Fergusons take Gubbeen cheese on a path to global success
West And The Cheese Smoked Ferguson, Gubbeen, Business Smoked In Tom Popular Cork Of Salmon And Fingal
Fingal Ferguson comes from a line of strange names. He told me so himself.
“My mother is Giana,” he says. “My sister is Clovisse.” As for himself, he’s called after Oscar Fingal O’Flaherty Wills Wilde. “My grandfather was a writer,” he says. “He liked the name. That’s how I got it.”
Fingal Ferguson is well named, I think. Like Wilde, he is a passionate and eloquent speaker, likeable and fired by what matters most to him. For Fingal, that’s family, land, community food and dairy.
Fingal’s parents, Tom and Giana, have worked Gubbeen Farm for over half a century with their family. Theirs is a 250-acre coastal farm in West Cork, one mile outside the fishing village of Schull. The Atlantic Ocean borders one boundary, and Mount Gabriel is to the North — a backdrop behind the land, sheltering the pasture that has long supported the Gubbeen herd.
“I’m the fifth generation on the farm,” says Fingal proudly. “We’ve always had a dairy farm here. My parents met back in the 70s. Dad is very much a West Cork farmer. Mum is the total opposite. She is this wonderful mixture of Austro-Hungarian, Spanish-English. She grew up in England and was educated in France. She spent a lot of her childhood in Spain. That’s very much where the food world influenced her.”
Fingal speaks quickly. He has much to say. I’m quietly amused then when he volunteers, unprompted, to ‘accelerate’ his story and continues: “There was this wonderful element of people moving to West Cork. The Cold War was one reason, and there were a number of other factors. There, people made connections, a bigger circle of friends, and they found community. For this new way of life, people were selling their houses all over the world. Many from Germany. Others from Madrid, New York, London and elsewhere. They came to West Cork with a good bit of money from selling their homes.
“Here, they bought small houses, fixer uppers, often with a bit of land. Just enough to leave money for a nest egg. That way, this community of — in many ways — blow ins came here. They came with their education and all their other elements and established themselves in West Cork, away from all the things they knew and loved.
“They were asking one another: Where do I get salami? Great cheese? Smoked salmon? Things like that, and they brought a burst of creativity, a convivial support structure, a curiosity, and maybe since the 1960s, they brought a mindset of wanting to leave the rat race behind.”
He talks of Veronica and Norman Steele and their son Quinlan, who were ‘by far the first’ with their Milleens cheese. Then, Jeffa Bates, whose daughter Sarah is now making Durrus cheese, and then his parents, Tom and Gina Ferguson.
“That was the order in which this group of friends began making cheese,” he says. “They were all individuals who started making their own cheeses, with their own twists. None of these cheesemakers were making cheese based on a business plan, or with a mind to turning a buck.
“It was pure curiosity and the love of and interest in cheesemaking. Also, there was a glut of milk, and cheese was something that could be done with that.”
Fingal was two years of age when his parents first started making Gubbeen cheese, which is a surface-ripened, semi-soft, cow's milk cheese with a pink and white rind.
“Semi-soft cheeses tend to have a little more character, a little more lactic flavour,” he says. “After the mouth starts to water, you have those sort of forest floor, earthy, nutty, mushroomy, fungal kind of flavours, that come from the maintenance of growing moulds on the cheese surface. This imparts a lot of flavour and changes the texture of the cheese, so it’s very character-filled.”
He has fond memories of his childhood days, watching his mother make cheese.
“Initially, when making cheese, my mum had just one large pot on the Aga, making Gubbeen cheese. It was a very honest kind of set up. Just making one cheese at a time, as that’s what she would have been shown, when she was a kid in Spain.
Fingal clearly knows the dairy industry well, given that he was born into it, raised in it. He knows cheese. He knows charcuterie: when he was in his twenties he rode that particular wave, making salamis and the rest.
When we talk of the future of the dairy industry he says: “I know that dairy is my future. I grew up in a period where dairy farmers were heroes. Now that’s maybe an over-exaggeration, but my point is that back then, to be a farmer who did this sort of work — growing food to feed people — was probably the most honest and noble thing you could do.
“I have five kids and they are all very different and I love every one of them. I think the reason I have five kids is because I have the most amazing wife. I’d like to think there is a future for all of them in this place, because it is all so multifaceted. I want them to be proud of where they come from and if one of them wants to take it over and get into it, or if they all do, then I want them to be proud of what they are.”
Fingal says his family focuses on the fact that theirs is not a business that wants to grow: “We realised our boundaries some time ago. We milk a certain number of cows that we can fit on our land. We are not intensive farmers. We don’t spray chemicals. Other people can do what they want to do. But looking around here now, there are weeds and herbs growing through our grass. The cows eat what is there. This approach has served us well.”
He is full of praise for the team employed in their business. “We wouldn't be able to make our cheese without the staff that we have."
Our conversation returns, then, to the topic of intensification. “That’s not the way to go,” he repeats. “That’s not the future of dairy. I think in Ireland we have very much abused our image and our label of the Green Island, the magical country. We do agriculture very well. We can grow grass and more. But we took advantage of that. We ran when we should have walked.” Part of Fingal’s vision for the future of the Ferguson family business, is the purchase of a biodigester. He tells me he has spent the past four years trying to get planning permission for one. “We might get that soon,” he says.
“If we get this it will allow us to take the farm slurry, the bedding, the cheese whey - all of which is fermented and produces gas which is captured - so that it doesn't go into the environment. Instead, it will fire the generator so that we are no longer taking from the grid. That way, our carbon footprint will be vastly lowered.
“The quality of the digestate, the slurry, that is going into that biodigester, normally that would go onto the land. It has been broken down and it is more accessible as nutrients in the soils, while also being accessible to the nutrient levels of the soil. That will reduce our fertiliser usage. So, on multiple levels, with the biodigester, we will be providing a lot of our own energy.”
Along with reducing carbon footprint, other steps Fingal’s family intend to take are putting solar panels on their roofs, getting rid of plastic in their packaging. “What we are looking at is getting better, instead of bigger,” he says.
“We are proud of the scale that we are at. There are times when we feel that we could definitely make more products. But instead, we make our quiet times a time to regroup. This is important, because in summertime and before Christmas we have to make hay when the sun shines.”
