Australia may have famously ridden to prosperity on the sheep’s back, with bush ballads like Click Go the Shears forming part of our national heritage.
But when Julie Cameron and her husband Sandy left their city science careers to come back home to the land as merino farmers they were soon facing disaster.
Their dream of returning to the sort of rural life and natural beauty they had both grown up with in farming families was under serious threat after the reserve wool price was discontinued in the early 1990s, precipitating an industry collapse.
“It literally dissolved our income,” Julie Cameron recalls today. “There were record numbers of sheep in Australia at that time, so sheep became absolutely worthless, and prime lamb prices dived because of the supply.”
The young couple had a stark choice for their farm at Meredith in rural Victoria: innovate or perish.
“Desperate times called for desperate measures,” Cameron says. “We wanted to be farmers and we owned this asset and we needed to produce something off it that would give us a sustainable income.”
As they looked around for alternatives to wool, salvation came after discovering that the French blue cheese Roquefort – often cited as the best in the world - was made using sheep’s milk.
Against the odds, the Camerons turned to their backgrounds in science to make it happen - milking their sheep instead of shearing them, while experimenting to make a viable local product themselves.
For those first few years of Meredith Dairy, Sandy, a veterinary science researcher, tended to the flock by day, while Julie, a nurse trained in microbiology, made the cheese at night with no time off.
“We were really struggling but we had cash flow,” she says. “We found we could reinvent ourselves. We weren’t relying on that one wool cheque a year. We were doing things that were really out there and a bit different and that’s why the brand became very valued.”
Twenty-five years on, the vertically integrated Meredith Dairy has a $15m annual turnover, with around 100 staff making and selling an extensive range of fresh sheep and goat’s milk products both here and overseas.
While overseeing such phenomenal growth, core to Cameron’s philosophy has been the “triple bottom line” of creating a business that is sustainable environmentally and socially as well as financially.
“It was why we came home from the city in the first place,” she says. “We are doing it because we want to be farmers and we want to make the world a better place. We don’t want to leave a bad footprint in the environment.”
Meredith Dairy includes pristine areas of the original Victorian volcanic grasslands that have been largely degraded elsewhere by European settlement and agricultural techniques. Cameron says she has been passionate about biodiversity from a young age and is proud to have set aside 20% of their 4000 acres for direct conservation.
She also sees water conservation as a necessity because of climate change, and the farm employs a number of innovative methods to achieve this. As well as recycling rinse water and the runoff from shed roofs, the dairy operations are built on a steep slope to enable a “dry sweep system” that is used while milking their flock of 4000 sheep and 9000 goats.
The animals stand on a platform almost 4m off the ground with a grating for waste products, like manure, to fall or be swept through. Instead of having to hose out a traditional concrete milking platform, the waste can accumulate below until it is hauled away using a bobcat.
To help their sustainability efforts, the farmers have taken out an environmental loan through the National Australia Bank, allowing them to put in solar panels and a solid fuel boiler, which uses waste timber instead of non-renewable LPG.
Meredith Dairy is one of more than 300 agribusinesses to take up this Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) equipment finance with NAB - an initiative aimed at letting irrigators, horticulturalists, dairies and other farms with high energy costs reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and improve energy efficiencies.
Through the scheme, NAB offers a 0.7% p.a. discount on the equipment finance rate for qualifying assets that reduce energy consumption or are renewable. The discount is for the life of the financing and the repayment schedule is aimed at fitting individual cash flow and circumstances. There is usually no deposit needed, with the security being the equipment itself, so capital can stay within the business.
$70 million of discounted equipment finance has been provided so far, with products funded including solar pumps, PV solar, irrigation systems, and new state of the art vehicles.
The CEFC invests commercially to increase the flow of funds into renewable energy, energy efficiency and low emissions technologies. It supports a diverse range of large and small businesses across the Australian economy.
For Cameron, the benefits of loan have been improved efficiencies while helping to reduce their carbon footprint, including being “off the grid for a while”.
“The number one priority is looking after the environment and to look after our social environment – the community – because we need them to support us,” Cameron says.
“I think people who live in the country are more attentive to their natural environment. I see native wildlife coming back in the district around us and that’s because there are farmers like us who are seeing the benefits of restoring degraded areas.”
NAB is to date the only Australian bank to sign the Natural Capital Declaration of December 2011, a global statement which recognises that natural capital poses significant potential risks and opportunities to the finance sector.
The bank is working with agribusinesses like Meredith Dairy as part of an integration of natural capital considerations into its day-to-day decision making processes and risk assessments.
