Milking Sheep in Italy

Dear Shepherdess,

I was twenty-four when I went to Europe in 2010. I was desperate to see the great sites and understand more about who I was, where I was from, why our nation was as it was. I bought a one-way ticket to Istanbul and arrived in Gallipoli in time for the 95th ANZAC service. As the sun rose over Gallipoli Cove, a young Turkish solider approached me and Laura, an Aussie chick I’d become friends with on the bus, and asked to have his photo taken with us. His great-grandfather had fought against our great-grandfathers and here we were, ninety-five years later. It felt pretty meaningful. All of our great-grandfathers had gone on to survive that terrible conflict, and mine had returned eventually to New Zealand where he’d taken up a solider settlement farm block out at Wainuioru in the Wairārapa.

I’d always intended to spend the bulk of the year WWOOFing – Willing Workers on Organic Farms – across Europe. My first farm was an olive grove and heritage orchard in the hills above Spoleto, Italy, and my second farm made sunflower and rapeseed oil near Perugia. It was while in Perugia that I got homesick. My Italian was limited to “ciao,” “cappuccino” and “gelato,” so for this chatterbox Kiwi the language barrier was becoming an issue. Everything on the Perugia farm had to be communicated to me via mime. I figured farmers were farmers and sheep were sheep, so I headed to a sheep dairy near Florence. We made pecorino – the famous Italian sheep cheese – and also some ricotta, which the family ate fresh on homemade bread most mornings. That first mouthful of homemade pecorino romano spaghetti was like love at first sight. To take a raw product straight from an animal and turn it into an entirely different product is a little bit special. The sheep farm set-up was very different to anything I had ever seen. There was no milking parlour, or even milking stand. A head bail ran along one end of the barn where maize was fed to the animals in the morning and, once the animals were in the bail, they could not get out until the farmer released them post-milking. She came along on her three-legged milking stool and hand-milked into a bucket.

You should have seen the shearing day: old men in overalls hand-clipping these stood-upright East Friesians and throwing the wool straight under the trees in the apple orchards. I asked why they didn’t shear the modern way or save the wool, and the farmer told me their wool had been worth nothing since New Zealand wool flooded the market post-World War II. It was the first time I’d ever been confronted by the negative impacts of our farming on other communities. That evening, I showed a few of these chaps a video of David Fagan shearing at the Golden Shears. The next day, my farmer had invited half the village to watch reruns of the Golden Shears during siesta. It was brilliant!

I came home at the end of the year as planned, determined that, whatever else happened in life, I would have milking sheep and make my own cheese. It took nearly ten years, but Dandelion Hill Sheep Dairy New Zealand is pretty much the daydream of a homesick Kiwi in Europe coming to life.

Genevieve Bennett
Waipukurau, Te Matau-a-Māui
Central Hawke’s Bay