Love ewes

Words Ryan Butta

Photography Rachael Tagg

IT didn’t start with the sheep. Before the sheep, there were the goats. But they ended up in the freezer. “They climbed all the fences and completely gave me the shits,” Cressida Cains tells me as we sit in the living room of her family home at Pecora Dairy, a few kilometres from the town of Robertson in the New South Wales Southern Highlands.

Nor were the goats the starting point. They were just a stepping stone or, better yet, a stone overturned on a search that Cressida and her husband, Michael, had started back in the early 2000s, a search for a point in place and time. Back then, both were working in Sydney, both in the wine business. The Sydney Olympics was happening around them and it was a heady time to be in the Sydney food and wine scene.

Cressida describes it as an “amazingly fun time”. The young couple lived in the Sydney inner-west suburb of Leichhardt, surrounded by older Italian neighbours who were all growing their own food in backyard gardens. It was only natural that the Cainses would follow suit. It started out with vegies, then blossomed into chooks.

When their first child was born, they decided to leave Sydney and relocate to nearby Picton, where they had more room to explore and continue their search. “We always had this love of the science of food and the science of agriculture,” Cressida says. “For us, it was always going to be a full-circle thing.”

It was in Picton that the urban garden became a market garden. Then Flossy the cow arrived, and Cressida would make butter and cheese from the milk. Flossy was followed by the freezer-bound goats. But it wasn’t until the goats were chilling that Cressida and Michael hit upon the sheep. And not just any sheep. East Friesian sheep.

Friesians originated in the Netherlands, from the same region as the better-known Friesian cows. They were introduced to Australia in the 1990s as part of an ill-fated, government-backed program. Cressida, though, can’t speak highly enough of the Friesians. “They are delightful. Light on the land. They don’t eat that much. Well, they don’t eat as much as cows. And they don’t eat everything like goats.”

But the flock of sheep that Cressida and Michael envisaged needed space; they needed a farm. So the Cainses upped sticks again and this time, after an extensive search, settled on a magical piece of land in the Southern Highlands.

They started out with 30 Friesians. Cressida would milk them and run the dairy farm, while Michael continued to commute back and forth to Sydney. The couple dedicated themselves to research and development, trying to find the delicate balance between science and art that would allow them to produce a sheep’s milk cheese that embodied the small parcel of paradise they had decided to call home.

In 2010, their initial efforts were rewarded when their cheese won a gold medal at the Sydney Royal Show. There was only one problem: they had no cheese to sell. Cressida describes their decision to enter the cheese when it wasn’t yet available commercially as “a bit cutesy”, but the recognition proved to the young cheesemakers that they were on the right path.

“We thought, ‘Well, that’s great,’” she recalls. “That gave us the encouragement to know we had a fantastic product. We were quite determined to go to market with a fully formed product. We really hit the ground running and off we went from there.”

These days, the Cainses milk between 150 and 180 ewes each season. They stress that the milking is coupled to the seasons, intricately linked to the vagaries and opportunities of place and time, of both the sheep and the surrounding environment.

“We dry off all the ewes in May, and then they have a break while they’re heavily pregnant. When lambing starts, we begin a process of ‘share milking’. The lambs stay with their mums during the day, and then at night they stay in a nursery. The ewes go back out on pasture. In the morning, the ewes are milked, and then the lambs go back to them.”

Share milking means taking a hit on milk supply, but the trade-off is happy sheep. And that is important. “It’s the right thing for our story. It’s what we want to do,” Cressida says.

Happy sheep are just one component of the incredibly complex scientific process that is needed to produce award-winning cheese. “You’re always responding to nature,” Cressida says. “And nature always throws something at you that you’re not expecting.”

But in the unexpected lies the magic. It manifests in the profile of the milk that reaches the vat – always different, never the same. “The exciting thing about working with a single flock of animals is that the milk changes so dramatically through the lactation period. It changes because of the weather and because of the season. It also changes because of the ewes’ natural lactation,” Cressida says. “We adjust what cheeses we make throughout the season because the different milk profiles lend themselves to making different cheeses.”

Pecora’s cheeses are a snapshot of a point in place and time, a reflection of the natural world in which the Cainses and their Friesians live.

The range of cheeses that Pecora makes is limited, but it is limited by design. “We take the view that we would prefer to be kind of experts in a very small range of cheese than making a whole bunch of stuff not very well,” Michael says. “We’ve spent 15 years studying how to make these particular cheeses, and we chose them because they are right for our milk, for our story.”

In the cheesemaking world, there is no more accurate expression of the environment than raw-milk cheese. Made from unpasteurised milk, it is the ultimate cipher of the surrounds from which it comes, so it was natural that Cressida and Michael would want to make it.

But there was a problem. Until 2016, raw-milk cheese was illegal in Australia (it is still illegal to sell raw milk in Australia). Never mind that raw-milk cheeses have been produced and sold in Europe for centuries without ill effects.

But retrograde legislation was never going to stop the Cainses. After extensive research and testing, in collaboration with the New South Wales Food Authority, they were able to prove the safety of raw-milk cheese. “We were able to show that maturing a cheese in controlled conditions for a long enough period is just as effective at killing any pathogens as pasteurisation,” Michael says. “This is the science aspect of it.”

Off the back of that work, Pecora became the first licensed producer of raw-milk cheese in Australia. “Raw-milk cheese is expressing the whole farming landscape: what the sheep are eating, the climate, the lactation cycle. Especially when it’s a closed flock, a single flock or a single herd, the milk is going to vary greatly over the year,” Cressida explains. “We’ve got really sweet milk in spring and really viscous, creamy milk in winter. The cheese you make out of those two milks is completely different. Raw-milk cheese captures that difference. Whereas if you’re pasteurising the milk, you’re homogenising the taste.”

Because the health of the land is transparently on show in every cheese they make, care for the land is at the forefront of the Cainses approach to farming. “All our paddocks are interspersed among nature. We have an enormous amount of biodiversity on the farm,” Cressida says. “There’s an enormous amount of carbon capture. We find we don’t have to use pesticides because there is such diversity of habitat and species.”

But the couple shy away from using labels such as organic or regenerative farming, deeming them too restrictive and prescriptive. Their approach is more philosophical, more a set of guiding principles. “The way we run our farm is that we are leaving this place better than the way we found it,” Michael says.

In early 2024, all the risks taken by the couple paid off when their Pecora Dairy Yarrawa – a semi-hard, raw sheep milk cheese – took out the President’s Medal at the Sydney Royal Show. With more than 4000 entrants, it’s an award that holds a special place for the Cainses.

“It really was the pinnacle for us,” says Cressida. “It’s something we always dreamed of winning. The reason why the President’s Medal is particularly important is because it goes beyond just producing a good product. It’s not about any one of our individual cheeses; it’s about the way we run our business. It’s about sustainability, with renewables and with our management of the land, about our ethical approach to animals. It recognises our ability to run a good and profitable and long-term business.”

The award has given the Cainses a platform from which to initiate important conversations. They want to talk about what farming might look like now and in the future, about what shape viable family farms will take, and about how farmers can be part of the solution to climate change rather than part of the problem.

“We need to think about circularity in terms of farming operations,” Cressida says. “The way that you use waste and convert that to methane or energy or being less wasteful. We put all of our waste back onto paddocks so that we’re managing soils, but also we’re an energy-positive farm in that we’re producing more energy than we use.” That excess energy is traded with other local businesses (the Southern Highlands’ microgrids were covered in Galah’s issue 7).

But the most important conversations are with consumers. The Cainses want consumers to start asking where their food comes from. How is it grown? Who are the farmers behind it?

To get closer to consumers and encourage those conversations, in 2021 the couple opened Pecora Cheese and Wine, a European-style cheese and wine bar in Robertson. Cressida describes the bar as an “offering to the community”, a place where locals and travellers can sample Pecora’s cheeses alongside regional wines – two complementary expressions of the highlands landscape.

As I leave Pecora Dairy, I drive past green fields smothered in the buttery yellow light of late afternoon. By the road a Friesian ewe feeds her lamb, its little body jigging and shaking as if it were suckling an electrical current rather than sweet, early-season milk. In another field, a large black wallaby stares back at me impassively as I drive by. And I realise that there is no capturing a point in place and time. Ever moving, ever evolving, place and time evade capture. The Cains’s search has no destination or reward. The search is merely a way of being, of each day synchronising your own place and time with that of the world around you.