A New Zealand road trip planted the idea, a Nuffield Scholarship study reinforced the concept and a hectic off-farm work schedule provided the catalyst to act.
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Now Danielle and Tom Wright have their own burgeoning farm-based processing enterprise, Gully View Dairy.
Gully View Dairy was launched last October and the salted and unsalted butter, cream, buttermilk and flavoured milk products are starting to make a splash.
The single-origin, small-batch, hand-crafted enterprise is Danielle’s initiative, building on her marketing and graphic design background, while Tom is the sixth generation to run the Panmure farm.
Tom is mostly responsible for making the milk, Danielle takes charge of turning it into commercial products, and together they are raising three children.
Gully View Dairy has been a long time in the making.
Danielle first thought about the value of farmer-run enterprises when she went on a Gardiner Foundation New Zealand study tour in 2017.
“Every town we went to, there was a farm stand or a shop,” she said.
“The whole group of us said this needs to happen more often in Australia. I came back and, like every farmer, joked about starting processing.”
A couple of years later, the concept came up again when she was reading a Nuffield Scholar’s report of visiting overseas farm-based enterprises.
The idea resurfaced when Danielle was teaching agriculture at South West TAFE.
“We were racing everywhere to get to work and organise kids and it was just chaos. The idea came up again then and it snowballed from there.”
The process wasn’t easy, although Danielle remains convinced other farmers should consider it.
They bought equipment including a 200-litre pasteuriser with a product thermometer and had a container fitted out, but a Food Safety Plan slowed progress.
“If I didn’t have my marketing background, I probably wouldn’t have even considered it,” Danielle said.
“The Food Safety Plan took about a year and it’s like 95 pages, and now there are about 15 different forms that I have to fill out every week,” she said.
“Most people would get put off by the red tape.
“You try and do something and you’re met with a wall of paperwork.
“If I had have read all we had to do before we purchased the equipment, we probably wouldn’t have gone down that path, but now we’re happy that we made it.”
Since its launch, Gully View Dairy has continued to evolve.
“It has been a massive learning curve,” Danielle said, who completed cheese making courses in preparation for the business.
“I’ve had to tilt the systems I had in place to streamline it for our family and to make a commercially viable product, but I feel like I’m in the groove now.”
Eventually, they hope to make home-grown cheeses and have purchased some equipment in preparation.
The farm is too remote for an on-farm outlet and they don’t want the biosecurity hassles, but the products are proving popular at markets and at the Panmure general store, and Danielle is hoping to extend to Port Fairy and Warrnambool.
“Eventually I’d like a permanent place in Panmure to showcase the products of our phenomenal local producers,” Danielle said.
“People like farmer-owned products and they like our story.”
Tom is the sixth generation of the Wright family to run the farm, where the dairy overlooks an unnamed gully.
He and Danielle returned to the 216 hectare property about nine years ago and milk 260 Friesians.
The cows produce more than their body weight in milk, roughly 580 kg/MS, enough to supply Frestine and keep a bit for their own production.
This year they won their first Gold Milk Quality from Dairy Australia.
“When we came on the farm, we bought bits from here and there to build up a herd,” Danielle said.
“Over the past couple of years, we have focussed on genetics and weeding out anything that’s old or not producing.”
They did start using genomics and will return in the future, but impacts of the drought, have meant directing money to re-seeding land and buying loads of hay.
However, this season has been much better and they doubled their silage and hay output over spring.
“I’d never seen that much growth in some paddocks,” Danielle said.
“They are predicting we will be dry this year, but we have plenty of reserves.”
They breed for a strong medium-sized cow with good health traits and components.
They introduced a two-way cross with Australian Reds to help even out size and improve health traits. It worked and the Reds are on their way out.
“Friesians are good on production and we find them easy to handle and their calves are beautiful to rear.
They’re born small but they’re nuggety and get going really quickly without needing a heap of extra love.”
Danielle grew up in Mildura and studied graphic and web design and worked for Beacon Lighting before meeting Tom and moving to Panmure.
They took over the farm on March 1, 2016 coinciding with the clawback disaster.
“We went in with a best-case scenario and worse-case scenario and enacted the worst case fairly quickly,” Danielle said.
They supplied Saputo at the time and hadn’t been in for long enough to get a clawback and also benefited from a young farmer incentive.
“Because we were in the thick of our first year, we didn’t really understand what we were dealing with. It was a hard year and the drought over the past few years definitely tested us, but we got through it.”
Danielle hopes the home enterprise continues to expand.
“I love seeing people’s genuine reaction when they taste the butter and say it taste just like I remember when I was a kid,” she said.
“We’ve had a lot of people from Melbourne at the markets recently and it’s beautiful to hear them in awe of what dairy really tastes like.”
They hope their success inspires others to investigate home-based enterprises.
“The more people we can get doing this type of thing in the dairy industry, the better it will be,” Danielle said.