Scots farm where Rabbie Burns ploughed the fields takes on ‘Big Dairy’

Farming Life

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.

Transcript

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.

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