Dairy Sheep Symposium - the Department of Animal Sciences ...

THE AUSTRALIAN SHEEP DAIRY INDUSTRY: HISTORY, CURRENT STATUS AND
RESEARCH INITIATIVES
Roberta Bencini
Animal Science, Faculty of Agriculture, The University of Western Australia,
Crawley, Western Australia, Australia
Introduction
Australia has a large ethnic population of European origin and imports some $8 million
worth of sheep milk products every year (Dawe and Langford, 1987). About 8,000 tons per year
of sheep milk products could find a market in Australia and to match this demand 250,000 ewes
would have to be milked in 100-150 dairies (Dawe, 1990). Sheep dairying is not completely new
for Australia: between 1963 and 1975 two sheep dairies operated in Victoria and in 1972 Peter
Tavella started a sheep dairy and a cheese factory at Leeton, New South Wales (Dawe and
Langford, 1987). In the same area, also S.T. Dawe and C.M. Langford were researching on
sheep dairying at the Leeton Research Station of the Department of Agriculture. The lack of
interest and the wrong economic environment caused, according to Dawe (1990), the unsuccessful
outcome of the Tavella enterprise. In 1985 an export market for 4-6 week old lambs was
established with Italy, and this revived the sheep dairy industry (Dawe, 1990). However, due to
organisational problems the suckling lamb market failed (S.T. Dawe, Pers. comm.).
Jumbuck Dairy operated very successfully between 1989 and 1993. A decision to move their
operations to new South wales turned out to be fatal for the company (I. Temby, Pers. comm.).
The Australian sheep milking industry is still relatively small, but it is growing. In 1987
there were only five sheep dairies operating in Australia. This number has now risen to 20
dairies mainly concentrated in Victoria, milking a total of 5000 to 10000 ewes. At the moment,
returns from sheep milk are about $100-150 per ewe per year, which is high if compared with the
traditional production of wool and prime lambs. However, there are high costs associated with
the purchase of the milking machinery, with the milking operations and with the rearing of the
lambs, which make the milking of sheep barely profitable.
Sheep milking has a distinctive advantage over other new animal industries: sheep farmers
would not need to change much of the infrastructure because they would be still farming the
same animals, and little new expertise would also be required.
Sheep milk has high farm gate returns of 1.20-1.50/litre and there are local and export markets
for sheep milk products. The recent GATT agreement should stop the EEC from protecting
their sheep milk products, so that Australia will have a chance to compete on the international
market (Bencini and Dawe, 1998).
Despite this, the sheep milking industry is still in its infancy and many sheep dairies have
appeared and disappeared over time. Three major reasons for this were identified at The University
of Western Australia where we have been conducting research to address these problems for
the last 10 years. These are outlined below.
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