Mauchline’s Mossgiel Organic Farm has recently passed the first of its two annual audits from Scottish Organic Producers Association (SOPA).

The farm have been going through various works over the past couple of years to improve their carbon footprint, including cutting out over 8,000,000 pieces of single-use plastic.

They also encouraged East Ayrshire Council to reduce their levels of single-use plastic – wiping no fewer than 400,000 single-use bottles from the council’s waste output every year – and taking steps to improve their biodiversity.

The team at Mossgiel farm say they are well on the way to becoming a fully carbon neutral business by their target date of December 2025.

The SOPA audits are split into two – one for their family farm, where they use the cow with calf system and no cereals to produce gold foil milk.

The other is for the milk brewery, where the Mossgiel team brew the milk from the awesome co-op of organic farmers of South West Scotland.

“Yesterday was time for our organic farm audit” said a Mossgiel representative.

They added: “Maggie, the auditor who came to visit wanted to see the whole farm – asking what kind of plants were growing, checking all the seeds we plant are authorised to use in organic farming and checking the Mossgiel Girls’ living conditions to make sure they are being looked after.

“We show any medicine used in the past year through detailed records and have to prove we have spoken to our vet to prevent future problems so we only use medication as the absolute final defence.

“In the office, we go through loads of paperwork to see what we have bought for using on the farm, what we’ve sold and if we have planned ahead for potential problems.

“The fab news? We passed with no ‘Non-Compliances’ – a term used for things we haven’t been doing quite right”.

These checks are carried out because ‘Organic’ is a legally recognised term and it is against the law for a farm, or any other premises to sell something as ‘organic’ if it can’t be proved that all the necessary steps are being taken to meet the organic standards.

Therefore, these audits and visits are the best way to to monitor and prove that when you’re buying something that’s being labelled as ‘organic’ then it is organic from the grass, straight to the glass.