Friday, March 29, 2024

A false start to success

Avatar photo
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.
Reading Time: 5 minutes

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 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 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.

“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.”

Total
0
Shares
People are also reading