Cheesemaker Cressida Cains is on a mission to save Australian dairy farms

You could say Kevin is the black sheep of Pecora Dairy — she’s also its star. The six-year-old ewe has an assertive
personality that’s earned her a loyal following on Instagram.

“Kevin has become an independent thinker and she just does what she pleases,” explains Pecora Dairy owner and cheesemaker Cressida Cains. “If she finds an open door in the summer she will take it upon herself to pop in to the house and have a look what’s in the pantry. She’s partial to the fruit bowl. She is really quite naughty.”

Kevin had recently lambed twins when Graziher caught up with Cressida and was taking a “relaxed approach” to parenting, much to the amusement of her fans. “If the lambs don’t remain with her at all times, she simply wanders off to greener pastures, as it were,” Cressida says with a smile. “I started telling stories about her on Instagram, and people really loved it, so I share more of her. But it’s also a lovely way to tell our story, to show how we are different — we milk all of our own animals and make all of our own cheese.”

Like Kevin, Cressida and her husband Michael prefer an unconventional path. The couple haven’t always been farmers — before they started Pecora Dairy, they worked in wine sales in Sydney. But Cressida always dreamed of living in the country and when she became pregnant with their eldest son, Hugo (now 17; their youngest, Darcy, is 15) they moved to a small property just outside the city. “We bought a couple of East Friesian sheep and just started making cheese on the weekends,” Cressida says.

The couple had an inkling that a sheep dairy could be a smart venture, but with Michael still commuting to Sydney for work and two young children to raise, it was put on the backburner. Then the pair entered one of their cheeses in the annual agricultural show at Robertson in the Southern Highlands, about 200 kilometres south of Sydney. “I remember driving out to Robertson and it was the most extraordinarily beautiful area. I immediately thought, I really want to live here, this is where my heart is,” Cressida says.

In 2011 the couple threw everything they had at an 80-hectare patch of land in Robertson — and quickly discovered that a sheep dairy in the Southern Highlands was considered to be a doubtful prospect. Not only was milking sheep a rarity in Australia — even today there are only six commercial sheep dairies in the country — sheep typically need a dry climate, and Robertson enjoys about two metres of rain a year. “But the sheep that we knew we wanted to milk — the East Friesian sheep — originally come from the Netherlands, so they’re very suited to wet and cold climates like we have in Robertson,” Cressida points out. “Michael and I just had this firm belief, we had this vision about what we wanted to create. We felt that what we were going to do had such integrity and such a future, that we really drove towards it.”

Underpinning the idea was the livestock’s low environmental impact while producing a nutritious, rich milk — “the Rolls Royce of milk for cheesemaking,” Cressida notes. “We always wanted to have a sustainable business, one which had a lighter footprint on the land than cows. Sheep eat less and they drink less. And obviously they produce a lot less milk, but they also have double the solids, so you can make twice as much cheese.”

Those early days were tough — Cressida recalls throwing away entire batches of cheese gone wrong and grappling with floods during lambing. The stress of being new farmers was compounded by being relative pioneers in the industry. “It was quite isolating, and a lot of the problems that we ran into we had to work out for ourselves — there weren’t very many
people who had any expertise in either the sheep that we were farming or the cheeses that we were making.”

But, there were enough highs to encourage them. Early on, their blue cheese won gold in the Sydney Royal Cheese & Dairy Produce Show, validating their efforts. Now their range includes fresh curd, blue and soft cheeses as well as their showstopper — a semi-hard variety called Yarrawa. A raw-milk cheese, it’s the result of Cressida and Michael’s long-held vision for cheeses that reflect the cool-climate rainforest pastures on which their sheep are raised. After working closely with the food authority, in 2018 they became the first in Australia to hold a licence to produce raw-milk cheese.

“What we really wanted to do was, similar to the concept of the wine industry, create terroir surrounding our cheese,” explains Cressida. “It means that you work with the milk, which has all the indigenous microbes in it from the day that you milked the sheep. You’re encapsulating that in the cheese and it becomes a real taste of the landscape.”

A decade in, Cressida and Michael have found their groove. They milk around 140 ewes from mid-August to the end of May, sharing the milk with the lambs, and their cheese is sought out by top chefs. “We’ve been consistently awarded for our excellence and innovation and could sell three times what we make,” Cressida says. As well as supplying restaurants and boutique retailers, they sell direct to cheese lovers online and have a shopfront in Robertson, with plans to open a small wine and cheese bar in December.

Theirs is a rare success story in an industry that has seen the number of dairy farms in Australia drop by a staggering three-quarters in the last 30 years. It’s why Cressida is so passionate about helping others flourish. In 2020 she was named the AgriFutures NSW Rural Woman of the Year for her plan to create Dairy Cocoon, an online platform providing education and mentoring to help small dairy farmers quit the traditional model of supplying milk to processors and create their own artisan brands.

There’s plenty of scope for small dairy farmers to thrive, Cressida says — Australia is the third-biggest consumer of milk per capita in the world, but much of our appetite is met by overseas producers. “We imported 22 million litres of ice cream into this country last year, and 100,000 tonnes of cheese,” says Cressida, “so there’s a huge opportunity for independent brands.”

With a farm to run, a new wine bar to launch, Dairy Cocoon to grow and evolve, and Kevin’s outrageous antics to document, Cressida’s capable hands are certainly full. But, that’s just the way she likes it. “Sometimes I do think, ‘Oh my goodness, have I overcommitted myself?’ But when I can see things working, and when I see that I can help people, I just get so much pleasure from it all.”

For more information, visit pecoradairy.com.au.

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