Cheesery finds greener pastures

Bruny Island Cheese Company acquires new dairy farm in Huon

THE first requirements for making cheese are grass and cows, two essentials Bruny Island Cheese Company outsourced for the first 14 years of its existence.

But not any more. A few Sundays ago the company opened the gates of its new farm to well-wishers interested in seeing its grass and cows – situated not on the island but on the banks of the Huon River at Glen Huon.

Nick Haddow, the face of Bruny Island Cheese, said his team had to quickly rethink the exercise when the Facebook expressions of interest indicated that 800 were about to turn up rather than 50 or so.

They might have expected the outpouring of support. Two years ago, Nick and his three business partners decided on a Monday that it “made sense on so many levels” to own a dairy farm in three to five years’ time. The five-year plan became a five-day plan, when, on the Friday of that week they were looking at 40ha at Glen Huon that had come up for sale. Reader they bought it.

The farm had not been used intensively for decades, which meant there was little that had to be undone in their pursuit of organic certification. But it also meant there were no fences, no laneways.

Bruny Island Cheese turned to crowdfunding to raise the money to develop the farm and ended up with more than $200,000.

As he showed me around the farm, Nick allowed that not all dairy cows were fed grass, but, he said: “Grass-based dairy farming produces the best milk if you are trying to make the cheese we are, which is cheese with regional character that comes from the soil and grass.”

And right now, the combination of hot weather and at least one good downpour, is creating “cheesemaking nirvana”.

“Spring is when the components of milk are at their highest, because there are a lot of flowers and fresh grass growth and the enzymes that deliver the flavour profile are also at their best,” he said .

“The milk makes itself into cheese at this time of year. It produces great flavoured quite robust cheeses.”

At the moment, there are 54 cows on the property. Eventually, 80 cows will supply milk for all the company’s cheesemaking, except at times of scarcity when it may fall back on other suppliers.

The breeds on the farm are all dual-purpose – with milk famed for cheesemaking but also good meat breeds.

There is the blotchy Normande, a French cow whose milk goes into camembert and Pont l’Eveque cheeses; Swiss Brown, the oldest dairy breed in the world; and, rare and endangered breed Australian Dairy Shorthorn.

For now, their milk is mixed up, but Nick hopes, in future to make milk from each separate breed to see the different characters unique to each one.

Already, he detects a difference in the cheeses made with their own milk as opposed to that they buy.

He believes the cheeses have more character, “they are a bit more ‘cowy’,” which he believes is attributable to the breeds rather than the grass.

Eventually Bruny Island Cheese will make all its hard cheeses – C2, Tom and George – in a cheesery at the farm, and they will all be made with unpasteurised milk.

A few weeks ago Bruny Island Cheese announced a collaboration with the farm directly across the river – Forest Home, where Peter and Frances Bender’s Huon Aquaculture has a very large hatchery, set in 60ha of pasture, which Glen Huon Dairy Co now leases.

Both farms are in the process of being certified organic by the National Association for Sustainable Agriculture Australia and waste water from the hatchery (which is cleaner than when it comes out of the river) is used on the pasture.

The dairy will use the Forest Home pasture for harvesting grass as silage and hay and for grazing calves and dry cows.

“Our farm would be a very different prospect without the land on the other side,” he said.

One of the company’s cheesemakers Joe Graff suggested his boyhood friend Richard Butler, an experienced organic dairy man, as a farm manager. Now Richard and his wife Karen work on the farm and live there with their young children. Ivan Larcher French cheese consultant is also considering a move to Bruny Island Cheese Company.