Mossgiel Organic Farm

A few important clarifications: • I’m talking about the rules allowing qualifying precision-bred foods to be authorised and sold without a label identifying that breeding method. I’m not claiming they’re already on supermarket shelves. • Yes, GM feed has long been permitted in conventional livestock farming, including Scottish dairy. Milk from cows fed GM feed doesn’t require a GM label. That doesn’t make the milk itself genetically modified. Organic standards prohibit deliberately using GM feed. • This change concerns a specific category of precision-bred plants, including certain gene-edited crops. It doesn’t remove the existing labelling rules for every GMO, or ordinary ingredient and allergen labelling. • Scotland hasn’t adopted England’s growing regime, but qualifying food lawfully marketed in England can reach Scottish shelves under UK internal-market rules. My point is about transparency and choice. You can support the technology and still support clear labelling. “We’ve done something similar for years” doesn’t answer whether shoppers should be told.

MOSSGIEL BUTTER IS BACK! You’ve been buying it faster than we could keep up, and we know it’s been frustrating finding it out of stock over the last few months!! We’ve made changes to help us keep up with demand, and we’re back in stock and ready to go!! A huge thanks to everyone who’s been buying it, asking for it and waiting for it to return. The demand has been WAYYY more than we ever imagined, but we need to make sure you can actually get your hands on the stuff!

CHEESE!! A special delivery from Jacqueline! Our cheese is FINALLY making its way to the supporters who invested in Mossgiel and helped make this happen. The first batch of deliveries heads out tomorrow, with everyone else’s following soon. To everyone waiting for theirs, thank you for your patience and for backing our mission. We can’t wait for you to try it. This cheese isn’t available to buy just yet - it’s for cheese investors only… but Mossgiel cheese for everyone else isn’t far away. Watch this space!

Every farm has their calving routine for new arrivals Here’s ours

It’s finally happening. 🧀 After a lot of learning, a lot of waiting and a considerably more complicated journey than we ever imagined, the first Mossgiel X Torpenhow cheeses are heading out this week!
 We’ve got hundreds of investor cheeses to work through first, so bear with us while we get them all where they need to go. If you invested and haven’t confirmed your delivery details yet, check your emails from last week.
 And for everyone asking when you can buy one… 
Not quite yet. 
Investors first. Then we’ll see where this slightly mental cheese adventure takes us. 
Massive thanks to the team at @torpenhow.cheese.co for helping us make it happen. 🧀

THE DROUGHT DIDN'T create fragility in British dairy. It’s exposed it This morning I spoke to BBC Scotland about why our collaboration of four small organic farms in Scotland are suddenly sending tens of thousands of litres of milk south. We’ve already sent around 56,000 litres down to help with shortages, with four independent organic farms here in Scotland working together to keep supply moving. For me though, the bigger story isn’t that Scotland has organic milk and England doesn’t - it’s that we’ve spent decades losing dairy farms and concentrating production into fewer and fewer places. Then you get a year like this one; drought, poor grass growth, heat stress and suddenly you see how little resilience is left in the system. We had earmarked this milk for new products to launch later this year, but when we say others in need of milk to sustain their own businesses - we couldn't say no. I believe that small farms and dairies working together, spread across different parts of the country have a much bigger role to play in food security than our modern world give them credit for. Anyway - one interview down. BBC Wales next and maybe some TV later -Bryce

FIRST MINISTER CHAT🐄🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 A pretty cool moment recently when I got the chance to speak directly with Scotland’s First Minister @JohnSwinney about Mossgiel, where we’ve come from and what we’re trying to build. From starting again after losing our milk contract, to bringing processing back onto the farm, putting calves back with cows, sticking stubbornly with reusable glass bottles and trying to prove that there’s another way to do dairy while teaming up with 3 other organic dairy farmers AND launching UK wide - it’s been some journey. So getting the opportunity to tell a little bit of that story directly to the First Minister was something I definitely wasn’t expecting when all of this started. More importantly, it was a chance to talk about the bigger picture too - Scottish farming, organic food, provenance and why businesses like ours need a food system that actually allows smaller producers to grow and challenge the status quo. Huge thanks to Stuart and the BaxterStorey Scotland team for giving Mossgiel a seat at the table alongside some brilliant Scottish producers from @qmscotland and @mungoswells Still plenty of work to do. But occasionally it’s worth looking back and remembering just how far this wee Ayrshire dairy has come thanks to all the support YOU give us everyday 🐄🥛🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

SICK OF HEARING ABOUT EPR YET? Because we’re sick of paying for it. The news covered a wee Scottish dairy who stopped using reusable glass bottles. Government says reusable packaging is encouraged. But glass is heavier, so it costs more when it first goes into circulation. And while they’ve spent more than a year saying this needs fixed, Mossgiel has already been hit with nearly five figures in EPR charges. So what’s actually being fixed? We collect our bottles.
Wash them.
Refill them.
Reuse them again and again. Yet the system still makes single-use plastic financially more attractive. EPR was supposed to reduce packaging waste. Right now, it risks becoming: EPR = DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS FOR REUSABLE GLASS. If the greener option is the harder and more expensive one, something has gone badly wrong.

HELP US BREAK IT We built a new postcode checker to help you get Mossgiel delivered For YEARS we've had calls and emails asking to have Mossgiel delivered - and for those same years we've taken days to come back to you because we've been using ancient methods to look up who delivers where. We've finally popped into the modern world and built a postcode checker - to let YOU know if Mossgiel can be delivered in your street AND If it can't - you can leave your deets and we'll ask if our delivery partners would be able to pop by. Give it a go now and let us know if it works - at HomeDelivery.MossgielFarm.co…

SEVEN YEARS to get one tractor into one field!! Back in 2019, we started working with @Matthew_Algie Coffee on a simple idea: could their waste coffee be composted alongside our farmyard manure, animal bedding and waste feed then returned to the soil at Mossgiel? Today, it finally happened. Coffee waste → compost → soil → grass → cows → milk → coffee. It’s taken TWO SEPA agreements, soil sampling, organic approval, paperwork to sinnk a ship and plenty of work from both teams; admittedly, us being a bit slow at times too… But seeing that spreader going across the field today made all of it worthwhile. "One persons muck is another's gold" is the old saying - sometimes waste is just something useful in the wrong place. Seven years later, we’ve finally closed the loop.

CAP OFF → RECYCLING SEAL OFF → FOOD BIN BOTTLE RINSE → RETURN

Happy World Plant Milk Day 🌱 Genuinely, thanks for making people think about milk again. Where it comes from. How it’s made. What’s actually in it. Dairy needed the kick up the a**e We’ll take it from here🥛

WOULD IT WORK? A year ago, Back of House magazine came to Mossgiel to see whether our cow-with-calf system and other MENTAL ideas could actually work! This week, Calvin and Till came back - and a lot has changed since then. We've gone from buying milk through a co-op to working directly with organic family farms. We've gone GB wide with Modern Milkman, launched cheese (well... almost - it's still coming! 😅), started making butter with that keeps selling out faster than we can make it and continued building a mission that tries to prove there's a different way of doing things. We talked about the highs, the lows, what we've learned over the last year and where we think the future of small-scale dairy lies - warts and all and jeez, it's been rough at times. A huge thanks to Calvin and Till for making the trip - we'll share the interview as soon as it's published. We think you're going to enjoy this one.

IS IT EVEN FIXABLE? The problem isn’t that the farming minister fainted. The problem is how disconnected government has become from farming. There’s an obvious joke in there - the last MP to get into trouble in a fridge was Boris Johnson, when he disappeared into one to avoid Good Morning Britain during the 2019 election campaign. This time though, the poor MP getting the flak, @StephenMorganMP , says it was the sudden change from the heat outside into refrigerated storage that hit him; and he actually praised the workers who deal with that every day. But the story is raising eyebrows in farming for a much bigger reason. The person now responsible for helping shape the future of British farming has come into the job with very little background in farming or food production. That’s something farmers have been frustrated about for years. And stories like this are perfect fuel for another round of polarised arguments about farming when, frankly, what we need is more understanding, more collaboration and a bit less shouting from both sides. Because the people making decisions about farming often have very little experience of actually doing it - yet those decisions can have consequences that last for generations. The thing about farming is, it can’t be run from spreadsheets and PowerPoints, animals get sick,, calves arrive at 2am, machinery breaks exactly when you need it most and the weather can destroy months of work - the current drought being a fairly good case in point. Decisions made in Westminster can genuinely be the difference between a family farm surviving for another generation, or disappearing into another statistic that gets used to tell us small farms just don’t work anymore - like our good pal @Johnmcternan who loves to shout about it. I don’t think you need to have been a farmer to become Farming Minister. But I do think you need to properly understand farming before making decisions that affect the people producing our food. So Stephen - and @andyburnham - Come to Mossgiel. Not for a staged photo opportunity. Put the wellies on, start early, milk some cows, wash some bottles, meet the team and look through the numbers. See what producing food in Britain actually involves. Farming in Scotland might be devolved, but many of the challenges and opportunities we face are exactly the same as those facing our colleagues across the UK. So come up, spend a day with us and let’s have a proper conversation about the future of farming. And don’t worry. We don’t have a meat fridge

We didn’t see much of the #eclipse because, clouds But any excuse will do to play on the big bales 👌🏼

WE NEED TO TALK Returning glass bottles for reside OS one of the best ways to reduce single use plastic But, they can cause some challenges too! At the dairy, we’ve seen a rise in bottles coming back a wee bit too covered in yesterdays milk And those caps can’t be reused (we did try but the metal inside them degrades with washing) We’d really appreciate it if you could: ♻️ Take off the cap 🌱 Pop the compostable seal in food waste 💦 Rinse and return your bottle So we can truly keep our glass bottle dream growing

MILK COFFEE COMPETITION Jason and Aidan swapped the dairy for Edinburgh to support Starter Culture’s Latte Art Throwdown - an evening packed with incredible talent, brilliant coffee and an even better community. A huge thanks to everyone who came along. The standard of latte art was unreal… although we’re still not convinced anyone can pour a better cow than our cows can. 🐄☕

We BURIED our packaging How will it go?

Changing dairy isn’t as simple as choosing a different bottle. I’ve read every one of your comments. Now I’d love to know what you think about this idea. #ChangingDairy #FamilyFarms #OrganicFarming #BetterFood #PlasticPollution #Sustainability #Mossgiel

You’ve not heard from me for a while - because ive been wrestling something huge For seven years, we’ve believed reusable glass was the best way to deliver milk. I still believe that. But what happens when two principles you care deeply about start pulling in different directions? Is it better to eliminate as much plastic as possible as a small business now - or help far more people choose organic milk, support more family farms and create a bigger positive impact later? I’m genuinely torn. I don’t want Mossgiel to be remembered for the bottle we use. I want us to be remembered for the change we make. I want us to become the Patagonia of dairy. This isn’t an announcement. It’s a conversation. I’d really value your thoughts after watching the video.