This is Biddy Fraser-Davies, the celebrated cheese maker from Tararua with her three cow herd: Sally, Molly and Emily.
Biddy the Dairymaid by Maddie Tait-Jamieson
Between them, and notwithstanding the needs of their own offspring, the jersey girls provide just enough milk to support Biddy’s small cheese making business. She produces two naturally rinded farmhouse cheeses each day and sells them to people who like to come and pat the cow that produced the milk that made the cheese on Cwmglyn Farm.
And what’s wrong with that? Quite a lot, apparently. The food safety people seem to think Biddy is a potential menace. She may not look it, in her pink crocs and purple apron, but the woman is dangerous; her cheese may constitute a health hazard. Not because her practices are unsanitary – all agree her standards are exemplary – and not because her cheese is substandard – it passes all the tests with flying colours. No, officialdom has it in for her because she failed to fill out the forms.
The Food Safety Authority woke up to the fact after Country Calendar profiled her last year. They came down on her with a tonne of paperwork and have spend goodness knows how much tax-payer money checking her out. It would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic.
Biddy Fraser-Davies
I spent a few hours with her recently as she made a batch of cheese, and I watched her dutifully document every step in the process. There was a form to record the heat treatment of each batch of milk from each cow and another that covered the cheese making process. All up each cheese required 7 temperature readings, 6 ph tests and 14 time checks. And it didn’t stop there – the documentation followed each cheese through pressing, maturation and point of sale; all in the name of traceability. Now that’s probably quite a sensible precaution for a big factory but it doesn’t translate to a dairy the size of Biddy’s. She has to fill out these forms for every cheese she makes. The compliance cost so far, including lab testing offsite, has come in at $5,000 – a huge chunk of her $20,000 turnover.
It’s enough to drive you mad – or out of business, and you can’t help wondering if that’s the idea. Are artisan cheese makers really such a threat to our dairy industry? Biddy has been making her cheese without a problem for 8 years. Her equipment is spotless, her cows are well cared for, their milk is checked regularly. You would think risk management requirements could be tailored to suit the size of small dairies like Biddy’s – especially now we are seeing such a resurgence of small scale cheese making. Encourage compliance by all means but don’t let bureaucracy kill the artisan culture.
Pass the Salt 
As a small business food producer I hear the gripe. We run a full HACCP system and have been for years. Annual audit for 5 years was around $600, not bad for a small business, it’s affordable. Audit last year $2,000, almost packed up shop. This is due to the fact a large company has taken over the audit responsibilities and there are no more smaller guys in the area. There needs to be a review of a big auditor coming to audit a small business.
I feel for the above cheese maker, there should be more work done to tailor each business and also look at the general product distribution. I’m not Watties! I am not going to infect every second NZ’er as my product does not reach that far and if it does I would not mind paying for a full scale audit as I would consider myself as a full scale distributor of processed food.
I can imagine there are a lot of people faced with the one-size-fits-all situation. It would be a shame if burgeoning compliance costs stifled the small start-up businesses that are often the real innovators in the food sector. What is your business, by the way?
We manufacture Elysian Taramasalata and just recently have put our Tzatziki on the market.
Great product! We buy it all the time and hassle New World Thorndon when they don’t have it.
Thanks Anna for the blog review. MAFF are in the process of setting up a new regime for small cheese makers using their own milk, providing they don’t produce more than 1000 litres of milk a week as a direct reponse to my agitation and publicity. However they have been very busy with Earthquakes, & departmental amalgamations (they are now back to the system that it used to be under some 30 years ago, talk about ‘what goes around, comes around!”) so nothing much has been done about it at the moment, but I am assured it will be.
We’ve dried Emily off now, so she can get her body ready for calving in September, so cheese production is down to winter levels of a couple of cheeses a week, Sally and Molly cowfully doing their bit.
If anyone is interested they are welcome to come and taste my cheese, Cwmglyn Farm is located 9 kilometres South of Eketahuna. Sign on Highway 2.
Thanks so much, dad is very passionate about his Taramasalata, I will pass the compliment on.
Anna, this is a great post (and a great spinoff to hear about a decent taramasalata, not to mention Biddy’s cheese!)