Former MP reveals merits of sheep milk

SHEEP milk cheese could be a Wairarapa product for farmers "up for a challenge", former Wairarapa MP Wyatt Creech said in Masterton yesterday.
Mr Creech, these days a director of Open Country Cheese, a Waikato-based firm that processes cheese and dried whey powder, was speaking at a business breakfast hosted by the National Bank at Copthorne Resort Solway Park.
He said with sheep milk cheese producers in Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia joining the European common market, "there's going to be a huge demand for sheep milk."
Somebody asked how large a scale was needed to be economical and Mr Creech cited as an example South Island company Blue River, which processes milk from 20,000 sheep.
"It sounds a bit of a funny thing to say but if you want to get into this thing, you have to think big."
"The real problem in Wairarapa is critical mass," Mr Creech said, explaining why Waikato had been a better site for his cheese processing plant.
Mr Creech shared his experiences in establishing an exporting cheese factory in New Zealand.
The equipment had been bought nearly new after a Wisconsin company merged with a neighbour and found itself with a factory to spare.
The "windfall", as Mr Creech described it, enabled him to set up at half the cost, although getting the plant into New Zealand had brought some difficulties.
Mr Creech said he had been on the receiving end of bureaucratic delay, as well joking that he used to be "at the fore-end of delivering some of the delay".
Mr Creech said he went through an eight-month resource consent process and "I didn't find that process hard, but I did find it time consuming ? some of the delays really served no purpose."
The company had a "small, very clear focus, with a top technical team."
Mr Creech said people are always asking "how do you find markets?" and are "surprised when I tell them it isn't really that hard."
He said he deals with traders and brokers who trade throughout the world, and "it's much more complicated to get a container out of New Zealand than to sell it at the other end."
"Everywhere you go in the world you run into New Zealanders running (dairy) plants. The value of these technical people is often seriously under-rated."
Mr Creech said in any exporting venture, "you have to have a hedging policy to deal with what's going to happen to the dollar".
But Mr Creech said the conditions were very favourable for dairy farming and more farms were likely to convert to dairy.
"If the relativity with sheep and beef stays like it is now, there'll be another rash of conversions."
The closure of Fisher and Paykel's New Zealand manufacturing plant was the sort of thing New Zealand could expect more of, Mr Creech said, but "in dairy you have to manufacture in New Zealand".
"New Zealand is a source of really low-cost, high-quality milk," Mr Creech said, because New Zealand cattle were "overwhelmingly pasture reared".
"I'm not a doom and gloom merchant," Mr Creech said. "We can make the future in New Zealand just about as rosy as we want it to be.
"Having said that I can understand why Fisher and Paykel made the decision to close, having to compete on whiteware with the Asians.
"But New Zealand's real strength is dairy, and the Asians aren't going to beat us there for some time."