At the start of her Nuffield journey Griffiths was known as Lucy Cruikshank.
Griffiths grew up on Rosedale, a small sheep and beef farm near Invercargill. She credited her parents’ entrepreneurial spirit for her own appreciation of the need to have diverse assets and not put all one’s eggs in the same commodity basket.
With a background in the food industry, Griffiths developed her marketing consultancy business, Innov8 Aotearoa, which represents speciality NZ food producers locally and globally.
Through her business, at the time known as Pure Wairarapa, Griffiths became involved in the marketing of Kingmeade cheese, the award-winning Wairarapa sheep cheese. They couldn’t keep with up demand.
“I thought, wow, this is a burgeoning industry.”
Along with wanting to keep improving NZ’s export earnings and a personal interest in using smaller land sizes with smaller herds of animals that still provided a return on investment, Griffith’s was quickly able to determine the subject of her Nuffield scholarship report – titled Business Plan for the NZ Sheep Dairy Industry – which explored the opportunities for farmers and food companies in NZ to be world leaders in the production and export of premium products based on sheep milk.
“A sheep dairy industry would be a natural fit for our current farming expertise and a six- to seven-month lactation would fit the pasture growth curve better for many regions than a nine-month cow lactation.”
With its superior health properties, a growing market for people with intolerances to cow’s milk-based dairy, the potential for it being easier on the environment than other forms of dairy and with faster returns on investment the sheep milk industry was a market too important to ignore.
Griffiths used her Nuffield travels to visit small ruminant experts and retailers in France, the United Kingdom, United States, Italy, Switzerland and Israel where she was able to see large-scale sheep milking farms in action and talk about some of the issues facing sheep milk farmers.
BUSY: Nuffield scholar Lucy Griffiths at the inaugural NZ ewe milk products and sheep dairying conference at Massey University where she presented her Nuffield report.
Griffiths quickly deduced that to gain the highest premiums NZ needed to focus on “creating high-value sheep milk products in the health, nutraceutical, pharmaceutical, infant, geriatric and gourmet food sectors.”
Griffiths said the approach to sheep dairy in many of the countries she visited could be summed up in a word.
For France it was tradition – it is the home of the fabled Roquefort cheese.
Israel was efficiency. All sheep are housed with three lambings in two years and measures such as feed mix are strictly monitored.
In Italy it was terroir. The provenance, geography, climate and unique flora and fauna consumed by the grazing mountain sheep was what mattered.
Switzerland was luxury and in the US it was artisan.
Americans are the largest sheep cheese consumers but have just three sheep dairies larger than 1000 head among more than 100 sheep dairy farms.
Griffiths believed NZ had potential to supply the US with premium sheep dairy products including butter, cheese, yoghurt, ice cream and sports nutrition products.
Asia was the ideal market for fresh sheep milk, direct from NZ, infant formula, ice cream and UHT.
In every market visited retailers and producers estimated global demand to be growing at 10-20% a year.
Griffiths defined the UK as an emerging market. The increase in demand had led to the creation in the north of England of a producer collective, Sheep Milk UK. A representative body, she suggested, should be part of an establishment of sheep milk producers in NZ where information, technology and marketing could lead NZ to becoming a global player in the sheep milk industry.
During her Nuffield travels Griffiths said the most common issue was supply.
“How to keep up with supply was a big issue. It is a really optimistic industry at the moment,” she said.
The NZ sheep dairy industry offered the potential to be a billion-dollar industry in 10 years if the right breeding programmes, feed mixes, finance, marketing and other technologies were implemented.
