Farmer quadruples value of farm milk
With his new Gallán brand of soft cheese, Finbarr Hourihane is counteracting the impact of falling milk prices by adding value to his milk output and producing an import substitute with clean and green credentials.
The product is being promoted on the basis of its taste and quality with "today's milk almost always making today's cheese" and a business plan based on the financial realities of modern agriculture but supportive of the drive towards less intensive and environmentally friendly farming.
The milk quota system has limited the income of the primary producer. But when used to make cheese, milk produced on the Hourihane family farm near Skibbereen in west Cork fetches four times more.
"Currently a quarter of our milk goes into cheese but the annual farm turnover has almost doubled," he says.
Gallán cheese, named after a standing stone on the Hourihane farm, is already available through SuperValu outlets, Pettits supermarkets in the south east and Sheridan Cheese Mongers, and is expected to be added to the shelves by other multiples.
The development of the new cheese, with the assistance of the University College Cork food science department, is the second demonstration of Hourihane's entrepreneurial acumen. He also established a furniture workshop which employs 12 people.
With the milk quota system effectively freezing farm incomes, Finbarr decided by the late 1990s that the only real future for the enterprise lay in adding value to the milk produced.
"I was selling a raw material and other people were making a real profit on what I produced. I decided that the only way forward for me was to turn that milk into something that gave me a decent profit," he says.
Mr Hourihane developed a new dairy on the farm in the spring of 2000 and with the help of UCC finalised a production method, conducted trial production runs and focus group tasting. The result is a product which he claims trumps the competition in terms of taste and quality.
