World is opening up for Clonmel artisan and Tullahay Farm

On a sunny June afternoon, I arrive at Rosemary O’Shea’s farmhouse, snug by Slievenamon, with the lush Tipperary countryside spread out in front.
Rosemary greets me as the two farm dogs circle, and laughingly apologises for the bags in the hallway dropped by her daughters.

As we sit at the kitchen table she introduces her husband Jim, who is taking a break from farm work and enjoying a cup of tea in the adjoining conservatory.
“We went to school together,” she tells me. I am delighted to share that I have a tub of her soft cheese in my fridge and have been regularly using it for the past year and a half. Finding a locally made food product, with no additives, always gets my vote.

FAMILY ROOTS
Both Rosemary and Jim have deep family roots in this area and an inherited love of the land, of place and of animals. This is a busy farm household that revolves around their daughters, who are very involved in sport, and care for the farm animals with all the work that entails.
Not to mention the new farm-based initiative that is Tullahay Farm products: high-quality soft cheeses and fruit flavoured whey drinks.

ENTHUSIASM
Rosemary’s enthusiasm for her work is infectious. She spent twenty-five years working in an insurance office, although the outdoors always beckoned.

She describes her life back then; regularly finishing work at 5 o’clock, “tearing home, then feeding calves and going off walking,” always for her the call of the outdoors.
Then a combination of factors spurred a major change and Rosemary finally ‘broke away’ from office work to engage fully with farm life, in partnership with Jim.

KNOWLEDGE AND LORE
During all that time at her office desk she was holding close her knowledge and lore around food that she learned from her mother and grandmother.
Rosemary and her siblings were given a spoon of whey every day, “just like other children might be given cod-liver oil,” she explained.

Liquid whey is a natural by-product of cheese-making, known to be rich in protein, with many essential micronutrients and digestive enzymes. Rosemary credits such practices in her childhood with her own robust good health and strong immune system.
On first leaving her office job, after she had fed the calves and other farm chores each morning, she began to experiment with making yogurt.

TEAGASC
Coincidentally, her eldest daughter was then having digestive issues, with stomach pain, and the doctor prescribed medication. But Rosemary felt that she might have a far better solution right at hand.
She drained the whey from her homemade yogurt and gave it to her daughter daily. Soon the girl was pain-free, with no further digestive issues, and what would become Tullahay Farm products was now in gestation in Rosemary’s fertile mind.
Rosemary was accepted on to a Teagasc product development programme in Moorepark, Fermoy and was helped by the expertise there to develop her unique soft cheese and whey products, based on the milk from their herd of dairy cows.

ACORNS
Another important source of business support and friendship has come from being in the Acorns network.
This is a programme designed to support early-stage female entrepreneurs living in rural Ireland. Rosemary is enthusiastic about the benefits of the Acorn group, especially during the pandemic.
“There are so many different areas that the members are involved in, they have taught me so much!”

This innovative programme is funded under the Rural Innovation and Development Fund through the Department of Agriculture, Food and Marine (DAFM).

WHEY DRINKS
Rosemary knows that tastes have changed and is pragmatic as well as practical. The whey drinks she has developed for sale are fruit flavoured, “because the pure whey taste would not be palatable to the modern palate.” But she sources high quality fruit purée, without added sugar, for her whey drinks. The newest fruit flavour will be from apples sourced from Traas’ Apple Farm near Cahir, further up county Tipperary.

Later, in the dairy, she offers me a taste of pure whey to drink. I sip and find it tart, but not at all unpleasant. This gives rise to a conversation about changes in taste as a result of the current high consumption of sugar-filled drinks, particularly by children, something she has observed first-hand when they host school tours.

WORKING FARM
Rosemary loves showing the working farm to schoolchildren, “They’ll remember it for life, they say it’s better than any school trip!”

EDUCATION
She has found that even children from small country schools seem not to have a connection to the basics of food provenance, for example that eggs come from hens and milk from cows. When they taste milk from Rosemary and Jim’s cows during a school visit, they declare that it doesn’t taste like milk:
“…it’s more like a smoothie; cold and creamy!”

And the other side of opening their farm to schools and other groups is very important to Rosemary, that of education.
“We’d like to show the children the liquid whey, not to allow that tradition to die; to allow them to feed the calves, or baby cows as they call them. To see the hens run around.”
With that Rosemary goes into the large, grassy hen run, takes a hose and fills the water bowls for the Rhode Island Reds who are pecking around in the grass.

We move into the dairy and Rosemary shows me the stainless-steel pasteuriser and the other equipment that she uses to bring the raw resource, their milk, through the transformative process that becomes the unique soft cheese and flavoured whey.
She opens a cupboard and shows me the cheesecloth bags that are used to strain the liquid whey, all made by local dressmaker Phil Fitzpatrick in nearby Callan.

The bags will contain the curds, the basis for the cheese, and allow the liquid whey to drip into containers below. These bags are super soft and remind me of cheesecloth fabric used in dresses and tee-shirts, back in the ‘70s.

CALF VILLAGE
An important feature of the Tullahay way of farming is that their cows are outdoors and grass-fed year-round.
The farm operates as a closed system, no animals are bought in, all calves are bred here, and Rosemary takes a particular responsibility for the calves and finds a real pleasure in looking after them.

Later she shows me around the ‘calf village’, outlining how important it is for them to be outdoors, but sheltered from inclement weather. If they are kept indoors, it simply leads to illness and lack of thriving.

She describes their way of feeding the calves, no automatic feeding here, such that she knows intimately the health status of any given animal, for example, which calf might need slightly less or more of a nutrient or some other attention. I comment that the calves are ‘hand-reared’, and Rosemary agrees.
They eschew bringing in anyone to help, despite the heavy workload and long hours (The first milking of the day starts at 5.30am).

Rosemary and Jim learned from experience that it is better to be personally on duty, confident in their own well-developed instincts around the animals, alert to any change.
Another step in her business development came with Rosemary’s acceptance to the SuperValu Food Academy, which works specifically with small, local food producers to give them the know-how to be successful in the fast-paced world of a large supermarket chain.

All of this provided a steep learning curve for Rosemary, not only making her products but also learning about packaging and marketing.
CHALLENGES
She is currently re-designing and developing new labels, with differently shaped bottles, to do justice to the special qualities of Tullahay Farm products.
Rosemary is ready to rise to the inevitable challenges, good ones too, that come as her business grows.

CONTRACT
“We recently got a contract from Lidl, for our whey drinks and under our own brand. I’ve just got all their boxes!”
As I let that sink in, she laughs, “The learning curve is massive, it will be a lot of work.
“But it will be good.” Tullahay Farm already supplies The Cashel Palace, a luxury five-star hotel in Tipperary, and Rosemary has ideas for building on that kind of relationship.

“We’re planning to offer food tours, thinking of guests in hotels as a potential opening.”
As we leave her dairy, the entrance porch lined with newspaper articles and photos of awards for Tullahay Farm, (including a Gold Blas na hEireann award at The Irish Food Awards 2021),

SPAIN
Rosemary mentions that she is sending a consignment of her produce, by invitation, to Spain for a competition.
Just as the fertile Tipperary countryside opens wide in front of their farmhouse, it seems clear that the world is opening up for Rosemary and for Tullahay Farm products.

Two books, Artisans of Clonmel and Artisans of Cashel, were published before Christmas.
They were launched as part of Clonmel Applefest and the Cashel Arts Festival. They both carry the stories of craftspeople in the community.
Over the coming months The Nationalist will carry stories from both books.
The article for this week was written byMargaret O’Brien curates the Brewery Lane Writers’ W/E, the open-mic Poetry Plus, and her writing workshops, Writing Changes Lives. An affiliate of Amherst Writers & Artists, her writing has been published in various publications.
Her new book, ‘Weather Report: a 90-day journal for reflection and well-being’, will be available from autumn 2022. @margaretwriting