INTERNATIONAL The
INTERNATIONAL The Scherrhof recipe is very simple: Good cows give good milk. And good milk makes good cheese. With their demonstration dairy plant in Tirol, the Walch family members not only create their own cheese: they ensure a secure future for their farming business. 24
THE WALCH FAMILY, KIRCHBERG (A) GOOD MILK – GOOD CHEESE Kirchberg in Tirol, only a few kilometres from the world-famous Kitzbühel holiday resort. We’re sitting in the bar of the Elisabeth Hotel. The barman brings coffee. We’ve come to meet hotelier and farmer Hans Walch. He and his wife once took over the parental guesthouse and from it have created a modern 200-bed 4-star Superior hotel with spacious wellness department. And their farming business is fit for the future too. “Actually, I passed the farm in Kirchberg, Scherrhof, over to my son a while ago”, explains Hans Walch. “He completed his agricultural studies some ten years ago. As we then got down to planning the development of the farm, it became quickly clear that we’d have to add extra value to the milk to increase return on capital. So we built our own cheese production plant.” TWO FARMS Hans Walch also owns a farm over in Hungary. The idea for this germinated during a holiday stay in Loipersdorf near the Hungarian border. “I was so captivated by the conditions that I felt like undertaking something agricultural there too”, he states. “All at once, a suitable farm came up for sale and I grabbed the chance. That was in 1991. There, I run 350 Holstein dairy cows with around the same number of followers. Average yield is 8000 kg with milking through a new 2x16 herringbone parlour. Surrounding farmland totals some 600 ha including 520 ha owned. We grow a lot of green rye and feeding barley plus some 130 ha wheat, 30 ha triticale and 15 to 20 ha oats.” The latter crop is for horse feed because Hans Walch keeps a few trotter breeding mares as a hobby. The horses are all served naturally in France, the foals reared in Hungary and then sent back to France as yearlings for sale and training for the racetrack. “On the farm we have 16 workers”, continues the farmer. “I’m over there around every ten days but employ a manager to look after the day-to-day business.” Back to Tirol. As we drive back with Hans Walch to the family’s Scherrhof farm in the three kilometres distant suburb of Spertendorf, we find the barns sparkling clean, but with not a cow to be seen. “It’ll be next weekend before the livestock arrive back from the herd’s summer grazings up on the mountainside alms”, explains the farmer. “They’ve been up there since mid-May. We have a lower and an upper alm with the first at 1,140 m altitude and the latter running from 1,640 to 2,000 m above sea level. We drive down the cattle end of September and link this occasion with a festival in front of the hotel. In this way we offer guests in our region, and the locals as well, a further tourist attraction.” DEMONSTRATION DAIRY This means the cattle spend the entire summer in the hills at the foot of the Großen Rettenstein. “We take all our 60 milking cows and followers up”, says Hans Walch. “Calving is mainly in autumn, ideal for us being October/November. This lets the cows take full advantage of the fresh spring alm pasture growth. If the feed starts to be used up, then the cows are anyway in the later stage of their lactation by that time or are already dry. Earlier, our family kept Pinzgauer cows. But then my father changed to the Fleckvieh breed. These cattle suit the region very well and they’re more profitable because the male calves attract good prices.” The Walch family breeds for a not-too-large framed type of Fleckvieh with a little Red Holstein influence added, and aims for udders that milk out well. Almost all the summer milk is made into cheese – around 100,000 l produces some 10 t of Austrian “Bergkäse” or mountain cheese, with additional lots of Tilsit, soft cheese, 25
