Mooball Moorrning!

To get to the Tweed Valley Whey Cheese factory, Murwillumbah you do not need to go through Mooball, but you should. It is an old cow-town- For real. We started off the day with a lot of laughs and fines. Afterwords the boys headed to museums and Margarita took me to The Cheese farm. Here's the tale of our mooorning....
Years ago, (Margarita and husband Gary explained this story to me) the main highway when right through the town of Mooball in the Tweed Shire bringing the tall B double trucks right through this little shire town. It is a perfect resting spot for truckers and families. Somewhere along the way the black and white spots were introduced to the buildings, light poles, gas pumps and cream houses. The town no longer hosts B doubles due to the by-pass, but the spots ares still fresh.

Turn left at the black and white cream house just before the holding pen of Frisians, to get to Tweed Valley Whey Cheese Factory. Debbie Allard and Sue Harnett, two happy ladies with pink cheeks greeted us with a G'day!
They have been making and selling cheese for two years. Sue and her husband still have a dairy farm just down the hill where the 100+ cows are grazing. Sue told us that they still
sell 95% of the milk to Norco, and she uses the rest to make the cheese, cottage cheese, sour cream, kefir, natural yoghurt, yoghurt cheese balls, feta, and haloumi. Check out these names: Cam and Bert, Heluva Haloumi, Norm and Bee camembert, and Fresian Fog. Me: How did you come up with these names? Sue: (giggles) A lot of bottles of wine!
They sell to a few small scale stores (we found some at the butcher shop in Murwillumbah), 2 farmers markets and a handfull of restaurants. She explained that the stores sell for the same price, $9/ small round of cheese, as they do at the markets. They want to encourage patronage at the stores that support them, the same for the restaurants.












Sue said her father is a great salesman. He comes to help out at the markets and store promotions often telling customers that he is Jamie Oliver's dad and this is the best cheese in the world. Sue is the Ebay queen, she searched night and day to find pasturizers, containers sinks, etc... After taking classes, the ladies toured large cheese plants to gather ideas and methods, they also received a great deal of help from a local agriculture extension agent. Norco also helps them through lab testing and general support. The thought being that there used to be more than 150 dairy farms in the Tweed Valley, now there are 8, so as long as these ladies are not creating competition Norco will give them support.


I had to include this black and white dog that is staying with Shawn is Wolfy, and he lets me tell him stories about Butter.
It's the start of another day- Headed to White Olive restaurant today!