A Dumfries and Galloway farming couple ‘Ivor and Daisy Dunnit’ accidentally made a discovery that could cheapen the cost of road repairs in the future.
Ivor told DGWGO in an exclusive interview “It all started when my wife Daisy was washing a very mucky pair of my overalls after I had done the milking a few months ago. My milking suit was filthy, covered in cow muck and milk, so Daisy put them in for a boil wash.”
Ivor continued “Instead of a lovely clean set of coveralls coming out of the machine, my gear was all covered in a black sticky substance. It seems that the muck from the cows had reacted with the spilt milk that was also on them when going through a boil wash.”
Daisy Said “No matter how hard I tried to wash the sticky substance off Ivor’s clothes it just wouldn’t vanish. The only thing that would remove it was a wee bit of petrol, but that rendered Ivor’s milking suit useless, so I was going to throw it away. But our son Micky works in a lab at a nearby chemical plant in Dumfries, he took the overalls away to do some tests, to see if he could discover how to clean the stuff off.”
The Dunnits are unique in the farming world, as they are the only people worldwide that are known to have a heard of milking Belted Galloways. The family milk 100 of the black cattle with a white stripe, on their 250 acre farm that sits next to the A75 euroroute in Dumfries and Galloway.
When Micky Dunnit had got the results back from the tests he did at work he was amazed that the substance turned out to have all the same qualities as liquid tar. He Said “As soon as I found out that the black goo was the same as tar, we tried to make more of it, by mixing some of my dad’s cows milk with some muck, and we boiled it up in a pan. Within an hour or so, we had a pan full of bubbling tar, which we then mixed with some gravel and poured into a pothole on the farm drive, and it worked as it is still there today 3 months later.”
Micky continued:”We have tried to replicate the substance with muck and milk from other cows, but it only seems to work with the combination from Belted Galloway’s. The Chemical company that I work for are very keen to work with my parents to get the substance, that we have christened ‘Tar-Muck‘ tested on a large scale.”
“We are hoping that within the next few months we will be able to gain funding to produce Tar-Muck on a much bigger scale than we currently can in my mothers kitchen on the Aga. We have spoken with Councils Innovation expert ‘Miss April Fruel’ who says that with her help we may be able to help solve the regions pothole situation by Christmas.”
Micky finally said “The biggest bonus about our Tar-Muck is that due to it being from Belted Galloways, it has a natural white stripe in it when laid on a large surface, so if a whole road was covered with a layer of our product, there will be no need to paint stripes on it. Honestly – no bull ;)”
