Thanks for the cheese

Pyengana is a village in north-eastern Tasmania, population 123, and part of the splendidly named Break O’Day council area. It is also the brand of Australia’s finest cloth-bound cheddar cheese. Well, 10 years ago it won the best cheddar prize at the National Fine Foods awards, but I reckon it’s still the best. I bring home a decent wedge of it most weeks and have done for all of those past 10 years.

But I’ve only just found out that these golden slices of Tassie are produced by Jon and Lyndall Healey, residents of Pyengana and owners of the brand, as well as 210 cows, a high-tech robotic dairy and a 40 tonne-a-year cheese factory.

Their family business is not only the culmination of three generations of Tasmanian dairying, but also of hardship, hard work and innovation.

Jon’s great-great grandfather on his mother’s side was one of half a dozen small dairies and cheese factories around Pyengana last century, making a stirred-curd cheddar for the miners at the local alluvial tin mine. His paternal grandfather, Terry Healey, had a dairy farm in Pyengana and worked at a big local cheese factory to make ends meet.

When Terry died suddenly at 60, his son John inherited the farm but he had to buy out his two sisters with cash: $17,000 each on top of $80,000 in debts sitting on the farm.

It was a tough start for a young bloke and it proved too tough. He had to augment the dairying with butchering, fattening the beef cattle on the property, slaughtering them himself on the property and delivering the meat to butcher shops up the road in St Helen’s.

That’s the life into which Jon was born in 1969, the youngest of five children. It was hard, grinding rural poverty. The first four children went to school in Launceston and then kept going into the world and got jobs; Jon, the youngest, stayed on the farm and left school at 15, working for his parents on $100 a week.

John and his wife Joy once took a rare holiday and young Jon had a look at the farm books. He concluded that there was no money in what they were doing, and never would be. He was making $100 a week and was never going to get much more, while his brother Simon was pulling in $700 a week in Launceston as a carpenter.

He called a family meeting and told them: “I’m leaving the farm. This is hopeless.”

“No, you’re bloody-well not,” they said. “You’re the last of us and you have to stay right there. Get over yourself, suck it up, sort it out.” Or words to that effect. Jon was then 18.

For some reason Jon didn’t tell his siblings and parents all to get stuffed. Instead he decided that if he was to stay, there had to be some value-add to make farm viable, not just selling milk to the co-op, so he got onto his bike and rode to a neighbor who was making cheese and asked him for some help in learning how to do it.

“No, piss off,” was the response. “You young blokes are all the same – you reckon things are easy and you can do anything. Well, you can’t. Go on, bugger off.”

So it was a sad and bedraggled Jon Healey who rode back home. As it happens, his brother Gavin rang from Switzerland, where he was a professional golfer by this time and Jon poured out his story to him. Gavin said: “Leave it with me, I know a guy.”

A couple of days later he rang back to say he’d been giving golf lessons to the manager of the Gstaad Cheese Factory, who had agreed to teach Jon how to make cheese. Gavin then sent Jon a ticket to Zurich. At that point, he’d been as far as Melbourne once.

Young Jon, wide-eyed, stayed in Switzerland for six weeks, living with Swiss dairy farmers and learning how to make cheese, first by hand on the farm and then in the factory. The experience changed his life.

He returned to Tasmania, took out a $7000 personal loan and persuaded brother Simon to help him build a cheese factory with secondhand equipment he picked up down the road for $1000. That was February 1992 and his first batch was 40kg of cheese from 400 litres of milk.

He thought he could just set up a roadside stall to sell it, but the council moved him on: “You need a license for that, mate.” So he had to give up making cheese and drove an excavator for 12 months in St Helen’s between milkings.

Meanwhile, the cheese matured, neglected in the cupboard. Someone suggested he put it in the national food awards. He did. It won! There was an item about it on the TV news. Suddenly, 'Healey’s Cheese', as it was called, was famous and he had to start making more of it -- lots more.

Jon and his new wife Lyndall decided that Pyengana would be a better brand name for their cheese so they looked into who owned it. Turns out it was the bloke up the road who told Jon to piss off when he asked for help, so it was with some satisfaction that the young award-winning cheese maker was able to buy the brand off him, along with his farm. He paid too much, but it was worth it.

Then six years ago, 39-year-old Jon Healey had a heart attack -- working too hard, the doctor said, as he gave him a bypass. “OK,” Jon told Lyndall, “time to move to mechanical milking. Apart from reducing the stress it’ll give us consistent milk quality for the cheese.”

So they borrowed $1.2 million and bought three Dutch robotic milking machines.

Now the cows wear a microchip in their collars which counts their chews, measures their temperature, knows where they are at all times and opens the gate into the dairy when they decide they want to be milked. When they’re in position, the robot scrubs their teats, attaches the cups and takes just enough milk before sending them back out into the paddock to start counting chews again.

The cows love it. No cold, clumsy human hands mucking about with their udders, half asleep -- just a dependable, gently attentive robot.

So Jon and Lyndall have 210 happy cows supporting a nice little business: a café and cheese tasting room on the farm, 26 employees and a national distribution deal paying them $4m a year before costs. They have three girls, Isabella, Eliza and Charlotte, who all work in the business and once a year they take them on an overseas trip. “The world’s such a small place these days”.

Yes it is.

Oh, and thanks for the cheese Jon.