THE BIG INTERVIEW

Ken Whelan

WHEN Johnny Lynch came up with his idea of setting up a buffalo farm eyebrows were raised in the Department of Agriculture. One official suggested that it might be prudent to erect a big fence around his Macroom farm just in case the animals mistook their surroundings for the North American prairies.

“We had to get an import license for the buffalo and someone in the Department said we should think about building a seven or eight foot fence around the farm to keep the buffalo in. I don’t know where he got that idea from – he probably Googled it – though, in fairness, I have to say today that the Department and other state agencies like Údarás na Gaeltachta have been very helpful since we first put the idea to them in 2009,” says Johnny, a native of the West Cork Gaeltacht.

The idea of setting up the buffalo farm and then making mozzarella cheese from their milk came to John because his Friesian herd was producing “good milk for bad prices”.

He says he had a choice of let- ting the family’s dairy farming teeter on the edges of commercial viability or branch out into a more viable artisan cheese venture.

He could see there was a market for artisan mozzarella cheese. Together with his friend and noted cheesemaker Sean Ferry, he set about creating the Macroom Buffalo cheese brand which now sells in most of the national supermarket chains in the country.

Seven years on, 70 tonnes of the product is being produced from the milk of the 200 head of buffalo now roaming John’s 150-acre farm near Macroom.

And the numbers are set to go higher this year (2017) with plans to expand herd numbers and up the mozzarella production to 90 tonnes

It’s a long way from being told to build a fence to employing 10 people and producing an artisan cheese product which was previously imported for the Irish market.

“We decided on the conversation from a Friesian dairy farm to the buffalo at the beginning of 2009 and had the first 31 buffalo on the farm within months. I went to Cremona in North Italy for the stock early in 2009 and they were on the farm within three months. I sold my milk quota at the time to finance the conversation and bought the buffalo for €2,000 each and €1,000 each for the calves

“We had to get an import license from the Department of Agriculture who were sceptical at the time and had to deal with restrictions in Britain because of a blue tongue outbreak there at the time.

“But I have to say that the Department and the food authorities have been very helpful to us,” says Johnny.

The herd conversion began more or less immediately and was completed within a couple of years through a buffalo breeding programme on the farm.

In parallel, the investment programme to build a cheese plant on the farm – which cost the guts of €500,000 – commenced, as did the development of the actual cheese brand for which he gives much of the credit to cheesemaker John Ferry.

Today 10 people – John Ferry and two other cheese makers together with commercial and office staff – work on the product in Macroom and not a pint of cow’s milk is produced on the farm.

It has been a remarkable journey for Johnny, all the more so given that three years into the venture he was struck by bowel cancer which has thankfully cleared after treatment in Cork University Hospital (CUH).

“I can’t say enough good things about CUH,” says