Standing on a 40ha farm, The Cheese Barn owners Kelvin and Cathy Haigh won the 2018 Countdown Champion of Champions Cheese Award - Commercial at the recent NZ cheese awards. Their organic cumin seed gouda was described by the judges as “an absolutely superb cheese”.
Set up 20 years ago with second-hand plant and machinery, The Cheese Barn range today boasts 25 organic products -- cheeses, yoghurt, butter and ghee.
Kelvin is an engineering and dairy science graduate of Massey University who decided to try his hand at cheesemaking after working for local dairy companies and overseas building dairy factories.
He told Dairy News that while working in Australia commissioning milk pasteurisers, he saw an Italian man stretching mozzarella and decided that could be his dream job.
“This Italian man owned the farm, milked his own cows and made cheese…. I fell in love with the idea,” he says.
But he had to start from scratch, buying “old pieces of machinery and plant” and storing them in his brother-in-law’s hay barn. He also did a cheesemaking course at Massey University and sought advice from the top four cheesemakers of the time -- Myer, Mercer, Whitestone and Mahoe.
In 1997, at last summoning the courage to buy the farm at Matatoki, just outside Thames, he moved in, milking 85 cows in the morning and putting together his factory piece by piece during the day.
“Nothing was done off the farm; we went up to milking 110 cows and it was very hard work,” he says.
The Haighs applied for BioGro certification to go organic, and three years later they were officially an organic farm. Milk was sent to Anchor Foods – later Fonterra.
By this time The Cheese Barn factory was up and running; Kelvin started making a few basic cheeses, drawing milk from the farm.
“The first cheese made at the plant was camembert and I threw it out; it wasn’t up to my standard,” he says with a chuckle.
“We had a few disasters along the way but we soon started drawing more and more milk and finally stopped sending milk to Fonterra.”
As cheese production increased and the café started drawing business, Haigh sold his cows and started collecting organic milk from neighboring farms. Now The Cheese Barn processes organic milk collected from two only farmers -- via the Organic Milk Hub.
Most of the milk goes into cheese, the rest into butter and yoghurt.
The products are sold at the café and at selected supermarkets, organic stores and specialty stores such as Farro Fresh.
