Ashgrove Cheese Farm, Elizabeth Town

Had a specially guided tour of the Ashgrove Cheese production area last Wednesday which proved an interesting contrast to another specially guided tour of the Fonterra factory in Wynyard the next day.

Fonterra are a commercial, huge global company who are situated in areas of milk production around the world, so as to be near to the origins of their cheese and butter (they are the makers of Duck River butter, amongst other products) production. Their operation is carried out on gigantic scale in comparison to Ashgrove, which is a much smaller, sole-retail-outlet, family owned and operated business.

It was extremely interesting to see at first hand any commonalities, and then the things both did which emphasised their huge differences.

Obviously Ashgrove did everything on a much smaller scale, with the result being that they offer a much larger range of 'flavoured' cheeses, like their Wasabi, Bush Pepper, Lavender and Smoked, as well as the Wensleydale and Fetta and others.

The process of making these specialist cheeses, as well as the aging, storage, slicing and packing of all their cheeses is also the result of the company's coming of age. As our guide explained, they previously had a much less efficient way of dealing with their produce. I presume trial and error, time and an increased awareness by the public of their products has enabled them to move forward in such a big way.

Ashgrove have added to their product range with their own milk, now being sold at the farm shop in 500 ml, 1 litre and 2 litre containers. Ice cream will also be added soon.

These are natural additions for a dairy farm which uses only its own milk for production.

At Fonterra, we watched the giant 25 kg blocks of cheese being made, then packed, boxed and dealt with - all with not one human hand touching the product. It is all done in giant vats by machines, even down to the automated 'robot' picking up four 25 kg cartons at a time and placing them on a pallet, to be loaded onto a truck all ready to be transported off the premises.

Both are geared towards totally different markets and both obviously do very well.

The photo above is in the mixing area at Ashgrove, where they hand cut the coagulum into curds and whey, and manually turn the curds. It takes around six hours to turn the milk into curd for pressing into shape. Then it is left overnight in the moulds to press into shape. After that, it goes into storage till matured. The square tins you can see in the picture, lined with the blue 'wettexes', are the moulds they are pressed in.

The clean, green image Tasmania has value-adds to products like this. Dairy Tasmania tells me that however much dairy product Tassie can produce, there is a worldwide need for it and we will never have any problems selling it, so we need to produce as much as we can of this much sought after natural product.

Go get 'em Tassie!