“We have a great deal of love and respect for our beautiful girls.”

cressida I was originally in sales in the wine industry, as was Michael.that’s where we met.we moved out of Sydney because we really wanted a different life for our little one-year-old, Hugo, who’s now 11. When we bought our tiny hobby farm at Picton we were really keen to have a go at small-scale farming, so we had chooks, ducks, goats, everything.we had a ball and really learned a lot. It was a useful time because it gave us a greater understanding of what we were doing, learning about pumps, tractors and animals. So when we found this property, we were well-equipped to get right into it and scale up. When we moved here in 2008, Michael continued to work in the city while I worked on the farm. I milked the sheep and froze the milk so that we could make cheese on the weekends. Basically, it was a hands-on learning process. Not having any previous farming experience has been quite good in some ways.we farm intensively on a small piece of land and milk pure East Friesians. The breed is like the racehorse of the sheep dairy industry in that they need to be managed carefully. We feel strongly that you need a fabulous raw product to be able to make a world-class cheese, so we have a great deal of love and respect for our beautiful girls. The focus is on their health and we do that through the health of the soil and pasture, and that’s reflected in the sweet, creamy milk they produce. It took us about seven years to learn to make cheese. Michael has more science knowledge than I do, so he calls the shots with the cheese. I’m more involved with the sheep, lambs and pasture, so I call the shots with the animals. Having said that, it requires both of us to produce what we do, and we feed off each other and discuss things in order to come up with the right answer. Michael has a wonderful ability to look at the big picture, the long term, and to see opportunities. He never thinks that things are too hard.with farming there are always ups and downs, and things that go wrong.when things do go wrong, he’s always very calm and looks at the problem in a rational way and finds an answer. >