Mossgiel Organic Farm

PART 3 - WE COULDNT SELL IT!! We almost gave up, until we collaborated with the Scottish Coffee Community *AI used in this VT

I ALMOST CRIED! This week, has been rough - so many in my team pushed incredibly hard, but against all the odds from every angle and what has felt like an almost impossible few days. It's finally here, we made it. Here's a sleep-deprived update... you'll find out the full deets soon. We're doing what we said we'd do, collaboratively.

PART 2 - why don’t we sell raw, And Where did brewed milk even come from? *AI used in the production of this VT

DAY ONE What happened, for our industry to be in such a mess? *AI was used in the production of this vt

THE END… of the beginning “Dare to be honest and fear no labour” wrote Rabbie Burns in 1786. A line written at Mossgiel - and the line we live by today. For a long time, our industry has just… ticked along. Same system, same rules, same outcome - the death of small-scale farms and the growth of huge dairy companies. But underneath it, something’s been building. It’s been messy, it’s been exciting, it’s been pressure, it’s been triumphant, and at times damn near impossible - but through it all, a growing community of people have decided to keep pushing, not just follow the status quo. Now, it’s starting to move - and once it does, it won’t stop. This April - you’ll see why. To be contin-mooed...

@scumbunker Sorry, you’ve lost us on this one? 🤷‍♂️

WTF are PHTHALATES? That question came up this week after watching The Plastic Detox on Netflix. It’s a documentary that leaves you sitting there asking why we use something today without really understanding it? Phthalates are a chemical in plastic and we first realised they were becoming an issue last year, when the Soil Association told us they wanted to check there were no phthalates in materials used in organic products. We knew our milk was fine, we’d already (accidentally) ticked that box moons ago - we don’t use any single-use plastic and our buckets we do use are BPA and Phthalate free. Everything’s reusable and we hadn’t just done our homework - we’d had it verified through studies. We knew our milk wasn’t exposed. But that wasn’t the point - we wondered why they’re concerned about this now? So we looked a bit deeper and realised Phthalates are used to make plastics flexible. They’re everywhere and they don’t always stay in the plastic, they can migrate into food. There’s a growing research raising concerns about how they interact with our hormones, with potential links to fertility and development; even claims that it’s affecting when puberty begins or how active sperm can be. But they’re still allowed in food contact materials in the UK - not fully unregulated and Carte Blanche, but controlled to “safe limits”, which brings a bigger question: If one product contains a “safe” level, and another product contains a “safe” level, and another… at what point does the build up stop being safe? How many different packets do you open for dinner tonight, or grab in a daily meal deal before it is unsafe in the one meal? With all this new focus, harder regulations may come - but the worry is that regulation usually follows evidence, and it’s usually a bit late. We made the decision to remove single-use plastics back in 2019 and we challenged ourselves further through a study with Heriot-Watt University in 2022 to check we weren’t being biased for the sake of it. We stubbornly stuck to that promise - even when large companies tell us they’d buy our milk if we dropped the reusable model and made life easier, we said no - because this isn’t just about plastic waste, it’s about everything that comes with it. If you haven’t watched The Plastic Detox, it’s worth your time. Go in with an open mind as you might not agree with everything, but you’ll come out asking questions.

URGH!! THAT WAS ROTTEN You know those coffee machines you see everywhere now? The ones in petrol stations, supermarkets and in corners of shops with fancy screens and branding. Have you ever had one and just thought… that was rotten? Not just “not great” - actually bad. Bitter, burnt, no life but you put up with it anyway to feed your need for a caffiene hit We’ve had a few of them lately and every time I walk away thinking the same thing - how has this become normal? Then you start digging - some of them are running on the cheapest coffee they can get their hands on. The milk is whatever is going out of date soonest on the shelf and even worse, some aren’t even using fresh milk - it’s powder!! and the shop owner? They don’t really get a say - they’re tied into a system that’s all about pushing volume, not quality. The big coffee companies have built it that way. Control the machine, control the product, control the margins but there’s a problem - people aren’t daft. You can feel when something’s been cut back. You can taste when corners have been cut and more and more, people are starting to question it. Because when you stop and think about it - why should a quick coffee mean accepting something poor? Why shouldn’t it be great coffee, proper milk and complete transparency? That’s what’s been bothering us and that’s exactly what we’ve been working on, with a few other Scottish companies ready to bring something moo to the market. #ComingSoon

GENESIS “Can we make milk taste the same as raw milk, but still pasteurised?” That was the question 10 years ago and this bottle is bottle one. For the ten years I’d been away from the farm, I’d been drinking the same soulless supermarket milk everyone else drinks and hated it. It tasted nothing like the milk I grew up with. My idea seemed pretty simple - tell the story of milk that tasted like it did when Rabbie Burns farmed here. The same fields and the same type of cows (Ayrshires) but there was a problem... The government won’t let us sell raw milk in Scotland (even as bath milk or plant feed), so I had to get creative. I had absolutely no idea how to work a pasteuriser and I couldn’t afford one that did it all automatically. All I really knew was that milk had to be heat treated in a way that didn’t destroy it the way big dairy seem to. Strangely, the idea came from something I remembered during my time at Mercedes - how their automatic gearboxes heat and cool their oil in conditions ranging from the artic circle to the subsaharan desert; so I built a system based on that principle and through that slightly mad process of trying to stretch every penny as far as it would go, I accidentally created a different way of pasteurising milk. We call it brewing. It gives us the quality you normally only get from micro-dairies, but with the energy efficiency of larger dairies. That’s why we’ve never really said we “pasteurise” milk - we brew it. Bottle 1's destiny was simply to sit in an honesty shop in our conservatory honesty shop, and now ten years later, we supply tens of thousands of bottles across the Scottish Central Belt using exactly the same philosophy. The last ten years would probably have been easier if we’d stuck with the plastic bottles we finally ditched in 2019 and yes, if we pasteurised like big dairy do, our milk would probably be cheaper and we might even sell more. But then Mossgiel Milk wouldn’t be Mossgiel Milk - and that creamy, raw-milk-like experience would slowly disappear, becoming nothing more than something your grandparents remember. Thank you so much for supporting our different way to dairy 🥛

WHY THE ACTIVISM? LOTS of people roll their eyes at me: How can one person be so passionate about 'milk' and so determined to talk about what goes on behind the scenes in the food industry? Well, it goes back years. The Mossgiel story has been told so many times - leaving the motor industry, returning home after a chain of family tragedies, and taking over a bankrupt farm that needed rebuilding from the ground up. That journey literally changed my life. As Mossgiel grew, I had to learn the science of food production - from soil to shelf. The more I learned, the more uncomfortable truths I discovered: the pressure placed on farmers, the lack of transparency around ingredients, the over-reliance big food companies hold over our food system works and the chronic underinvestment in UK food plc, with cheap imports being the preference of policy makers. I could have kept quiet and simply sold milk from the farm, but I wanted to do more. I wanted to at least TRY! I’ve watched our nation become increasingly disconnected from the people who produce its food. I’ve seen friends in farming pushed harder every year by the economics of big food and a system that struggles to support anything outside the status quo. And yet I was lucky. I grew up on this farm - in the mud, eating real food from the garden and drinking raw milk from our Ayrshire cows. It’s an experience fewer and fewer people have any chance to enjoy today. If, through Mossgiel, our team, and the conversations we start online, we can help people reconnect with real food - and give small farms a fighting chance to survive and thrive - then it will have been worth it. Because the future of food shouldn’t be decided in boardrooms and marketing departments. It should start on farms

@drowsyfire Yes 😊 We’re looking at it as a long term solution for lots of our future products; but for now you can buy our butter via Brownings the Bakers website. You can find them at browningsbakers.com/product/mossgi…

@MossgielFarm Any chance of mail order?

WOOPS!! You may be wondering why we’ve been quiet about our moo-nique Mossgiel butter lately. Well… it turns out it’s been pretty popular and that’s been a bit of a problem - we simply couldn’t keep up with demand. Our butter depends entirely on the amount of cream we can produce - and there’s only so much of it each week. With organic cream being so popular, having enough left to turn into butter has been a real challenge - especially when the legends at The Wee Knob of Butter take that cream, apply their obsessive butter geekiness, add a pinch of Blackthorn | Scottish Sea Salt Flakes, and somehow make it taste THIS good. BUT We think we’re finally on top of it. We’ve found a little more cream, the chaps at Wee Knob have turned the churn up to 11 and there’s Mossgiel butter available once again. This is the kind of butter your great granny would recognise. Proper butter. Grass-fed cream, nothing added, nothing messed about with. Just slow-churned flavour that belongs on a thick slice of warm sourdough where it melts into the bread and makes you pause for a minute. You can get it today from our partners below - just look for the little block with Rabbie Burns silhouette sitting proudly on the front: Home Delivery Partners Mill’s Milk home deliveries Brownings the Bakers online home delivery Shop Partners Roots & Fruits Glasgow Locavore Glasgow Starter Culture Glasgow & Edinburgh Cairn Lodge Services Mossgiel Coffee House Dunlop Post Office Holmhead Farm Shop Wholesale Lomond Foods GreenCity Wholefoods But, you may need to hurry - before the churn gets overwhelmed again!

@duchessmathilda We could possibly help with mail order. We’re looking at it for a long term solution for lots of our future products; but for now you can buy our butter via Brownings the Bakers website. You can find them at browningsbakers.com/product/mossgi…

@MossgielFarm So disappointed that I have zero access to your products!

@MrJamesMay That's the appetizer version

Scottish McFolk: I’m trying this tonight. It serves one, yes?

THE COST OF BEING DIFFERENT I remember watching BrewDog when I was younger and being amazed by the journey. Beer had become corporate and for old men who moaned about politics. BIG BEER had squeezed the life out of it. Then two guys from Scotland came along and gave a middle hoofed salute to the multinationals. They weren’t just brewing beer - they made a whole new industry for a new generation. The marketing was outrageous, hilarious, brilliant, bold and edgy. It felt like they were inviting people into something more than a product. My favourite was when Aldi copied them and they fired back with “YALDI” IPA - it was like they took the German discounters on at their own game and won. They weren’t saints, they made mistakes - with some pretty public ones. But show me a business that grows that fast and doesn’t trip over itself along the way - it’s life, and our country doesn’t reward that enough. What’s hard to watch is how it’s ended - a pre-pack administration pushed through by a huge American firm. In my opinion, that was the moment the ship started taking on water with TSG. A necessary step argued by some, but in reality it was just men in suits wanting to make more money (which didn’t really work out for them). As someone trying to build a small dairy that pushes back against a dominant industry that doesn’t want to change, I feel it in a pretty personal way - It’s a bloody hard time to be independent. Cash flow is relentless, margins are horrendous, government seemingly doesn’t want us and the pressure doesn’t switch off. BUT to the people at BrewDog who’ve lost their jobs - I’m genuinely sorry. Building something disruptive takes guts and rebuilding after it takes even more. I hope you all find new positions out there soon. Challenger brands matter - even when they wobble and when they fall. They shift the conversation because they do one things their competitors don’t… which needs a quote from another disrupter One who failed before building the biggest company in the world - with the odds of you reading this on a device he envisioned being over 50% They ‘Think Different’ - Steve Jobs

WOULD YOU CHEAT, AND TELL? One presentation stopped me in my tracks yesterday. A “hybrid dairy” company stood up to talk about innovation - and how they add plant-based, ultra-processed ingredients into dairy products to market it as a way to reduce emissions. They wanted to talk about consumer expectations, so they framed it as a dilemma: “A boy has a girlfriend; he really likes her and wants to see where things go but on a night out he sleeps with another girl. He still wants girl one. Should he tell her?” That was their analogy - to represent dairy products quietly containing non-dairy ingredients - but still being presented as dairy. Examples they gave: Cheese that had dairy & UPF plant ingredients Milk that is 40% plant-based The conclusion? We shouldn’t “tell the whole truth”. Just focus on the fluffy bits. Lower CO2. Climate friendly. Modern. Innovative. When someone asked about biodiversity or water quality impacts from monocropping the plant inputs, they admitted they don’t monitor that but 'it was 'obviously better than dairy' - no data to back it up, just opinion. The speaker previously worked for a major dairy company. He openly explained how they would tweak recipes slightly every year - just enough that customers wouldn’t notice the change - and they even have a chemical engineer as part of the development team. And it was all framed as progress. Sitting there, I couldn’t help but think: this wasn’t innovation. It felt like an admission of the smoke and mirrors tactics used all around us in food today. An admission that parts of the food industry are comfortable chemically engineering food for margin, then selectively using environmental claims to justify it. Not because it nourishes people better, restores soil or supports real farming communities - but because it sells. If we are serious about sustainability, the answer isn’t quietly diluting real food and hoping no one notices. It’s honesty, transparency, whole ingredients and systems that consider the planet, animals and people - not just a single carbon metric. Consumers don’t need marketing dilemmas - they need truth.

AMSTERDAM So, that was fun Ash and Farmer B popped over to Amsterdam, as he had been invited to the ‘Dairy Innovation Summit’ as a speaker. We had the chance to share the Mossgiel story - where we started, why we started, the setbacks that nearly finished us, and the challenges we’re still navigating in a rapidly changing dairy world. Standing on that stage, it hit us how far we’ve come - and how much is about to change. This year will bring some of the biggest shifts we’ve ever made - from new collaborations in our supply chain, to where Mossgiel milk goes and everything in between. In a few months’ time, Mossgiel could look very different. But - what won’t change is the reason we exist. We stand for small-scale, grass-fed dairy - for doing things properly and standing with the farmers who refuse to be swallowed by big food.

We’re in Amsterdam this week, as Farmer B is speaking at an international dairy conference. Before the conference starts - we wanted to search out the ‘world famous grass’ that’s here We’ve been walking about for 2 hours so far and haven’t seen any pastures, cows or even sheep so far Don’t see what all the fuss is about really

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