Scran: The changing nature of Scotland's dairy industry
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00:00 [MUSIC]
00:04 I'm joined by farmer Bryce Cunningham from Mossgale Farm. Hi Bryce, how are you?
00:08 Hi, not bad, thank you, not bad. Thanks for having me on.
00:12 That's all right. I've been saying happy new year to everyone,
00:14 but I don't know if we're a bit late, but happy new year.
00:17 Thanks very much, happy new year to you too. There's always some kind of cut off, isn't it?
00:21 No one really knows when that is.
00:22 Yeah, I know. Someone should just set a date. So yeah, we're talking on this episode about
00:28 changing landscape of dairy in Scotland, but for anyone that doesn't know your company,
00:33 could you just tell us a little bit about it, please?
00:35 Yeah, absolutely. So we are Mossgale Farm. So we're a dairy farm in the southwest of Scotland,
00:42 about 25 miles from Glasgow. And we have our own cows. We have 45 of our own cows,
00:48 which are fully organic, and we operate a cow with calf dairy on site as well.
00:52 And we also work with five other organic dairies in southwest Scotland through the
00:56 Organic Herd Cooperative to supply milk to us so that we can brew it. And then we deliver it
01:01 across Scotland. And we also have a coffee shop as well. So it's a coffee shop and speciality
01:06 bakery in Stewarton, about 10 miles from the farm. So we've got a few different things to
01:10 keep me busy and keep me awake at night. So that's all good.
01:12 And keep you up early in the morning probably as well.
01:15 Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. The day always likes to start early.
01:18 And are you in quite a historic location? Am I right in saying you've got some kind
01:24 of connection to Robert Burns? Is that right?
01:26 Yeah, that's correct, Jip. So we live in Mossgale Farm. So we live in West Mossgale. East Mossgale
01:33 is a farm next door that Robert Burns himself lived back in 1784 to 1786. And today we farm
01:40 the land of both farms. So our cows graze the very grasses and lands that Robert Burns and his
01:45 farm attended a couple of hundred years ago. So it's a pretty special place to be, especially
01:49 this time of year, of course, with a couple of weeks to Burns Night.
01:51 Yeah, definitely. So how did you sort of come up with the idea of, you know, organic stuff's
01:58 been going around for a while, obviously, but the cow to calf's relatively sort of,
02:03 I would have thought, innovative and quite new at this point. So how did you get to the
02:06 point you're at now when it comes to your business?
02:08 Yeah, absolutely. So our business 10 years ago was a conventional dairy farm. So my father was
02:17 a farmer at that time and he was milking 150 cows and just doing the day to day. So cows have been
02:24 fed, producing milk, we're selling it to the market through a local milk buyer. And ultimately,
02:29 it was becoming cheese for sale into supermarkets across the UK. Now, on a global scale, that was
02:35 the time that the milk price began its sort of most recent collapse and the volatility that
02:40 has the dairy industry. And it was the sort of hardest, the hardest collapse in dairy prices
02:45 in living memory. So at the time, internationally, Russia had stopped buying European milk, which
02:50 had crashed prices, as had China. And there was also a glut of milk coming from New Zealand. So
02:54 the international commodity price had crashed the UK local prices as well. Unluckily for us,
03:00 we were on the lowest priced milk contract in the UK at the time. Our milk price went from 27 pence
03:05 down to nine. In the same month that happened, my father had died from terminal cancer. My
03:11 grandfather, who was also a part of the business, had died the year before from heart conditions.
03:16 And I had just at that point just taken the business on after a 10 year career in Mercedes
03:20 Benz, fixing cars. So I had no idea what I was doing. And ultimately, because of the sort of
03:26 the triple problem that happened to us, the bank decided we were no longer a viable business.
03:31 And they went to sell off our assets to try and pay the bank off and left us with quite a lot of
03:35 debt. At the end of that, we were left with 28 cows. And because we didn't own the farm, the bank
03:41 couldn't take it away with our tenants. So we were able to keep the farm. And I sort of decided that
03:46 I wanted to keep something going. So we kept those 28 cows. We continued to milk them, but we couldn't
03:50 find a milk buyer because we didn't have enough milk to supply them. So we decided that we're
03:55 going to turn back the clock and start selling my milk directly to a local community. Through that
04:00 sort of sort of transition and process, we couldn't afford to feed my cows fancy cereals and fancy
04:06 concentrates. We couldn't afford to fertilise them. We couldn't do lots of different things.
04:11 So we sort of fell into sort of accidentally becoming organic, if you like. So we sort of just
04:16 because we couldn't afford to do these things, we just didn't do them. And we became organic. We
04:19 signed up in 2016 to become an organic farm, sort of officially. And as we sort of went on that
04:27 journey, because we couldn't afford to buy these fancy tractors and fancy bits of equipment and
04:32 fancy cereals and things, we ended up farming the way that my grandfather would have farmed back in
04:37 1948 when he came here originally. And over the years, we sort of realised that, you know, this
04:42 way can work. We have this direct relationship with our supporters, with our customers. We're
04:47 producing milk in a very natural way because we weren't interfering with the cows diet in such a
04:52 way that the milk quality was very high. And we ultimately started selling milk into speciality
04:58 coffee shops in Glasgow and Edinburgh. And because of the way we were pasteurising, which is
05:03 effectively brewing the milk, and because of the diet our cows had, and because our cows were also
05:08 Ayrshire dairy cows as opposed to Holsteins, which the Ayrshires produce a slightly higher
05:13 quality of milk. We sort of started producing this very high quality milk for speciality coffee
05:18 shops and other places around Scotland. And so as we sort of continued down the road of the business,
05:23 we kept that sort of idea of we wanted to farm traditionally in a modern way, and also listen
05:27 to our customers as to how they would like to see us farming. And one of the things that came out of
05:31 that was organic farming and the cow with calf system where we keep the calves with the cows
05:36 until weaning. And then we sort of do different things around the farm to sort of try and make
05:41 that system work. So it's certainly been a voyage of discovery for the past sort of eight to 10
05:46 years that we've been on. Yeah, it sounds amazing. Like with all that sort of adversity, you could
05:52 have just walked away because you know, you had another career. So you've obviously wanted to
05:55 had a bit of a passion for it. Do you think that comes from it being a family business?
05:59 Yeah, I think it's in part to do with that. Yeah. I mean, I actually grew up in the farm. And when I
06:06 hit 16 years old, I couldn't wait to get away from it, to be honest. I hated everything to do with
06:12 farming. I was miles away from my friends. I wanted to do something in the motor industry,
06:15 which the farm wouldn't allow me to do. And I was actually I moved away from the farm the time I was
06:20 20. And just to try and get away into this different industry. It was sort of near the end
06:26 of my career in the motor industry that I started to think, you know, I'm actually quite missing the
06:31 farm. I was a this whole life I haven't sort of looked at and ventured on and sort of seen my
06:37 father's health failing. I thought, you know, this might be the opportunity I have to go and do
06:41 something. And when the sort of the sort of cycle happened in 2014, we nearly lost the farm. I just
06:48 had this passion to go, well, actually, you know, this was almost taken away from us. We've got
06:52 absolutely nothing to lose. We might as well give it a go. And at that time, that was when the sort
06:57 of animal rights movement started to become very loud. And we're starting to pay a lot of attention
07:01 to how farming is affecting the environment. And also, we're starting to hear about how plastic
07:06 pollution was affecting the oceans more and more in social media and on the mainstream media as
07:10 well. And I felt quite strongly about that. And so that was one of the reasons we started to do a
07:15 lot of the things we've implemented over the years. And you sort of mentioned the cows a little bit.
07:20 Could you tell us a bit more about the breed and the herd and how that they produce the milk that
07:26 they produce? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And so our cows on the farm, we call them the Mosquito Girls.
07:33 So they've all got their own names. And all of that breeding goes back to the original cows that
07:37 my father and my grandfather had over the 50, 60 years that they had the farm. Today, they're looked
07:43 after by our Herd Happiness Manager, Elizabeth and I. So Elizabeth's in there day to day doing
07:48 the milking, looking after the cows and calves. And she's the one that names them all. So we've
07:52 got lots of different names in the herd now as well. So for example, last year, all the calves,
07:57 all the female calves were born with given Ukrainian names, just to sort of advertise and
08:02 support the Ukrainian cause. And we've got lots of different things going behind the scenes.
08:06 Can you tell us some of the name of your cows? Because I've only ever been to a dairy farm once.
08:10 I grew up in Fife and one of my friends from school, her dad's a dairy farmer, and they were
08:14 all just numbered. So we used to go in and see them, but it was like, oh, there's number 11,
08:17 there's number five. So what are your names for your cows? We've got lots of different names. So
08:23 I know we shouldn't have favorites, but one of the favorites about here is Mary. So Mary's a cow who,
08:28 she was born on the farm and she was actually one of the first ones that we started naming this way.
08:32 We always had paid green names, but she was one of the first that we started to call the sort of
08:35 more namey type names. Mary's quite funny because she was always a bit of a pet. She was the first
08:41 in my cow with calf system and she'd walk about. Now she's a mum as well, so she's now milking.
08:45 We've got girls like Rosa, we've got Lizzie, we've got Cheryl. We've got lots and lots of
08:51 different names. So what we used to do as my dad's day is he would always call a cow the name of its
08:56 mother and then another number behind it. So that would be the pedigree names. If you ever looked
09:00 up the old Westminster school pedigrees, you would always see this line of cow names. But I say now,
09:05 Elizabeth's got involved, every single one's got a different name. And even more recently,
09:09 so at Christmas time, Elizabeth was starting to run out of names. So she started putting
09:12 out across the team saying, "Oh, this little baby has been born with a name for it." So
09:16 we started to name some pretty funky names now. The cows themselves, they're Ayrshire cows. So
09:23 they're actually the same types of cows that Robert Burns would have had here at Miss Gila a
09:27 couple of hundred years ago. And Ayrshire cows are quite famous for that they don't produce
09:32 the highest fat and highest protein of milk, but they don't produce a very low fat and protein milk.
09:36 So they're a milk that's very, very balanced. A lot of traditional cheese makers like the milk
09:41 from Ayrshire cows because it's a very sweet taste. It's got a very balanced protein. It makes really,
09:45 really nice cheese. It's not too oily or sort of too dry, if you like. So Ayrshire cows are
09:51 quite famous around the world for that. You find Ayrshire cows all the way from here in Ayrshire,
09:55 where they originated, all the way to New Zealand, South America, South Africa, North America as well.
10:00 So they're a breed that's went around the world. Their diet on the farm here, we feed the cows
10:05 the grass that grows around the farm. We also have planted research herbal lays as well. So that's
10:11 where we're planting lots of different species of grass, clovers and different herbs that we feed
10:16 the cows as well to try and reduce the cereal intake of the cows. So we feed the absolute minimum
10:20 of cereal to the cows themselves and only if they're being milked. So it keeps the milk quality
10:25 very high. And we're also feeding things like seaweed and rock salt to the cows as well. So
10:30 the seaweed to keep their iodine and nutrition intake up and the salt licks because cows love
10:36 salt because it just keeps the saliva going and they keep everything tasty. So it's not just a
10:40 case of garnish on top of the grass. They do like a bit of a salt lick. So that all culminates in a
10:46 milk that we feel is very, very special. As I say, we take that milk, we brew the milk. We don't
10:51 pasteurise it in the normal way. The brewing process is something that we've created over the past three
10:55 or four years, which is similar to pasteurisation, but we heat it up and cool it down in different
10:59 ways to get the unique flavours that we have. And we work with the five other farms as well through
11:04 the cooperative. The milk they supply is fully organic. And again, it's also made in a very
11:09 similar way with the minimum of concentrates that they can allow, which is quite a standard thing in
11:13 organic production. And the cooperative itself don't use antibiotics in any animals producing
11:19 milk. And they've got lots of different things as well as part of that co-op, which allows
11:23 sustainability and productivity to thrive within that. And I'm assuming with the co-op, it's just
11:30 strength in numbers. If you all come together to produce this product, you can also sort of,
11:34 does it help set the price or does it sort of protect you from what happened before? I mean,
11:38 I know you're doing much smaller, you're not going into the supermarkets, but are you protected from
11:43 any sort of fluctuations in the market and the way that you're doing things now?
11:48 So as personally, I wouldn't say we're protected as such from the fluctuations in that way.
11:52 But what we do is we market very, very separately and very differently. So the price that we buy and
11:58 sell milk for is not linked to the quality market. We do everything we can to remove ourselves from
12:03 that sort of fluctuation within that. And the co-op itself does set the price. So we've got a
12:08 very unique relationship with the co-op. We are part of the co-op, however, we buy milk from the
12:12 co-op. And that means that the cooperative sets the price based on what the farmers need to farm
12:17 and that's the sort of sustainable way that we ask for. But they were able to sell that to supporters
12:22 with a completely transparent way of being able to sort of show the milk price from the farm all
12:26 the way to the shop shelf kind of thing. I should tell you just now before we get carried away into
12:30 something else, that it's your milk and this coffee. I get delivery from Wokovore as part of
12:38 my veg box. So that's a... Oh, thank you very much. Well, thank you. It's great. So just on that,
12:46 have you found the consumer demand and what they're looking for to be, you know, you said people are
12:50 more interested in knowing where their food comes from and the animal rights movement. Are you
12:54 finding that there is obviously consumer demand there, but there's also a knowledge around sort
12:59 of sustainability and animal rights? Yes, I am. So you've touched on quite a few things there.
13:05 Yes, I do agree. There's definitely a massive knowledge now of how food production, whether
13:12 that's animal based proteins, plant based proteins or anything new that's coming along the lines
13:15 is affecting the environment. And that's something that I feel very passionately about. And it's the
13:19 reason that we've sort of done what we do now. So yes, we're finding that consumers are picking up,
13:26 not everyone, but a lot of people are picking up products based on what they believe is the right
13:32 thing for them to do. So as you mentioned there, a lot of people believe that picking up a plant
13:36 based product is the thing for them. A lot of people believe that picking up an organic product
13:40 is the thing for them. And that's the way that we're sort of trying to meet the market and
13:44 everyone's trying to work out what we're doing. My aspirations as a business is to sort of go out
13:49 there and show that we have this dairy product, which is organic, which is delivered in electric
13:54 vehicles and delivered without any plastic waste. And that can be as sustainable, if not more
13:58 sustainable than the plant based equivalent. That's the whole sort of vision that we have,
14:02 is to sort of show this and see if it can be done. So we're in quite an exciting position just now.
14:09 Well again, it never came out of adversity, but it came out of a bit of a unique situation. So
14:15 a few months ago, Oatly, the oat brand, had put this advert up saying they wanted a dairy
14:20 executive to debate with them in a discussion about putting carbon footprinting numbers onto
14:26 packaging. And they wanted someone from the dairy industry to go ahead and do that. And they put
14:31 this big advert out. So I decided that I was going to go and try and be that person. And it turns out
14:35 I was the only person within the dairy industry in Europe to actually send the email in and apply
14:39 for it. So we ended up in this really surreal situation where myself and the sustainability
14:45 director of Oatly were on Reddit doing an 'ask me anything' debate about why climate labelling is
14:50 not done in dairy, but it is done in oat drinks. And what came out of that was a really, really
14:55 interesting discussion with quite a number of people across Reddit. So much so that Oatly have
15:00 actually agreed to help us find out our true carbon footprinting numbers, which is something
15:05 we've struggled with because there's a lot of different questions asked about the true value
15:10 behind carbon footprinting, how it's calculated, all the different ways it can be calculated.
15:14 So this is where you're seeing some industries saying where they're perhaps net zero, but it's
15:19 actually greenwashing because they're most likely certain parts of their industry or certain parts
15:22 of their product to report on. So you want to do an entire carbon footprinting number from Moss
15:27 Gheel. We'll find out what that number is, we'll then work out exactly where the highest emissions
15:31 are within my business and supply chain and be able to work in that to reduce it. So we'll be
15:35 doing some sort of co-presentation with Oatly in the coming months once we've got all those numbers
15:39 carried out. So again, it's a bit weird that a small dairy like us has taken on the biggest
15:45 milk brand in the world talking about sustainability, but it's an opportunity for both of us
15:49 to work together and actually go, well, actually, is there a way to do it more sustainably? How can
15:53 we do it more sustainably? And people are out there demanding products of certain kinds, how can
15:58 we meet that demand in the most environmentally sound way? So just going back to your question of
16:02 are people looking for more environmentally sustainable options? Yes, I do believe they are.
16:06 But again, we're just coming through a cost of living crisis for the past 18 months.
16:10 We have seen demand in some areas go down, we've seen demand in some areas go up. So it's always
16:16 a moving base. We've always got to keep an eye on how the market goes and where we want to place
16:20 our product for that. Yeah, that is really interesting that that came about. I'll need to
16:26 look into that. And just to quickly go back to the cow to calf method, do you ever see that being
16:32 something that can happen large scale? I imagine you're probably still quite small compared to
16:38 say other more well-known brands, for example, but do you think it's something that can be
16:45 introduced across the board or do you just think the sort of loss of money potentially is not great
16:51 for bigger brands? Yes, that's always going to be a challenge. So just give you a background into
16:57 what we've been doing. Since 2018, we've been a cow to calf dairy. So that's when we started
17:04 keeping cows and calves together. And we started with 30 cows. And we had massive problems. It took
17:10 us a good three years to work out how to get the system sorted out. So we had every problem from,
17:14 you know, for the past hundred years, this farm has been fenced for cows and calves been in a shed
17:20 until a certain size and then they go outside. So if you can imagine, these calves are now running
17:24 through the gaps in the fences that cows can't get through. So then the cows want to get a calf back,
17:28 they'll bust through that fence. We started having fences getting bust all over the place.
17:32 When we had the calves inside in the winter, we would move the calves to a certain area where
17:36 the cows weren't and the cows would be bashing the doors and they'd be moving things about to
17:39 try and get to the calves. And it was, to be honest, after the first year, we were pulling
17:43 our hair out thinking we'd done the completely wrong thing. We felt as if we had done a worse
17:49 thing for the cows as opposed to a better thing for the cows. But it sort of stuck at it. Elizabeth
17:53 and I had daily meetings. We kept trying to hone it and progress and do things differently.
17:58 Speaking to the other 14 or so cow with calf dairies in the UK, including a couple in the
18:03 Netherlands and one in Germany as well, just to try and get an idea of how to do it better.
18:09 And what we did was we just basically managed to find out a way to get it to work.
18:12 So we feel that we stumbled on the right way about 2021, that kind of time. And we've kept
18:18 going from there. So we then grew it from 30 cows up to 45. We've now got that working.
18:22 And what we did then was we were only calving in the summer time because we felt that if we
18:28 calved all our cows in the springtime, we weren't calving any cows in the wintertime. It just made
18:32 it easier to manage the cows from the outside. So if we had any problems, we weren't bringing
18:36 them into the sheds in the wintertime and things like that. So this year, 2023, 2024,
18:42 this is the first year we've got them inside. And we feel we've cracked that as well and got
18:45 that system working. And again, we've been chatting to other cow with calf dairies to see if it can
18:50 work. And what we believe now is we actually believe we've now got a blueprint and a
18:53 documentation that we can now go to other farms and start saying, we've got a system called cow
18:58 with calf. We would love for you to do this. And we would love to take your milk to then sell it
19:02 so we can start launching it. Because one thing that I found really hard in the early days was
19:08 being a farmer, trying to market milk, trying to sell milk, trying to deal with invoices and
19:13 individual customers. And you can absolutely 100% see why farmers would like to be farmers and sell
19:18 milk in a tank or to a dairy that goes and sells it and gives them a sustainable price.
19:21 So what we would love to do is be the platform for cow with calf dairies to sell milk into and
19:26 organic dairies as well to sell milk into, which we can then distribute to places like
19:30 local workers, which would then ultimately bring it to your home and into ethical retailers and
19:35 different ways that we can supply milk across. That's what we want the school to be, is this
19:38 platform for small cow with calf dairies to be able to sell into and create a much bigger story
19:43 around that. So that's what we are aiming for and our vision is going forward.
19:46 I'm now joined by David and Wilma from the Ethical Dairy. Hi both, how are you?
19:52 We're well, how are you?
19:54 Hello.
19:55 Yeah, good, thank you. Hello, hello. Yeah, slightly cold in my spare room, but it's all good.
20:00 So we're going to talk a little bit about, we are talking about the dairy industry in Scotland
20:04 as a whole just now, a bit of a snapshot, but for anyone that doesn't know, could you tell us a
20:09 little bit about your business and how it all came about and why now you're focusing on ethical dairy
20:16 practices? Well, it actually has to start 30 years ago when we diversified the farm together and we
20:25 launched Cream of Galloway, which is an ice cream brand and we've made ice cream here at the farm
20:32 for the past 30 years and then that diversified again into tourism. But we also as individuals,
20:41 maybe halfway through that journey, started to look at the kind of social and economic issues
20:50 with regards to climate change and resource depletion, environmental issues, etc, etc, etc,
20:57 and thought, shouldn't we be doing something else? Because ice cream is so energy intensive and we
21:02 are taking in ingredients from all over the world. The milk from the farm, it was just a tiny part of
21:09 the whole cost of what we were doing. So we decided that we had to change and that was about 2008 we
21:18 were looking at that and we decided that we had to make another product using milk and we then
21:26 started to plan to make cheese. And that took a long time, you know, you just don't have the
21:31 resources to say, and tomorrow we'll make cheese. So we had to find the finance, learn how to make
21:38 cheese, convert another building on the farm, etc, etc, etc. So we started on a small scale in 2013
21:45 and then I'd been badgering David for many, many years, he says it was 19,
21:52 that we should actually keep the cows and calves together after the cows gave birth,
22:00 and the norm is 24 hours. So round about the time we were planning about changing to make cheese,
22:07 we realised we were going to have to completely change the physical dairy and therefore why not
22:14 include an area where cows and calves could be together. So that also started, and there's a
22:18 whole story behind that. And then in 2019 we had dedicated cheese making facilities and that was
22:27 when we started to think about, right, is it time to sell the ice cream business, close the ice
22:34 cream business or whatever, you know, and you need to, so you can't just shut down your main income,
22:40 which was ice cream, and just think this wonderful new world of cheese is going to
22:44 keep us financially viable. So you have to plan that. So actually we've just sold Cream of Galloway
22:50 and we no longer own it. I'm still in the deal for a few months yet where I'm helping with the
22:56 transition, but really now our focus and our money will be concentrating on the farm and the cheese
23:04 business. And how do you feel about that? If you've been thinking about it for this long, how does it
23:10 feel to just be having that as your main focus? Well it'd be fair to say we had a little drink
23:15 when it was finally all through, because you never really think it's going to happen. You just think,
23:20 okay, this is what we plan to do, but is there really a buyer out there, etc, etc, etc. And so
23:27 that always takes a while. And what's been the consumer reaction to the ethical dairy? Because
23:33 I know there's sort of more knowledge and understanding from consumers about the sort
23:39 of dairy industry and have you found it quite positive? Yeah, absolutely. Well we knew there
23:48 was a market there, a growing market, because we've been doing farm tours for 25, nearly 30 years,
23:56 up to several times a day during the summer. And really the only strong negative that we ever had
24:06 from the tourists, from the visitors, was that we were separating the calves from their mothers.
24:14 On a dairy farm, it was just unthinkable that you didn't, because the cows would drink half the milk
24:22 if not more. So we knew that it was a problem because people voiced it and we knew that it
24:32 wasn't going to get any better. And of course then once animal welfare and vegan activists
24:38 started putting stuff up on social media in the last five, six years, that has stirred things even
24:45 more and made people widely aware of common practices in the dairy industry, which they
24:54 weren't happy about. And in the dairy industry, we were a very closed shop, we were very inward
25:00 looking and we learned from each other, but we don't really listen to our customers and that's
25:05 been our biggest fault I think. So we could see that the perception of dairy by the general public,
25:16 which was probably one of Janet and John's school books, you know, the farmer with his bit of straw
25:23 and his floppy hat and the two cows and two sheep and two pigs and straw, the yard, the farm,
25:30 you know, it was so disconnected from the reality. And even at our level, and we thought we were
25:36 pretty, you know, non-intensive, pretty acceptable, was, yeah, it was cow with calf was,
25:46 or cow separation was clearly an issue. So that was what was driving Wilma and also our visitor
25:54 centre manager at the time and my members of my family as well, who were, let's say, outside
26:01 farming, but from farming as we were. Then they were all saying, well, you know, why don't you
26:08 give this a go? And I was being defensive and saying, you know, you'll put me out of business,
26:13 there's no way we can do this, the calves are going to drink all the milk, you can't run a
26:17 farm like that. So that was the way it was for probably about seven or eight years. And then
26:24 we had an opportunity to revisit that back in 2008, '78. And there's two things happened. One
26:34 was the old dairy that we had here was becoming unfit for purpose going forward. We had to make
26:39 a big decision about whether we continued dairying, whether we're going to invest a lot of money
26:44 to fix it up or to new build. And the decision was, well, okay, we'll look at new build. If we're
26:51 going to do a new build, we could think about incorporating facilities for cow with calf. And
26:58 that was really the first steps. And then we went across the Netherlands, the whole team,
27:02 the farm team, everybody went across various stages and had a look and came back, everybody
27:08 came back unanimously. Oh yeah, that's no problem, we can do that. Because smaller herds, 30, 40 cow
27:16 herds over there, organic, were leaving calves on, probably a handful of them. And it seemed to work
27:21 quite well with them. So we thought, no, we can do that. Of course, the story is it's a lot more
27:29 complicated than that. And that does lead me into the question, what are the challenges of it?
27:36 Because obviously, if it was easy, everybody would be doing it.
27:40 Exactly. So it was, what were the challenges? Well, the challenges were every kind of level,
27:54 basically. It was about, there was so little information out there about how much milk the
28:01 calves were going to drink, what the reaction of the cows and the calves to being left together and
28:07 trying to milk them was. We knew that there was a public discomfort with cow-calf separation,
28:18 but we didn't know whether that would be enough to drive the customers to change the buying
28:25 behaviour. That was critical. Because we were thinking, well, at this point in time, we're
28:30 starting to move away from thinking about ice cream as being the future, about cheese. And the
28:37 cheese, really, one of the major drivers towards cheese was A, it was a farm product, it was 99%
28:44 plus from the farm, rather than all this other stuff we were buying in for the ice cream.
28:50 And it was something that we could put in a bag and send anywhere in the UK for a few quid.
29:00 Whereas with ice cream, we can't do that. It has to go through a frozen food distribution system,
29:06 which is horribly expensive. And we're selling stuff in London, ice cream in London,
29:13 for double the price it was in Dumfries and Galloway, but we were making less from it because
29:18 of all the people that were taking percentages out of it, so 35%. So we thought, okay,
29:26 and also your route to market was constantly being interrupted by a buyer's decision,
29:34 by a retailer's decision. We were deciding about the best margins we were going to make out of the
29:40 product. And the story behind the product really didn't matter to them. And so you're constantly
29:46 being blocked. Even if you had a good story, it didn't get through to your customer because
29:51 at the end of the day, all they could do was read the packaging and who does that?
29:54 So is your main product with Ethical Dairy cheese or are you also doing milk as well?
29:59 Our main product by far is cheese. Milk we're doing on a kind of local haphazard scale,
30:10 mainly because we live in an area that doesn't have a huge population. There are a few other
30:16 dairies choosing to pasteurise milk and to distribute it locally, but we haven't. And
30:25 one of the issues around that, I think, is scale as well. In Scotland, it is illegal to sell or
30:34 even give away raw milk and pasteurised milk. And in England, it isn't. So you do get quite a lot of
30:42 small scale dairies doing cow with calf who are selling their milk, but they don't need to
30:50 pasteurise it. So they don't need to invest in the equipment to do all that. I mean, we have invested
30:57 in a lot of equipment, but we're going to concentrate on cheese equipment.
31:02 And can you tell me a bit about your cows?
31:04 Oh, the cows, yeah. Well, where do you start? Because we're allowing the calves to suckle
31:19 their mothers for five to six months before weaning, the calf is now a very valuable part
31:28 of our dairy systems. So it is so important for us to, A, look after the calf with every level,
31:36 and to get a calf that is suitable at the end of the day for the beef market, because
31:45 something like three quarters of the calves will be going into the beef
31:52 for food, and a quarter will be retained for breeding purposes. So the type of cow
32:00 that we're now breeding towards, we started with Ayrshire cows way back,
32:06 35 years ago, then we started crossbreeding with Swedish reds, Norwegian reds, which are basically,
32:17 they were Ayrshires that went to the Nordic countries 100 years ago, and they've bred them
32:22 on in their own style. So we've been crossbreeding with them, then we started bringing in one
32:29 Bélaiard, which is a more dual purpose type of breed, brings a body and scale to the cow, so that
32:38 brings beef to the calf. And then we've brought in Halstein, which I swore I'd never do, but
32:46 we've brought in Halstein, but the Halstein breed is a very wide spectrum of breeds, so you can go
32:54 for a very high yielding, skinny animal, or you can go for a more general purpose type of cow
33:01 that we go for, which is a good legs nutter, and a good type of healthy animal, robust animal.
33:11 So we're then breeding, so we're using these three breeds, crossbreeding, to give us a crossbred cow,
33:17 which as anybody would know, if you get a mongrel animal, it is so much more robust,
33:25 more fertile, more productive than the purebreds. And that's just a scientific fact.
33:33 Oh, it's really interesting. So yeah, nature provides.
33:38 It does, but it takes time. The problem is with natural systems is you have to wait.
33:44 I mean, it can be years, and it took us 10 years before we got the organic thing to work for us,
33:50 and the soils recovered from all the stuff we'd been putting on, fertilizers and pesticides,
33:57 once we'd stopped doing that, the soils recovered, the fertility of the soil recovered,
34:03 the production from our silage and grazing fields recovered, to the point where we were getting the
34:09 same kind of yields now that we were getting 25 years ago with all the chems, but without any of
34:14 that stuff. And the great thing about that is that it means that your profitability is so much better,
34:20 because, and also when you've got these price spikes in commodity prices, so fertilizers,
34:27 double the price 18 months ago, doubled in price in six months. And it was really squeezing farmers
34:37 to the point where they could barely function. And then the same thing is with feedstuffs,
34:44 feedstuffs going up 50%. We haven't experienced really any of that. So we have a much more
34:52 robust business, a more resilient business that is reasonably, that is profitable, actually.
35:00 And just quickly before we finish up, where can customers buy your cheese?
35:05 Well, we've got a very good online shop, and we have an increasing audience of buyers who
35:17 speaks at Christmas, so we go through a very busy time late December. So it can be bought
35:24 at our website, the Ethical Dairy. But at the same time, we're within Edinburgh, Glasgow,
35:30 Stirling, Perth, and in the south of England as well. So there's various cheese wholesalers that
35:38 now stock our range and go primarily to delis. It's not in any supermarkets,
35:43 but it will be in delis and some restaurants now buy it as well. So a good independent deli
35:50 has got a very good chance. And if not, get in touch with us and we'll make sure we
35:53 get in touch with the distributor and get it in there.
35:55 Well, that's great. Well, thank you very much. I know we kind of ran over a little bit, but
36:02 thank you. It's been really interesting. And yeah, I'll need to look out and just
36:05 try some of your cheeses soon.
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