Bureaucracy just getting in the whey
The plight of a cheesemaker sums up the burden of bad regulation.
It’s a David versus Goliath battle. In one corner is Biddy Fraser-Davies of Cwmglyn Cheese. She’s 74, an awardwinning artisan cheesemaker who hand-milks four jersey cows (Dizzy, Holly, Patsy, and Isobel) on her small organic farm in Eketahuna. In the other corner is the Wellington bureaucracy, with its clipboards, exorbitant fees, and one-size-fits-all rules.
I met Biddy on Thursday. She’d trekked down to Wellington, along with other cheese enthusiasts, to present to the primary production select committee. The selfconfessed ‘‘stubborn old woman’’ was ready for a battle.
She’s used to taking on the cheese world and winning – receiving a Super Gold at the World Cheese Awards 2014-2015. Her cheese features at top Wellington restaurants and was even served at Prince George’s Wellington playdate.
But for the past few years she’s also been taking on the Government – submitting to the Productivity Commission, petitioning the Ministry for Primary Industries and blogging on bad dairy regulation. She points out that she’s not only fighting for herself but for the next generation of small-scale cheese entrepreneurs. She even helps educate aspiring cheesemakers on how to deal with the sector’s red tape.
And she’d know all about it. Her story is a case study in the burden of bad regulation. She’d comfortably passed council inspections for years, but issues arose when her farm was featured on Country Calendar in 2009 and the Food Safety Authority decided to poke around.
Her compliance requirements now include milking parlour inspections, herd inspections, TB inspections, courier costs for test samples ($150 a week), and costly risk management audits. The tests and audits show her product is of excellent standard. But it’s not the standards that are thwarting Biddy and other raw cheese makers – the problem is the sheer cost of fees and compliance, plus the frustration of absurd bureaucracy.
One classic case was when an MPI official demanded she have an export licence just to enter a cheese wheel into the 2013 World Cheese Awards (at which she was the only New Zealand winner). And this year, she’s been trying to explain why rules around transporting raw milk at fridge temperature aren’t quite necessary for her milk’s 5-metre journey from udder to cheeseroom.
These regulations have been designed for Fonterra-league companies, but are completely disproportionate for a business of Biddy’s size. And as she says, ‘‘I don’t want to get any bigger, my desire for world domination has ceased a little. I just want to be able to make and sell raw cheese.’’
She calculates 40 per cent of her revenue goes towards compliance costs. And it could get even worse under new legislation intended to allay fears after the recent dairy botulism scare.
Ultimately, all these rules serve to (intentionally or not) protect existing players by creating barriers to entry for smaller businesses who simply can’t afford the costs.
This occurs at a time when politicians and government departments pontificate about how our dairy industry should look at value-added products rather than bulk milk powder. What Biddy does epitomises this, in her own small-scale way.
Biddy and artisans like her pave the way for higher quality and more innovation across entire industries – consider the influence of Kapiti cheese and more recently, Lewis Road Creamery. Let’s champion these little guys, not gut them with one-size-fits-all regulation.