The Great Eketahuna Cheese Festival in May involved small cheese producers from around New Zealand and Australia. The festival came about through the hard work of smaller producers joining together to try to get a fairer deal from the government with fees and regulations. Visitors are welcome to the event.

Biddy Fraser-Davies loved cheese, and fought bureaucracy to make it.

The lobbyist died on Friday night, after suffering a serious stroke four days earlier. She was 76.

A few months before her death, Fraser-Davies said she wanted to leave a legacy for generations of cheese makers to follow her. She said she wanted to be remembered for helping to destroy "the swamps of bureaucracy".

LOREN DOUGAN/STUFF Biddy Fraser-Davies, former owner of Cwmglyn Cheese company near Eketahuna.

Her battle started in 2009. After seven years making cheese, she found herself targeted by the Ministry for Primary Industries after showcasing her farm and artisan cheeses on Country Calendar.

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After the show aired, she received an email from the ministry saying they would send an inspector to check her operation.

ILLYA MCLELLAN/STUFF The Eketahuna business will stop making cheese.

"My costs suddenly went from $100 a year paid to Tararua District Council to $5500 a year to MPI. It was a bit of a shock and nothing had actually changed except now the ministry were involved," she said, in an interview with Stuff.

Those costs, that email and the regulations that effectively prohibited artisan cheese making, encouraged Fraser-Davies to fight for change.

She was successful. In May, Food Safety Minister Damien O'Connor​ announced an overhaul of the system that added huge compliance costs to small cheese producers.

LOREN DOUGAN/STUFF Biddy Fraser-Davies became an unlikely campaigner, who successfully pushed for changes to dairy regulations.

He travelled to Fraser-Davies' Eketahuna Cheese Festival to announce the changes, and he credited her for pushing the cause.

"Biddy has been a big help in helping me understand how we can better support and understand them," O'Connor​ said in May.

Her husband, Colin Fraser-Davies said the changes were a long-awaited "triumph" for Biddy, and cheese makers across the country.

LOREN DOUGAN/STUFF Biddy Fraser-Davies was 76.

Despite their successes, Colin said he would be closing their cheese business.

"We're not going to make any more cheese. We will simply sell the cheese that we have in store. It's an artisan business, and the Artisan has died."

They had run the Cwmglyn​ Farm and Middleton Model Railway together. The railway would continue.

Sabato cheesemonger Calum Hodgson called Biddy his "food hero".

In a Cuisine interview she told him she wanted to be remembered for bringing down barriers cheese makers face.

"As I head towards the end of my life, I'd like it to be said that I've left a legacy that makes it easier for the next generation of cheese makers to survive the swamps of bureaucracy MPI compels us to wade through, and thereby give everybody time to make better cheese," she told Cuisine in May.

When she died on Friday, in Masterton, her three children had gathered around. She died peacefully, Colin said.

They had lived together for 35 years after Biddy responded to Colin's "lonely hearts" listing in the magazine New Scientist. They had been pen-pals for well over a year before Colin, who at the time lived in Britain, made his first trip to New Zealand in 1982.

"It was a slow speed romance. Airmail would typically take five or six days," he recalled.

A memorial service would be held on Thursday at the Eketahuna Community Hall.