Scots farm where Rabbie Burns ploughed the fields takes on ‘Big Dairy’
A farm in Ayrshire is leading the charge against Big Dairy’s stranglehold on the sector as it launches a crowdfunding campaign to raise £300k to build a state-of-the-art, zero-waste dairy facility.
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00:00A long, long time ago, in a field not so far away, someone who must have been very thirsty
00:07discovered that if you squeeze a cow's udder, you get this.
00:12They called it milk.
00:14The farmers realised it was healthy and it tasted delicious, so they shared it with their
00:20families, their friends and their neighbours.
00:23Some started to raise their own cows and sell the milk.
00:26This went on for some time, hundreds, no thousands of years.
00:30Cows were happy, milk was healthy and everyone was having a good time.
00:35And then, not that long ago, things started to sour.
00:40Big nasty evil companies came in and ruined everything.
00:44They wanted more milk for less money and didn't care how it happened.
00:48They started a race to the bottom, which shut down thousands and thousands of independent
00:53farms.
00:54The milk wasn't as tasty or as healthy as it used to be.
00:58Big dairy had taken over, which wasn't good for cows, milk or the planet.
01:03And for many people, that was the end of the story, but not for me.
01:11I'm Bryce, a farmer trying to fix dairy.
01:14I thought, like you, that the story was over for dairy and the baddies had won.
01:18Then I thought, nah, there's got to be a better way.
01:22I realised that despite what big dairy say, I can keep calves with their mothers.
01:27And I realised that if I farmed with nature instead of against her, that biodiversity
01:32would come back to our family farm.
01:34From breakfast tables to school canteens and everything in between, people loved real milk
01:38just like it used to be.
01:39If I bought old machinery and looked to the past, I could learn important lessons about
01:43the milk of the future.
01:44I realised that using modern technology, like these solar panels, reduces our carbon footprint.
01:52Then I realised, happy cows give better milk.
01:56Then I realised, by reusing bottles and tubs, I could cut out all that waste.
02:01Then I realised there were other farmers just like me, so I started working with them.
02:05We're raising £300,000 as part of a larger £900,000 investment series, which we seek
02:10to raise via crowdfunding, private investors and banks, to scale up and build a new dairy
02:14that will make great milk the standard, take the fight to big dairy and make more scale
02:19more accessible.