FLORENCE Dutneall bought the first two-litre bottle of farmer friendly full cream Gippsland Jersey milk to hit the shelves.
Her purchase was among 850 at the brand’s launch at Warragul Farmers’ Market on Saturday 17 September.
Friends Sallie Jones and Steve Ronalds joined forces to create the Gippsland Jersey brand to “be a light in a dark time in the industry”.
They launched the concept in June after dairy co-operative Murray Goulburn earlier this year retrospectively slashed how much it paid farmers for their milk, leaving many to pay back the difference to the company.
“Steve owns the farm at Jindivick. I’m from a dairy farm at Lakes Entrance,” Sallie said.
“We moved to Warragul for my husband’s work.
“I don’t think you can beat a dairy farming upbringing, as a child. It’s the best.
“You get to learn other skills and you’re a different person.
“When you leave the farm and go off to uni or go to Melbourne you’ve got a different resilience to your peers.
“You know how to work hard.”
On an Easter Holiday in New South Wales, Steve saw farmer-owned milk brand Tilba for sale and in use at cafes. It started the wheels turning.
“I said to my wife Bec ‘we should bottle our own Jersey milk’,” he said.
On his return he bumped into Sallie at Farm World.
“Around the same time, my dad passed away unexpectedly,” she said.
“He was a milk processor in Lakes Entrance.”
With Tilba in mind, Steve suggested a project to honour him.
“I started up the Warragul Farmers Market three years ago,” Sallie said.
“A couple of weeks after Steve and I had that conversation, the milk crisis happened.
“At the famers’ market, people were asking how to help.
“We hosted a dairy farming panel at the market.
“They could explain what the dairy crisis meant to them.”
After that she sent Steve a text: “I think I’m ready, I think this is exactly what my dad would be wanting me to do.”
The idea took off on social media and Sallie and Steve were inundated with support.
“It’s all happened really quickly,” Sallie said.
“There’s no Gippsland farmer-owned milk brand apart from a little dairy down at Inverloch.
Steve said: “Whereas there is in every other region.”
Sallie said a label company reached out to them on social media to provide in-kind design and help with set-up costs.
“Because they’ve got family in the industry, they know it’s hard and they want to reach out and help,” she said.
“Other farmers are contacting us as well, wanting to jump on the brand.
“We’ll start with all the milk from Steve’s farm and will call on other farmers if demand grows.
“We can’t solve the dairy crisis, but we can do our little bit.
“There’s a lot of negativity in the industry, there’s a lot of heartache.
“Our milk slogan is good for you, good for farmers.
“Farmers are the ones with the milk.
“What we’re doing is taking that control back into our own hands.
“It’s all about a fair price at the farm gate.”
Sallie said Gippsland Jersey had also teamed up with The Ripple Effect – a program to reduce stigma about suicide – by featuring it on the back of its labels.
“The Ripple Effect is funded by beyondblue and is about farmers helping farmers beat rural suicide,” she said.
Steve is a fourth generation farmer.
“My great-grandfather settled it back in the late 1800s,” he said of his 450-acre Jindivick farm.
“He started breeding the jersey cows back then.
“It’s the best milk. They’re a beautiful animal.
“They’re easy to work with.
“It suits our farm because there can be a lot of rainfall. A lighter weight animal doesn’t cause as much damage to the paddocks.”
Descendants of the original cows remain in the paddocks.
“It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, ever since I was a kid all I wanted to do was be a farmer,” Steve said.
“We’re dunning about 800 acres all up.
“We’re in a big valley with a permanent creek running through it. It stays green all year, a fair bit of the farm does. The cows always have grass in their diet all year.
“We have about 450 jersey. Last year we did about 2.5 million litres of milk.
“The flow varies throughout the year. We’re as flat as you’d probably get.
“We produce between 4500 litres a day to 8000 litres a day.
“There are lots of jersey farmers in Gippsland that we could potentially call on. We’ve had a lot of inquiries.
“We do want to pay a very fair and flat price.
“The lows are ridiculously low. This year’s milk price is actually worse than last year’s.
“The cheques they’re getting now are significantly lower than this time last year.”
Steve has also worked outside the farming industry, and is working three days a week with Burra Foods. The company buys his milk currently and will continue to take any excess.
“Most the farms are owned by multinationals,” Steve said.
“There’s hardly anything out there that’s Australian-owned.
“All the milk comes from Australia so it’s still supporting the farmers.”
But Gippy Milk is French-owned, he said, and US company Chobani owns Gippsland Dairy.
“We’d love to develop other products, in the future,” Sallie said.
“We see there’s so much opportunity in the dairy industry for a small dairy-farmer owned business.
“People are sick of the big boys, they’re wanting to back and they’re wanting to support farmers directly.”
Sallie and Steve each have three primary school-aged children.
“Long-term we’re hopefully seeding jobs for our children in the future,” Sallie said.
“Who knows how big this is going to get.”
Earlier this month, supermarket chain Coles announced that 40 cents from every two litre bottle of a new Farmers’ Fund milk range would be returned to farmers by grants from the Victorian Farmers Federation (VFF), starting in mid-October.
But Steve said that on his rough calculations, an average farm that received the maximum $20,000 grant was “probably going to get about 1 cent per litre equivalent”.
“Which is probably not really going to feed too many families and help massively, as much as it’s such a positive thing to do,” he said.
“One of the challenges for us is how much of that is actually going to help the farmers at the farm gate.
“Gippsland Jersey is a little bit different. We want to pay a fair price at the farm gate.
“The more Gippsland Jersey that we can sell, means the more farmers we can bring on board, is going to make big significant differences to families and their lives.”
