Udder passion; ‘I live this dairy,’ says 82-year-old owner of Ahualoa goat farm

AHUALOA — It’s 4 p.m. on a Thursday, which means it’s milking time.

There is a steady tick-tick from the 10 milking stations in the barn of Hawaii Island Goat Dairy, as 10 does — some Saanen, some Toggenburg, some a “Snubian” mix — munch on hay while milk is pumped from their full udders. They already have been milked once today, at 6 a.m.

Milking, though, is just one part of running a dairy.

“I didn’t get much sleep last night,” said Dick Threfall, 82, owner of the dairy since its founding 16 years ago.

On this particular day, two babies were born. The mother is passing the afterbirth in a barn stall. There were triplets born the day before. Beezy, a brown doe with a calm face, is due any hour now, but hasn’t gone into labor just yet.

It’s Beezy who has been keeping Threfall up at night. He keeps track of does about to kid via a security camera in the barn, pulling up the camera feed on his iPhone to watch for kidding from his house.

Goat cheese has been made for thousands of years, but technology added some convenience to the 24/7 job of operating a farm. In the barn, milk meters track how much each doe gives per week (some give 2 gallons daily). Once a week, Threfall takes the milk meter numbers and enters them into an Excel database.

One goat, a new mom, is being hand-milked at a wooden milking stand. The doe’s colostrum-rich milk will be heat-treated and bottle-fed to the babies.

The milking stand was built by Threfall’s late wife, Heather, who died in 2011. Heather first started making cheese as a hobby after the Threfalls moved to the Big Island to be closer to family on Oahu.

There was at one point a borrowed cow providing milk, but goats, being several times smaller, were easier to manage.

One day when the Threfalls were discussing what Dick could do once he retired from the backbreaking work of being a farrier — something he’d done for 37 years — Heather suggested a dairy.

“I said, ‘Sure, we could do a dairy,’” Dick Threfall recalled. “So we did.”

That was in 2001. The Threfalls had drawn up a business plan estimating it would take about six to eight months to ramp up production.

“Six weeks in, we were selling every ounce of cheese we made, and it’s been like that ever since,” Threfall said.

There were growing pains, and not just from jumping from an eight-goat herd to one of two dozen (the rest of the goats came from California). All of the equipment was bought used. The barn was finished two months late.

But there was no question there was a market for cheese. At the time, there were no other goat dairies in the state — two others on the Big Island had recently closed. Threfall hit the pavement to get the word out about the new business, calling chefs throughout the state to ask if they were interested in adding local chèvre to their menus.

“Word of mouth is just amazing,” Threfall said.

The dairy’s first restaurant client was chef Peter Merriman of Merriman’s restaurant in Waimea.

Merriman said he was impressed right away by the cheese’s quality.

“I still believe to this day that Dick makes the best goat cheese in the world,” he wrote in an email to the Tribune-Herald. “The texture is smooth, and the (taste) is mild yet flavorful.”

The cheese-making room of Hawaii Island Goat Dairy, with its blue-painted floor and wall of refrigerators and freezers, does not smell like cheese. Instead, it is the fresh milk that stands out, as it is pumped over from the goats being milked in the barn.

One tank chills the milk, agitating it to keep a uniform temperature. Another pasteurizes the milk, heating it at 145 degrees for a half-hour. Cheese cultures, imported from France, and rennet, imported from Wisconsin, are added. The milk clumps, changing to the nursery-rhyme combination of curds and whey.

Cheesemaker Sonya Torweihe, who has worked at the farm for 11 years, wraps the clumps in cheesecloth, hanging them overnight so the whey drains off.

Chèvre is the easiest type of goat cheese to make, and is the farm’s top seller. The full dairy lineup also includes feta, mozzarella, “Gavarti” (goat Havarti) and hard cheeses. Some cheese is aged up to eight months in a “cheese cave.” Shipments go off-island every three days.

“If you have a good product, it sells itself,” Threfall said.

And to have a good product, he said, you have to start with “happy, healthy goats. … We can’t have a goat that’s mean.”

The goats, it is safe to say, get more time off than Threfall and the farm’s nine employees. The does are milked 10 months of the year, in rotations. The rotations are written on a massive whiteboard in the barn.

“You have to give the tissue of the udder time to regenerate,” Threfall said. “If you don’t, you get less and less and less each year.”

Does usually milk for eight to nine years.

The farm is at goat capacity right now, with 130 animals. There are just five bucks, along with 20 more mainland “bucks” in a nitrogen tank: The dairy has been artificially inseminating does since its beginning.

Only about a dozen babies are kept each year. The others are sold.

“They go fast, and people raise them,” Threfall said. “People will come back two years, three years later and get some more.”

“Dick and his staff have been a tremendous help to us,” said Tim DeLozier of Aina Pono Livestock &Land Maintenance, which uses goats and sheep to “mow” land and clear it of invasive plants. DeLozier estimated that the business picked up nearly 100 goats from the dairy through the years (Threfall also gave them one of his best bucks, Lance).

“We can call him or his herd manager any time, and they’re always very generous and willing to help us out at any time,” DeLozier said.

The 9-acre farm and all of its dairy equipment is currently for sale. But Threfall isn’t planning to step back until a sale goes through.

“I’m 82, and I’ve never done anything as satisfying as this,” he said. “I live this dairy. Everything I’ve ever done, I’ve done with a passion. If the passion goes, I quit.”

Is that still the case?

“Oh, absolutely,” he said. “Absolutely.”

Email Ivy Ashe at iashe@hawaiitribune-herald.com.