Last month Park Farm took home two Great Taste Awards for their fresh single-herd milk and cream and won top honors at the Royal Highland Show Scottish Dairy Championships, securing a Champion Cream treble for the third-year running, alongside gold awards for their whole and semi-skimmed milk. 

 

Director Ross Neilson told Scottish News the firm is still expanding across Scotland: “Earlier this year we secured all the Glasgow universities and colleges”, he said.

 

“We also go across to Arran three days a week. Arran Dairies act as a wholesaler and they wanted us to bring milk across to make their ice cream, it’s been a great success. It’s just grown arms and legs.”

 

Not one for farming life growing up, drummer Ross had dreams of becoming a rock star with local band The Detours, but eventually followed in the footsteps of his brothers Grant and Glen who manage the family business, overseen by dad Hugh and papa Tom, who still lives in the cottage and likes to check on how things are running - even though, Ross quips, “he doesn’t understand the tech”.

 

In 2020, the family launched business venture ‘What’s Fresh’, a doorstep delivery service, it continued to expand its offering and invested in a new purpose-built milk bottling facility.

 

The new milk deliveries boasted ultra-low food miles and reusable one litre glass bottles to cut down on single-use plastics and reduce emissions.

“Our unique product is fresh milk in a glass bottle”, said Ross.

 

“When we built the dairy four years ago, we had no experience of how to pasteurise milk, bottle or deliver it, and all the rules and regulations that go with it. It was a big learning curve and took two years to build, but it all came together. 

 

“We launched a delivery business in lockdown called ‘What’s Fresh’ to build a customer base before fully launching so we had about 100 customers to start with.

 

“Then we linked up with Equi’s Ice Cream, which was a real winner. They were looking for local milk with quality and provenance and they also wanted to reduce their plastic waste.

 

 

He added: “Our goal isn’t to get into the big supermarkets, we’re a bit anti-supermarket. Supermarkets squeeze suppliers and you can’t do bottle returns. You will pay a bit more for us, but we can guarantee the freshness, the quality and the service - and it’s in a nice returnable bottle.

 

“And the local community have been great because they want to know where their food comes from. A lot of folk cycle and walk their dogs up here and they can see exactly where their milk is made.”

 

Established in 1924, papa Tom took on the farm from an uncle who bought it as a local estate. Park Farm marked its centenary milestone as a dairy farm in 2024.

 

“The farm has been in our family for 102 years”, Ross explained. We worked out just recently that its been a dairy farm for 100 years so we missed our own centenary - that would have been a good excuse for a party!

 

“When my dad took it over from my papa it was old fashioned with 70 cows milking in an old byre, and then through my dad’s career he expanded and invested really heavily in growing the size of the business and the innovation. 

 

“I was never really interested in farming growing up so when my brothers took it on I did my own thing playing in my band and working in renewables, but my brothers were always going to be farmers. They couldn’t wait to get home from school and get the boiler suits on.”

 

Choosing to take on the commercial side of the operation over getting his hands dirty on the farm, Ross saw milk as an “overlooked product” and had ambitions of making it more marketable. 

 

He added: “I always feel like milk is such an overlooked product, nobody really markets it well. Everyone buys it but nobody gets particularly excited about it. 

 

“This is my family’s livelihood and I know how much investment, time, energy and care goes into making a pint of milk.

 

“I noticed farm vending machines popping up during the pandemic where you can go and fill a glass bottle. It was making milk more of a unique product.

 

“If you buy milk from us, it’s only coming from our cows. We can tell the story of knowing what the cows eat, where they sleep, we know where they’re milked and we know that they’re healthy.”

 

The sustainable practices at Park Farm strive to improve animal welfare and product quality.

 

Ross continued: “It’s regenerative farming that we do. So it’s not quite organic, but it’s all the same principles. We don’t put fertiliser on a field that doesn’t need it, we try and use waste from the farm or the grass so it’s more circular, we don’t use medicines that we don’t need to. 

 

“Sustainability is such a big thing now that that’s sort of filtered right down to the farm level as well. There’s no real human interaction with the cows now which is better for animal welfare, they just do their own thing.

 

“Ultimately it means that the cows are happy, they’re healthy and that means they give more milk, and a higher quality of milk.”

Celebrating another successful venture is farmer Grant who splits his time driving between driving tractors and birthing calves and running Park Farm Strength and Fitness with his wife.

 

 

The bespoke, custom-built gym on the farmland has built a community of nearly 200 members offering first class training facilities and coaching.

 

Grant, a former professional rugby player who trained with the Glasgow Warriors, makes the most of the picturesque surroundings by training with his clients outdoors as much as possible.

 

“A lot of family farms are struggling to make the sums add up now without either going and spending a load of money on something else, whether its robotics or expanding, or just selling up”, he said.

 

“There’s a reality now that you have to be at a certain scale to get the economies to make sense. Small family farms struggle unless they diversify. “Buying farms back then - in my grandpa’s era - was easier. Now succession and keeping farms in the family is a big industry discussion.

 

“The goal is not to sell all the farm’s milk, the goal is to put as much milk as makes sense into local doorsteps, offices and restaurants.”