Eureka moment?
It came from watching farmers go bust, including my own family farm after low
milk prices left us bankrupt. Milk had become an anonymous white liquid on a
supermarket shelf, with little sense of provenance. I realised it did not have
to be treated as a commodity. There had to be a way to reconnect milk with its
source and give farms and farmers the value they deserved.
Finance
Finance has been difficult. Dairy is enormously capital-intensive and, when you
are trying to do something different, traditional funders do not always know
how to support it. We turned to private investment, but many investors could
not see how the numbers would work because everything they knew told them the
industry was tight. We were not just financing a dairy; we were asking people
to believe in a different model. In 2024, we raised funds through a community
equity crowdfund.
Regrets
I have not cut things quickly enough when they were not working. I have always
been good at starting things, but less good at stopping them. When you have
invested time, money and emotion in an idea, it is tempting to keep pushing. I
have learned that protecting a failing idea drains energy from the right one.
What would you have changed?
I would have had more faith in the scale of what we were building. When you are
fighting to keep the wheels turning, it feels like survival. Looking back, we
were laying the foundations for something bigger: a dairy business with
provenance outside the conventional system.
For further information please visit Mossgiel Organic Dairy
