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 [1]