Milking it: Camel farm taps new market with dairy offering

Updated

From skim to soy, reduced fat to long life - consumers are faced with a dizzying array of choices when it comes to dairy.

A WA business, Australian Camel Dairies, is hoping to put a new flavour of milk on the map, but it may not be to everyone's taste.

Camel milk is known as "white gold" and at $20 a litre, it is easy to see why.

The product is wildly popular overseas and could become a profitable new industry for WA.

Just like milking a cow

Australia's first commercial camel dairy operates out of a small shed in the Perth Hills.

Steve Geppert is the resident camel whisperer and his job is to transform these desert ferals into calm milking machines.

The animals are led into pens and tied up, before their udder is washed with soapy water and alcohol wipes to remove any dirt.

Steve then attaches the udder to an automated milking machine with a special attachment designed for camels.

The machine is switched on and the milk begins flowing almost straight away.

Twelve months ago this camel was running around wild out in the Australian desert and now here she is in the dairy, standing so still you could sit down and read a book between her legs. Steve Geppert

The camel remains calm throughout the process, more interested in the bucket of feed next to it than the machine whirring in the background.

"Twelve months ago this camel was running around wild out in the Australian desert and now here she is in the dairy, standing so still you could sit down and read a book between her legs," Steve said.

Camels are sensitive souls and even the slightest change in routine or stress levels can mean no milk.

But Steve is a good teacher and these girls are old pros.

"The camels we're milking at the moment are well over 400 days into their lactation, but we're still receiving strong yields of five litres per camel per day," he said.

"When we're selling the milk at $20 a litre, they're certainly paying for their keep."

The raw milk is then passed through a filter to get rid of any dust or fine particles before it goes into the fridge.

An untapped resource

There are an estimated 750,000 wild camels roaming Australia's deserts.

Gilad Berman was working in his native Israel when he heard the Australian government was spending millions of dollars culling them.

"The first question that popped up is why?" he said.

"There is huge demand for camel milk, [so] why do you have to cull camels? Why not bring them in, milk them and build a dairy?

"A lot of cow dairies are being closed down in the south of WA now.

This could be the next thing - the demand is huge."

Gilad moved his family to Perth and began working for Australian Camel Dairies.

Steve was recruited to train the feral animals, and this past year has been a big learning curve for both of them.

"We're the first commercial dairy in the country so we didn't have a playbook, we basically made it up as we went along," Steve said.

"That was the point of starting with a small pilot program which allowed us to get the kinks out of the system and work out how to smoothly run a commercial dairy."

The dairy has been milking just four camels over the past year, which produce around 450 litres of milk every month.

Every drop is sold, with most shipped to the eastern states and some sent to New Zealand.

The rest is sold to local customers, who cannot get enough of the stuff.

Pauline England owns a few of the camels at the dairy and her family goes through four buckets of milk every week.

She says her children are lactose intolerant but can drink camel milk.

"Cows milk made my children phlegmy and they felt sick after drinking it," she said.

"With camel milk they don't seem to have any effect - they can drink as much as they like every day."

Unpasteurised milk can pose health risks

The milk is not pasteurised, which means it is not considered fit for human consumption.

The dairy labels its products with a warning but there is no doubt what customers like Pauline are buying it for.

"There's actually four of us drinking it at home, having it every day on cereal and milkshakes and using it for cooking," she said.

The Health Department warns that raw milk can contain high levels of bacteria that may cause severe illness.

It's a clean environment and I can't see any problem with us drinking milk that hasn't been pasteurised.

Camel owner Pauline England

But Pauline is not fazed.

"I've seen the process of how the camels are actually milked," she said.

"It's a clean environment and I can't see any problem with us drinking milk that hasn't been pasteurised."

Gilad says the dairy has been sending samples of its milk to the Pathwest laboratory to test for bacteria.

"They results we're getting are uncanny," he said.

"We even heard from them that the raw camel milk is much cleaner than pasteurised cows milk, so we're quite happy with what we're selling."

Scarborough mother Mel Borcher discovered camel milk after her son Jaiya was diagnosed with a serious allergy to dairy.

"It has been quite amazing because after two months giving [camel milk] to him, the hives he developed just by touching him with milk [were] the size of a little mosquito bite," she said.

"I started giving him yoghurt and he was fine with it and now he can take butter and cheese too."

She says the milk also soothes Jaiya's skin problems and for that, she is willing to pay a premium.

"I would do anything for it to cure the eczema, to cure the allergy, because I believe that it cured it," she said.

Despite the rave reviews, Australian-based research on the potential benefits of camel milk is almost non-existent.

Plans for expansion

The company has just received approval from the Health Department to pasteurise the camel milk, which means it can be sold for human consumption.

That is expected to open up significant new markets in Australia and overseas.

The United Nations estimates there is more than 200 million potential customers across the globe and the industry could eventually be worth $10 billion.

"We had people knocking down our door before we even started selling the camels' milk," Steve said.

"Some of our international clients are requesting up to 7,000 litres a month."

We're the only Western country in the world with access to wild camels, we've got the purest and most disease-free wild camels on the planet and we've got some of the highest dairy standards in the world. Steve Geppert

Their only real competition is the world's first camel dairy in Dubai, which recently began exporting to Europe and is now pushing for access to the US.

Steve is confident Australia has an edge.

"We're the only Western country in the world with access to wild camels, we've got the purest and most disease-free wild camels on the planet and we've got some of the highest dairy standards in the world," he said.

The company wants to expand its herd to around 300 camels, but it will need to build a new dairy and acquire more land first.

Michael Laurence from Murdoch University's College of Veterinary Medicine says milking that many camels will present challenges.

"Firstly you need a source of good and productive camels and not every camel is going to produce a lot of milk," he said.

"Then of course you need the infrastructure and you need the land to house these large animals.

"But once that's established there's no reason why a well-functioning camel dairy can't be quite a productive enterprise.

"Everything points to camel milk being a really good product.

"It's relatively low in fat, high in protein, it's rich and full of flavour and it's consumed widely across the Middle East and other parts of the world.

It is expected the price will eventually drop to around $10 per litre - still expensive compared to cow's milk, but there is no doubt the demand is there.

But what does camel milk taste like?

Pauline says it is like milk without the creaminess, while Steve says it is a very subtle taste.

"If you're having it in your coffee you certainly wouldn't be able to tell the difference," he said.

Topics: dairy-production, sustainable-and-alternative-farming, perth-6000

First posted