A BOLD vertical integration plan by a Dubbo, NSW, district dairyfarming family will see the Central West city boast its own milk-processing plant for the first time in decades.
The Little Big Dairy Company starts producing milk from its new on-farm processing plant next month, incorporating one of the most modern and technologically advanced milk harvesting systems in Australia.
The factory will be supplied by the Chesworth family’s 800-cow herd, which has previously supplied Lion’s Dairy Farmers brand, with milk to be produced just a few kilometres from Dubbo at Rawsonville.
The Little Big Dairy Company is owned and run by Erika and Steve Chesworth, sons Duncan and Campbell, and daughter Emma Elliott and her husband, Jim.
The family has been involved in dairying for more than 100 years, moving the herd to the Rawsonville farm seven years ago from Denman in the Upper Hunter Valley.
Each day the Chesworth herd produces 25,000 litres of milk for a yearly total of about eight million litres.
Emma Elliot said the new processing operation would produce “single sourced” fresh milk, bottled on the day it was milked from the cows.
The Dubbo dairy would sell homogenised milk in plastic bottles as well as non-homogenised milk in glass bottles.
All milk would be pasteurised.
Milk in the glass bottles would be “like milk of years’ past with a layer of cream in the neck of the bottle”, Mrs Elliott said.
“We’ll also be producing flavoured milk from syrups we’ll make ourselves, as well as a decadent, premium-quality cream.”
Producing its own ice-cream line would assist the family company to cope with high milk production surpluses.
“It’s something that will give our milk products a longer shelf life,” she said.
Although Steve Chesworth’s brother is a cheesemaker in Muswellbrook, NSW, Mrs Elliott said there were no plans to further process the Macquarie Valley milk into cheese.
The Little Big Dairy Company’s products will go on sale at the Dubbo Farmers Markets, and selected cafes and IGA supermarkets in the city.
The Little Big Dairy Company has employed the description, “single sourced milk” to highlight that its product is all sourced and produced from its own Macquarie River farm.
“We like to think of single source as our promise to you, ensuring our milk is of the highest quality, traceable down to the very cow that made it,” Mrs Elliott said.
“We will guide the product from start to finish, from milking through processing and into the bottle.”
