Laganory

Laganory was created by David and Wilma Finlay, two visionaries with a deep love of animals, at The Ethical Dairy on Rainton Farm, in south west Scotland. Over 25 years, they moved from conventional farming to an organic, 100% pasture, regenerative, cow with calf dairy, and are now at the forefront of a global movement to transform the farming industry.

The Ethical Dairy is revolutionary in that young calves are not separated from their mothers as they are in traditional dairies at birth, but instead are kept together to significantly improve animal welfare, as well as reduce the use of antibiotics, increase biodiversity and cut energy use.

The dairy had been organic for two decades by 2012, so was already leading the way in terms of animal welfare in the UK, however they wanted to do more, so built a custom dairy that year which would allow cows and their calves to stay together. This was redesigned over a number of years and in 2019, the dairy committed to this way of farming permanently.
The cows behaviour showed a significant reduction in stress, they showed improvement in health and higher than expected levels of productivity, while the calves absolutely thrived being reared by their mothers and grew twice as quickly as before.

Since the project began, the dairy has cut gas emissions by more than half, reduced energy use by more than half, cut both antibiotic use and agro-chemical use by 90%, doubled the productive life of cows and increased farm biodiversity five-fold. The farm is now carbon negative and is even sequestering significantly higher levels of carbon than commercial forestry could achieve.