On the organic farm where Rabbie Burns wrote some of his most famous lines, Bryce Cunningham has created a sustainable dair y producing welfare-friendly milk that will soon reach doorsteps all over Scotland
Ashort stroll from Bryce Cunningham’s milking parlour is the field where Robert Burns composed To A Mouse. “I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion / Has broken Nature’s social union,” wrote the farmer’s son-turned-poet after turning over the creature’s nest with his plough. More than 200 years later, Bryce was cutting silage in the same field when the lines struck home: “It was the first time I connected the history of the farm with what Iwas trying to change.”
Bryce grew up at West Mossgiel Farm in Mauchline, East Ayrshire, where his grandfather and father were tenant dairy farmers. As a teenager, he couldn’t wait to get away from the farm made famous by the national bard, who once lived at East Mossgiel Farm next door: “I’d get cross because my trainers got dirty walking to the car.”
He left at 16 to become an apprentice technician at Mercedes-Benz, but was drawn back ten years later when his father and grandfather died within 18 months of one another, leaving Bryce a business mired in debt. “Small dairies were being squeezed out,” he says. “Dad was a respected, award-winning farmer, but he’d invested heavily in a bigger milking parlour and larger herd to survive.”
Ayear after his father’s death, in 2015, milk prices plummeted and Bryce found himself tied into a contract paying less than ten pence for every litre he produced. Faced with bankruptcy, he sold most of the 120-strong Ayrshire-Holstein herd that his father and grandfather had spent 67 years building. “I sold our machinery, too, everything I could to pay off debts,” he remembers. “It was a very rough time. There was nothing else to lose.”
BREWING UP AN IDEA
Left with just 28 cows, Bryce turned his back on conventional dairying in a last-ditch bid to save the family farm. He decided to pasteurise his own milk and sell it directly to customers instead of going through a commercial buyer. “I’d grown up drinking milk straight from the cow,” he says. “Supermarket milk tasted like water.”
It is illegal to sell raw (unpasteurised) milk in Scotland. But by drawing on his technical training to modify a secondhand yogurt pasteuriser, Bryce devised a method for pasteurising at a lower temperature than large-scale dairies. “It kills the pathogens but keeps the flavour,” he says, likening his gentler method to craft beer brewing. “Our milk is the closest you can get in Scotland to the richness and sweetness of raw milk.”
