Terra Tasmania: Holy Grail of the Holy Cow

It is such an odd mind shift to drive for hours along an exceptionally quiet route where hardly a vehicle passes, and to turn up an even quieter track, and there find not one tourist 'hot spot' but two, that have so caught the attention of the touring public that carloads, and, when we were there, busloads, stream in from literally nowhere, by the dozen in any hour.

Where are they all coming from? And what happens to them from here? They just appear, then disappear like vapour.

This is the Pyengana Cheese Factory. We had debated even bothering with Pyengana until something we read on a snippet of a tourist info suggested the cows there were milked by robots. This we had to see, we reckoned, so right we turned.

Amidst all these dying villages we'd been immersed in for days sits a wet green valley dotted with buttery fat black and white Friesian dairy cows.

Herds of dairy cattle have apparently been in this family for several generations, but not always so successfully as today.

When Jon Healey was a young lad in the third year of his Agricultural course in Burnie he chose to use real figures from his dad's farm to illustrate an accounting spreadsheet assignment he needed to complete. He soon realised from the figures he'd laid down, that if he was ever to take on a dairy farm himself, he would need to come up with an unique idea that could fly, be financially more viable, or he would be wasting his time.

He thought of cheese-making, something his family had been involved in in this very valley for four generations on a small scale. Jon had bigger ideas. With help from his family he headed off to small dairy farms in Switzerland where he learned cheese-making from scratch over many long months. He then spent years on the mainland experimenting and researching and learning about cheese and dairy.

Jon came back to the Pyengana valley and with the help of his family set about building the Pyengana Dairy Company. Today there are over 200 Friesens in the fields and some sixteen, and growing, staff.

Each cow is individually micro-chipped and these chips hold all the information needed to enable the cows, when they turn up in the automated milking stalls, to be milked 'on demand' whenever needed, throughout the day. No staff are needed for milking.

There are even automated back-rubbing brush rollers on offer in the milking yard. We watched cow after contented cow amble over for a scratch and a rub and roll. No staff are needed for back rubs.

Milk from the machines is zoomed up to the cheese factory via stainless steel pipes. Using 100 year old traditional methods, Jon and his staff create strong creamy artisan cheddars from the stirred curd and rich drained whey. But they didn't stop there.

Using their own plentiful supply of milk and cream they created a pure natural ice-cream with no preservatives added. Real Ice-cream, they call it: handmade and non-homogenised. So delicious is this that hundreds of cones are sold each day through the cafe, and the freezers are emptied of ice-cream on a daily basis. The staff really need to learn how to produce it faster.

Nor did they stop there. They thought of selling their products through an on-site cafe and so they set about building it on top of the deep dark cave in the ground that they use for maturing and ripening their cheddar.

The Holy Cow they call it.

And inside is the Holy Grail of farm shops filled with their own delicious and award-winning Pyengana products which does nothing short of crazy trading. The cafe and shop were full to overflowing for the hours that we were there.

Not to mention they have some five chefs on call churning out, one proudly told us, some one hundred and ninety meals each day, on average.

And it is all happening in this quiet little valley in this dying, nearly dead, part of Tasmania.

Such a clever idea!

And just down the road is Priscilla. Priscilla is not a pig in a poke, but a beer-guzzling pig in a pen in a paddock. A little come-on she is, to entice those tourists who might have any appetite left after they have visited the Holy Cow down the road, to call into this old world pub, reminiscent of bygone days, to whet their appetite.

At the Pub in the Paddock.