A pioneering Scottish organic dairy business has raised over £155,000 towards its future eco-friendly goals. 

Mossgiel Organic Farm set a goal of £300,000 from a crowdfunding – or ‘CowFunder’ – effort to build a state-of-the-art, zero-waste dairy facility.

Posting on LinkedIn, Mossgiel owner Bryce Cunningham (pictured), said: “With our Cow-Funder now closed you have raised an incredible £155,392 – buying 19,424 shares in Mossgiel, and the future of small scale farming in Scotland.

“All in, we didn’t hit our financial target, but that’s absolutely fine – what we have been part of has been so much bigger than we anticipated. We have over 400 new business partners, hundreds of thousands of people who know who we are that didn’t a month ago, and a new opportunity for small scale dairy to create something incredible.

“We have over 400 new business partners, hundreds of thousands of people who know who we are that didn’t a month ago … and a new opportunity for small scale dairy to create something incredible”

“It all means that we won’t be able to hit out goals quite as fast as we wanted – but that’s ok too, because we will hit them; it’s just going to take a smidge more time.”

Multi-award winning Mossgiel, which has its own herd of 45 Ayrshire Cows, works with five other local farms as a cooperative to supply businesses and local authority sites across south-west Scotland using its branded electric vehicles.

Mossgiel says it acts as “the bridge between the farming families and our buying supporters, handling the pasteurisation, processing, bottling and delivery”. One ground-breaking initiative involves supplying schools operated by East Ayrshire Council, which includes the installation of zero-waste organic milk vending machines.

Mossgiel’s milk is non-homogenised and the dairy uses a ‘low and slow’ brewing process designed to preserve the natural nutritional goodness of the organic whole milk.

Mossgiel says it is on its way our way “to being 100% self-sustainable”. As well as applying some innovative engineering to ‘brewing’ its Milk, it has also installed a bio-mass boiler, leading to significant savings in heat efficiency and pitting the business on track to be carbon-neutral by 2025.

Images from Mossgiel’s ‘CowFunder’ campaign