FW: Farmers look to pig poo to boost revenues -BBC
Chris Hodrien
BBC 6 July 2011 Last updated at 00:00
Farmers look to pig poo to boost revenues
By Richard Anderson Business reporter, BBC News
The farm's 4,000 pigs are contributing to the upkeep of the pens they live
in
What to do with 12,000 tonnes of pig poo?
That's the question farmers James Hart and Jeremy Iles found themselves
asking two years ago when contemplating how best to supplement their
dwindling incomes.
Thanks to the buying power of the major supermarkets, pig farming is no
longer as profitable as it once was, and Mr Hart in particular was looking
at ways to make the most of the resources at his disposal.
The solution they came up with was beautifully simple; turn the huge amount
of pig faeces generated on the farm - not to mention cow dung and chicken
droppings - into hard cash.
The mechanism for doing so is, in essence, remarkably straightforward and
could secure the future of the farm and the livelihoods of the 10 families
which depend upon it.
Slow uptake
Glebe Farm near the sleepy village of Hatherop in Gloucestershire is an
unlikely place to stumble across a state-of-the-art, million pound biogas
station of which there are just a handful in the UK.
The plant can run 24-hours a day and output can be tailored to demand
The plant itself is wholly unremarkable to look at, but what goes on inside
could help to revolutionise not just this farm, but hundreds of others just
like it across the country.
In fact, the technology is proven and, given the government subsidies
available, profitable.
It's just that, like with most renewable energies, the UK has been
painstakingly slow on the uptake. In Germany, for example, there are
thousands of similar plants.
Hot air
In essence, vast quantities of animal waste are mixed with lots of grass in
a cylindrical tower - "basically a 3,000 tonne cow's stomach," says Mr Hart.
Bacteria then break down the mixture, producing methane, which is siphoned
off, cleaned and filtered.
Mr Hart has bet heavily on the success of his new biogas plant
This gas is then used to power what is effectively a £200,000 Mercedes truck
engine, which in turn powers a generator, electricity from which is fed into
the National Grid.
A by-product of the process is large quantities of fertiliser that remain in
the tower once the bacteria have worked their magic.
The heat generated by the process is also captured and used for central
heating at the farm house. It is, then, in renewable-energy speak, an
efficient 'closed-loop' system.
And the benefits to the farm are both numerous and substantial.
For a start, Mr Hart expects to be able to sell the 2.2 million kilowatt
hours of electricity generated each year - enough to power more than 175
homes - for about £300,000.
Almost two-thirds of this money comes in the form of a green energy
generation subsidy from the government - a perfectly standard arrangement
for any new energy source, and one that will be reduced once plant costs
come down.
On top of this, Mr Hart should save about £30,000 in fuel bills for the
farm, and of course pay no heating costs at home.
In addition, he expects to buy about 200 tonnes less fertiliser every year,
saving another £60,000.
And what's more, the process even removes almost all the smell coming from
the manure.
Harmful gases
But it's not just Mr Hart's business that benefits from the plant.
The hi-tech biogas plant requires more than 3km (1.8 miles) of wiring to
run
Methane is about 20 times worse than carbon dioxide in trapping heat in the
atmosphere and so is widely recognised as one of the more potent greenhouse
gases.
By capturing the methane produced by the waste generated by his 4,000 pigs,
100 cows and 100,000 chickens, Mr Hart expects to reduce his equivalent
carbon footprint by about 10,000 tonnes a year. That's the equivalent of
almost 9,000 return flights from London to New York.
He is also using far less fertiliser, which can be fairly carbon intensive
to manufacture.
Hard times
In theory, then, the biogas plant could give Glebe Farm a much-needed new
lease of life.
A standard truck engine adapted to run on gas runs the electricity
generator
Mr Hart's father took on the farm in 1969 and was able to make a good
living, but his son has found life much harder.
The price he receives for his pigs from the supermarkets is the same now as
it was 15 years ago, and was significantly lower for much of the past
decade.
With the cost of raw materials and labour, not to mention the price of bacon
and pork in the shops, increasing significantly over this time, margins have
been slashed.
Mr Hart needed to take drastic action to keep the family business going.
"I needed to find another source of income and I wanted to improve my
environmental impact," he says.
He and Mr Iles considered wind turbines and solar panels, but soon realised
planning permission would be tricky. Nor were they convinced either would
produce enough power.
Farming has moved a long way from the more traditional manual-labour
intensive tasks
Biogas generated from pig poo seemed the perfect answer - a "win win
solution where we could extract an income from something we already had,"
says Mr Hart.
Getting planning permission was easy, but finding the necessary cash proved
a great deal harder. "We had nothing but a very large overdraft," Mr Hart
explains.
Despite a £300,000 grant from the Rural Development Programme for England
and a payback of just four to five years, Lloyds was the only bank prepared
to stump up the extra £900,000 needed to buy and fit the entire plant from
low carbon energy firm Alfagy.
Beating targets
It may have been running for just three months, but, barring any unforeseen
major maintenance costs, the early signs are good.
"We are ahead of schedule and have already hit our September bank targets,"
says Mr Hart.
Mr Hart hopes to use the profits from the biogas plant to upgrade his pig
pens
In other words, the farm is back in business. There are no guarantees, but
Mr Hart says that until such time as the supermarkets pay a fair price for
his pigs, he will continue to rely on the revenue generated from his
animals' waste, not just to support his family and those of his workers, but
also to maintain his pigs.
"I'm not an environmentalist, I'm just a farmer who wants to be as green as
he can be," he says.
"As farmers, we are always thinking of the next 30 to 40 years and we [at
Glebe] are now fully committed for the next half a generation.
"We are custodians of the land and are just trying to leave it in a better
condition than we found it."
Thanks to the biogas plant and of course his pigs that feed it, Mr Hart and
his sons may now be in business long enough to do just that.
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-- Oliver Tickell