Mr. Brendan Crosse:

We set up this business, Sheep Milk Ireland, in 2017. We started with the view that most sheep industries across Europe and the world have sheep milk industries attached to them, and Ireland and the UK stand out in not having one, yet we have a world-class dairy industry and world-class sheep milk production here. We felt that by establishing a large dairy genetic flock, we could help to bring the two industries together to create a new industry in Ireland. We have scaled up from a low base in the last five or six years and we have conducted trials on our farms. We have produced milk powder product which we have exported to China and Taiwan. We are now developing a cheese product to export through one of the dairy co-ops.

What has happened that has really increased the fundamentals of our project is that 45% of world sheep milk is produced around the Mediterranean basin, in France, Italy, Greece and Turkey, where products such as pecorino, manchego and feta cheese are household names of cheese products. However, increased cases of drought and cost inflation in their inputs, given they are all consolidated into indoor systems, has led to fundamental challenges of sheep milk production in those regions, and it has created a huge opportunity for Ireland to move into this sector. There is a precedent for this in that New Zealand has developed a sheep milk industry in the last ten years. It is similar to Ireland in that it had an older age profile among its farmers but it has started to attract new entrants because there is a huge opportunity for people to get in and make a good living out of this. We are very optimistic about the opportunity here and delighted to get the opportunity to present to the committee today.