of the new Riverside Market in central Christchurch.

“The manager said ‘We’re looking for a cheesemonger’ so we said, ‘Yes, please’,” Guy recalls.

“We knew nothing about it, so we made a trip to Australia and watched a whole lot of YouTube videos,” Sue adds.

“And it just went off.”

As well as stocking their own product, their shop has cheese from 13 other producers from as far away as Takaka and Oamaru.

“So, we’ve gone from being cheese producers to now clip the ticket on everybody else’s, but it’s given them a profile that we struggled to get for ourselves.”

But they were still on a treadmill with the shop open 10 hours a day, seven days a week and the couple, both in their late 60s, realised something had to change. It was obvious to them that there was better money in selling cheese than in making it.

“The farm was all money going out, huge running costs, huge compliance costs, a lot of stress, all this working all day and all night, turning cheeses at 3am, and doing all this stuff and we woke up one day and thought, ‘Why don’t we go to where the money is really, in the selling, so why don’t we put life here on hold?’ We just needed a break,” Sue says.

“Then this young couple came into the shop and said they were cheesemakers and asked if we would be interested in developing a relationship in which they made the cheese and we sold it.”

Daniel Bell was a cheesemaker at Barry’s Bay Cheese near Akaroa and his fiancée Kate Crawford works in marketing. Under their partnership arrangement, Daniel makes the same range of cheese that Sue used to, in the MPI-compliant facility the Traffords built on their land.

They’ve put milking sheep on hold and have reduced their flock from 220 ewes to 98 ewes and from a peak of 40ha, leasing paddocks from neighbours, they’re now down to about 20ha and expect to reduce that further.

A nearby farmer who milks more than 400 sheep supplies the milk that Daniel uses to make Charing Cross Sheep Dairy cheese, which is sold at Riverside Market.

Sue and Guy have retired from Lincoln University and are learning to give themselves some time off. Sue says they’ve learnt an enormous amount over the past decade.

“One of the things I’ve learnt is farmers always seem to think the production end is the most important end and it’s exactly the opposite. It’s about the consumer experience,” she says.

“If they don’t like your product, if it doesn’t resonate with them, give them some kind of emotional, social or ethical experience, they will just go to the next place. So the market is that perfect venue to give that experience.

“Although it’s painful and can be expensive, failure has been our biggest asset and an ability to be flexible. For a couple of old fogeys we’re actually incredibly light on our decision-making feet and we’ve taken opportunities that most people probably wouldn’t have and most of the risky opportunities have come off.” n

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Breeding for gains

By Gerald Piddock

Breeding programmes in the North sees milking sheep developed for New Zealand conditions.

Dairy sheep genetics have Sheep’s flock had Romney genetics, the made massive gains in sheep had a lactation period of around the past few years thanks 120-140 days. to dedicated breeding Those results prompted a discussion programmes from North Island-based amongst Spring Sheep’s leadership sheep milking companies. team.

Spring Sheep Milk Company launched “What we really need to do is put that its own milking sheep breed Zealandia genetics programme on steroids,” he at its open day in November, while Maui says.

Milk continues to develop its Southern In 2017 they were immediately able

Cross breed two years after its unveiling. to increase production from 1-2 litres

Both companies see superior breed per sheep once they got access to performance being key in increasing those European genetics, although the sheep milking suppliers in their Waikato lactation period was still short. bases. Over the past three years that lactation

Spring Sheep general manager of period had increased from the start of milk supply Thomas Macdonald says August to the end of April.

Zealandia was a combination of six years’ “What it means in numbers is that it worth of data and performance records takes you from a 120l sheep in that first going into the company’s breeding year to a 200l sheep when you have that programme. cross of the dairy and non-dairy sheep

The breed is essentially a composite of together to where our team sat last year, several different milking sheep breeds. which is in that 270-275l/ewe,” he says.

He says they decided early on that Spring Sheep chief operating officer non-dairy genetics were not going to be Nick Hammond says their average part of the breed. production this year across all seven

In 2017 they brought in dairy sheep farms, across all sheep ages was now genetic material from Europe, which 250-300l/sheep. proved to be the foundation for the He says the Zealandia breed had taken

Zealandia breed. They met with the best attributes from different breeds.

European sheep milkers and learned “We have taken a variety of highwhat worked for them and what did not. performance dairy sheep and breeds.

“That was when we brought the We brought them into New Zealand

Lacaune breed and the East Friesian and what we have done is taken a huge breed back into the country,” Macdonald amount of data and measurements off says. that group,” Hammond says.

“It’s been three years of bringing in “We have done 24 million data points additional lines and advanced lines off that group and off that we have looking for specific traits that are selected the best rams and we’ve done specific to our Waikato farming systems, all of the heavy lifting. recognising that not everything that “We now have a high-performance happens overseas is applicable to the dairy sheep adapted specifically to NZ’s

Waikato.” farming systems.”

He says there were several traits Spring Sheep got rid of any sheep they wanted in their sheep and once carrying non-sheep dairy genetics after obtained, those sheep are recorded and two years of operation. bred to become suitable to Waikato farm To their surprise, removing those systems. sheep and sticking only with dairy sheep

The breed’s characteristics were based had not come at the expense of other around extended days in milk. At the traits like hardiness and survivability in beginning when the bulk of Spring NZ’s outdoor farming system. A mob of Zealandia milking ewes bred by Spring Sheep Milk Company wait to be milked.

“You think it would – and that was one of our initial considerations – but hasn’t actually been the case,” he says.

Hammond believes the data they collected allowed them to successfully select the genetics to avoid any animal health issues.

“The animal health burden has not been the big disaster everyone told us it would be,” he says.

Sheep-milking farmers can also notice any issues a lot faster than sheepmeat farmers because they see the sheep twice a day during milking

This allows them to quickly deal with any animal health issues they would not have otherwise seen, he says.

When asked if the industry was large enough to have two breeding programmes, he says the industry will grow quickly because of sheep’s fast breeding rate.

“When we talk about scalability of an industry and you look at animal constraint, it’s very much a short-term constraint. Quite quickly we can be 40,000 sheep by 2025,” he says.

Maui Milk general manager Peter Gatley was formerly LIC’s general manager of genetics when the company developed Kiwicross cattle, which is now the most widely used cow in the dairy industry.

He now wants to do the same with the Southern Cross milking sheep.

The sheep were being developed for an outdoor system, which is different to other countries where milking sheep are farmed indoors.

“The Southern Cross ewe we’re breeding is effectively the sheep equivalent of the Kiwicross cow,” Gatley says.

The programme began in 2015 when Gatley and geneticist Jake Chardon attended a sheep milking conference at Massey University.

They were a couple of individuals looking to find a way into the industry, he says.

Chardon spoke with Dr Jock Allison, who imported the original East Friesian genetics into NZ.

He discovered Allison still had the frozen embryos of those sheep and bought them off him on the spot.

“It was quite scary, we didn’t have any sheep at the time,” Gatley says.

They moved quickly and within a matter of weeks those embryos were implanted in ewes being farmed in Hawke’s Bay.

Over the years they have used the East Friesian, Awassi and Lacaune genetics, along with a Coopworth base.

Getting access to the Lacaune genetics was key. The sheep breed’s genetics are jealously guarded by French farmers and it took Chardon two years to build up a relationship with those breeders.

The first shipment of those genetics arrived in 2017 and it became an integral part of their breeding programme.

“We are miles ahead of where we were back then, but it still feels like there’s massive potential ahead of us,” Gatley says.

While the Lacaune was fully competitive with the East Friesian on milk production, it had advantages in other areas such as udder conformation, milking speed and was better suited to outdoor NZ grazing systems.

“When we started in 2015 we were totally dependent on East Friesians but they just didn’t last. They go soft in bad weather, they don’t like the sun and pneumonia is a real issue,” he says.

Gatley says the Southern Cross breed’s genetic makeup was likely to resemble a sheep with mostly Lacaune genetics and some Coopworth to give it resilience to outdoor farming.

This year they have started their own embryo programme to maximise the genetics of elite ewes.

They will use progeny tested semen to get those embryos and the embryo donor ewes will be the top 10% of the ewes at Maui Milk’s Waikino Station near Taupo.

For converting farmers, the rams they will be supplied with will have come from multiple generations of progeny-tested sires.

“Every one of their mothers will be a proven performer from a grass-based system,” he says.

First-cross hoggets were capable of producing around 200l while mixed age ewes with more dairy genes on an all outdoor farming system were capable of doubling that. n

Class in the paddock

By Ross Nolly

Attracting young people into the agricultural sector has been a challenge for the industry, but programmes such as the one implemented by a Taranaki school will help.

It is often difficult to attract urban kids to careers in the rural sector, however, one urban high school has initiated an innovative agricultural programme to help bridge that divide.

Taranaki’s Waitara High School is in the second season of its sheep milking programme. Situated 25km north of

New Plymouth, 75-80% of the school’s students are urban and 70% are Maori.

The programme is part of the school’s agriculture curriculum for Year 11 and 12 classes, which focuses on Unit Standards in fencing and animal handling. External achievement standards are also offered for livestock management and soils.

The Year 11 class focuses on career and training pathways, health and safety, farm skills including drenching, hydration, and nutrition of farm workers, animal reproduction and digestion.

The Year 12 class focuses on animal behaviour and farm management, to Waitara High School introduced a sheep milking programme for Year 11 and 12 maximise production, running the school students to attract urban children to the industry. farm, agrichemicals and reproductive technologies.

“A couple of years ago one of the Year Milk NZ is readily available for new sheep next one.” 12 livestock management projects dug milk operations. David Chapman from Sheep have proven to be a perfect up a Nuffield Scholarship report about Woodville’s Wildbush sheep-milking dairy animal for a school environment. the prospect of sheep milking in New farm gave the school their East Friesian Berghan has found that sheep milking

Zealand. We thought it sounded pretty sheep and a ram to get them started. is quicker and easier than milking cows, interesting and could be a viable project The school operates a 2.8-hectare and he was surprised how readily the for our school. So, I joined the sheep farm, running 40 ewes, three calves and sheep responded to entering the shed. milking conversation through the Sheep chickens for eggs and show. Pritchard Cows can make more mess and are a

Milk NZ group coordinated by associate spent two days with students to outline much larger animal to deal with in the professor Craig Pritchard from Massey milking sheep management practices shed and on the farm. Their size also

University,” agriculture and science and designed a milking platform, which increases the risk of injury to students, teacher Gus Berghan says. the students built and now milk four East especially those who are not used to

“We investigated the logistics and Friesian sheep on. being around stock. The students can with the support of the L. A. Alexander “Some of the students have been in a handle the sheep and learn how to do

Agricultural College Trust Board (the dairy shed, but it’s a real eye-opener for it safely, without feeling intimidated or trust supports Taranaki agriculture and most of the kids who have never been injuring themselves, or the sheep. horticulture teachers), we went ahead on a farm before. It opens them up to “I was a little concerned that I’d be with it.” possibilities for work they knew nothing milking every day, but there’s been

Pritchard invited Berghan and the about,” Berghan says. a lot of support from other teachers

Waitara High School students to Massey “Instead of solely hearing about and students who cover some of the and helped them investigate the milking, they can come to the shed and weekends for me and my wife Helen,” he practicalities of fitting the project in a experience it. They can go from learning says. school environment. Shakespeare in one lesson and be down “We’ve taken the lead from Dave

A great deal of support from Sheep here putting cups on the sheep in the Chapman and leave the lambs on their

mothers until they are about 13.5kg, before separating them at night.

“The lambs have access to water and pellets, which they soon find a liking for. The next morning the ewes are miked first and then returned to the paddock with their lambs. This takes nearly a week and then we wean them and put them out with the other stock. We only milk for nine or 10 weeks during the fourth term.”

Many students who aren’t on the course visit to watch the sheep being milked. In December Gus picks a group of Year 10 students who will begin the course the following year to introduce them to milking.

“It either turns them on or off. It’s better that they experience it then, than have a class of 25 disinterested students the following year,” he says.

“I often bring entire classes of Year 9 and 10 students down to show them how it’s done. Some don’t even know where milk comes from. This introduces agriculture to those who may never have thought of taking it as a subject.”

The Year 11 and 12 students, and the Year 10 students who are choosing the course for the first time, are given a notebook to allow them to record any farm work that they complete during the school holidays.

Berghan calls the farmers to assess the student’s confidence and skill levels, which enables him to complete a final assessment and if competent, the students gain NCEA credits for their work. The school also has consent to assess sheep milking as a Unit Standard.

“The Unit Standards they gain aren’t just for NCEA, the credits can also go towards their Level 2 National Certificate in Agriculture. Each year I write references for students who have found work, or are looking for work on farms,” he says.

“Some have chosen agriculture as a career and gone on to Taratahi Agricultural Training Centre and Telford Rural Education Centre, and others have undertaken agriculture university degrees.”

Another remarkably innovative idea was the purchase of a pasteuriser to allow the school’s Year 9 to 13 Home Economics classes to make cheese from the milk.

After pasteurisation the milk is frozen until it’s needed to make feta and mozzarella cheese. The students get the opportunity to see the entire manufacturing process, from the milk leaving the ewe’s teats to the finished cheese. The learning doesn’t just stop at making cheese though, because the students also design the cheese packaging.

“The students learn to work together and cooperate with one another. I like to have some diversity to give students the opportunity to experience a variety of agricultural activities,” he says.

“The farm is used by the Business Enterprise course to produce eggs and chickens, and to rear and sell calves. We want to show the kids that it’s a business.”

“I’d like to increase our milking sheep numbers. It would be nice to produce enough milk to increase the types of cheeses we produce to use in the café.” n

Waitara High students preparing the milking plant, as agriculture and science teacher Gus Berghan watches from above. The milking platform was designed by Massey University professor Craig Pritchard and was built by the students. Student Joseph Vallen putting cups on East Friesian the sheep.

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