Agribusiness | Real Milk Timaru
A tale of two herds In the paddocks of Stu and Andrea Weir’s farm there is living heritage munching on the grass. Some of their 220-strong herd of Holstein Fresian cows (aka the black and white ones) are the great-great-great-great-great-greatgreat-great granddaughters of the original herd established at the family farm, on the outskirts of Timaru, in the 1940s. A smart operator knows when to embrace progress and what traditions to hold on to. The Weirs have struck a balance in their milk production, at Glenwillow Farm, which caters for both the processed retail milk market and for a niche unpasteurised, non homogenised clientele. Real Milk Timaru is now in its seventh year in business, which came about after the Weirs realised they needed to make their raw milk sales to the public more formal.
“All the good bacteria that helps with digestion. It’s also the taste. I’ve just picked up a new customer this week who’s an ex-dairy farmer. He told me it was great to have proper milk again.”
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Our customers are what keeps driving us. They’re so grateful for the opportunity to get this milk. - Real Milk Timaru owner and operator, Stu Weir
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Food safety
People of a certain age will know what whe means.
Real Milk Timaru sends milk samples once a week for testing at a lab in Christchurch.
Milk in glass bottles with a silver foil top, that when peeled off revealed an inch (yes, premetric) of solid cream in the neck.
They test for: plant hygiene (aerobic plate count), e.coli, salmonella, listeria, campylobacter, staphylococci, coliforms, and inhibitory substances.
“Because of our proximity to Timaru, people would come out for a drive to the country with a container to get milk from us, they’d leave cash in the mailbox. It grew to a point where we knew we had to tidy things up,” Stu says.
Theoretically, you were meant to shake the bottle to disperse the cream before opening. This didn’t always happen when there were kids around who wanted to scoff the cream or dad wanted to put it on his porridge.
He puts this growth in demand down to people wanting to get back-to-basics with their food. Stu says people understand the benefits of unpasteurised, non homogenised milk.
This nostalgia combined with the demand because of the growing consciousness of the health benefits of raw milk, led to the Weirs upping the ante. They came across
Takaka-based Village Milk and signed up with them as a franchisee. In 2016, after two years of doing that, the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) made regulatory changes. This meant the franchisees had to disband and register as individual producers.
Setting up from scratch, under the MPI regulations, is considered a huge and daunting task by many milk producers. Fortunately for Stu and Andrea Weir, they had already set up through Village Milk, so they already had most of the MPI processes in place. Stu says the transition to becoming independent was “pretty much seamless”. Real Milk Timaru’s set-up costs were about $100, 000. This went towards buying Italianmade dispenser units and one-litre, screw-top glass bottles. As the demand for the milk has grown, the company has invested further capital into building a new dairy shed with a retail shop attached.
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