Is whey the secret to smooth skin? Doctor and farmer Kate Field is betting on it

Though she has just worked a night shift at the Royal Hobart Hospital, Kate is a whirlwind of energy when we meet at her farm to talk about goat farming, cheesemaking and her new skincare range. Kate easily identifies her drivers and the places where her passions intersect. 

“My purpose in life is to use my skills to make the world a better place,” she says. “I am passionate about human, animal and landscape health, and that I can effect positive change through my work across my two main disciplines. 

“I see that they are incredibly linked: if you don’t eat nutritious food, you’ll be sick. If your animals aren’t well, they won’t produce nutritious food. If your soil is impoverished or the landscape doesn’t function properly, then your animals (or crops) won’t be healthy.”

Kate puts this ethos into practice daily at Leap Farm, a hilly 108 hectare property at Copping in the island state’s south east, 50 kilometres from the capital, Hobart. Kate and her ecologist husband Iain, who emigrated from the UK in 1996, bought Leap Farm in 2012. Keen cheesemakers, they identified their ethos before taking the next step.

“We needed to guarantee the quality of the milk and happiness and health of the animals, and the only way to do that was to have our own farm,” Kate says. They launched themselves into goat husbandry, dairying, cheesemaking and new parenting all at once, with son Hamish born in 2014 followed by Zoe (universally known as Pippi) two years later. 

A decade later, it’s still go-go-go. With a 75 per cent workload as an emergency physician plus a national role overseeing education and training for the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, Kate also found time to develop her Leapful range of skincare products. It was for this, her innovative use of whey waste from cheesemaking, that she won a Tasmanian Women in Agriculture Development Award in 2022.

Cheesemaking is a process of separating milk into curds and whey. At Leap Farm, cheeses are made by adding cultures to milk to metabolise lactose, producing lactic acid to activate the separation. When Iain takes the curds for cheesemaking, Kate takes the whey, which, at 70 per cent of the overall yield, is abundant. Before they struck on transforming the nutrient, mineral and antioxidant–rich by-product into skincare, they struggled to find a worthy use for it.

“It’s a biological substance, but unless you dehydrate it and turn it into whey powder, what?” she says. “You can give it to pigs and we did, and we made wine with it, but we kept coming back to skincare.”

By then, Kate had firsthand experience of its value as a skin restorer. “In winter, when we do not milk, we turn to farm maintenance, including fencing, and our hands get trashed because it’s cold and dry. We noticed that when spring came and milking resumed, Iain would have his hands back in the whey and they would heal.”

First up, Kate developed a base formulation using lactic whey and local olive oil, commissioning botanicals for three scent profiles from local horticulturist Angus Stewart, of Gardening Australia fame. Then she launched Leapful, promoting not just its local provenance but its naturally high levels of vitamins A and C, amino acids and retinol-binding beta-lactoglobulin. “The acidic pH of the lactic whey also discourages the bacterias that cause acne,” Kate says. “Daily Renewal face cream is now my best seller.”

Big-picture health is Kate Field’s guiding light, and she is also passionate about farming sustainably by improving the land and increasing biodiversity. In 2021, Leap Farm achieved carbon positive status, sequestering more than three times as much carbon as it emits. That’s equivalent to 60 average Australian household emissions, plus their own. When it comes to her embrace of regenerative farming for a better future, Kate is typically indefatigable.

“By ensuring that our landscapes are healthy, we ensure that we have a healthy planet, which is so important for now as well as future generations,” she says.

Kate Field talks about Leap Farm’s carbon-positive initiatives on past episodes of her podcast, The Curious Farmer. Order Leapful skincare at leapful.skin

Kate appears alongside other unsung rural heroines in Graziher’s 2025 Women of the Land diary. Produced in association with Rabobank, this beautiful hardcover diary features important country events and space for all your goals and to-do lists. To receive a free copy (valued at $49.99), subscribe here. Already a subscriber? Diaries can be purchased separately here.