The Rural Voice, 2006-07, Page 25operation near Punky Doodle
Corners).
It was years before the original
dream could be realized. It required
financial problems of Parmalat's
operation at home in Italy create the
opportunity when the company
sought to unload some assets in
Canada. It took the formation of a
local group of investors, Millbank
Cheese and Cold Storage Inc., to buy
the plant and renovate it for
Mornington. And Mornington had to
grow enough to be able to support a
facility.
Working capital has been short
from the beginning. There's not a lot
of money in the goat industry, Reid
says. Most farmers who took up
goats were looking for an
inexpensive gateway into farming
because they didn't have much
money, so when it came time to form
a co-op they didn't have the kind of
money that pork producers or
chicken producers could invest.
So Mornington was a gypsy
operation from the beginning.
Cheese was first made using
one small vat at the cheese factory in
Bright. Later Pine River Cheese, near
Ripley, made hard cheeses like
cheddar and Quality Jersey Products
of Seaforth rented them space. One
of the trials Mornington had to
survive, was the collapse of the
Quality Jersey operation "from under
us", Reid says. Another was when
one of their early cheese makers
"blew himself up" in an explosion in
a lab making crystal meth.
Fluid milk was first processed in
Leamington, then at Kawartha Dairy
Limited in Bobcaygeon.
Those far-flung operations were
expensive and often it meant doing
business at a loss, Reid says. It did
buy time for the market to grow,
however.
Probably the operation is still not
large enough to justify having its
own plant, even if it is rented, he
says. But it is convenient to have the
Millbank plant with its cheesemaking
andimilk processing operations in
different rooms under one roof. The
bulk of the milk processed is
pasteurized and sold in one -litre
bottles or four -litre bags, then being
shipped as far at the east coast.
The most recent crisis has been a
change in management because of
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