Renewables

Anaerobic Digestion

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After researching the AD market and visiting countless AD plants around Europe, Simon Gittins took the decision to develop a new concept of digester with Russell Mulliner the MD of Marches Biogas based in Ludlow, Shropshire. Although a big risk at the time, the investment has paid off with Marches design proving extremely popular in the market place because of its versatility, build quality and improved efficiencies over the standard German type digester. Its ‘plug-flow’ design ensures a guaranteed retention time that other digester designs do not offer. This ensures that digester contents cannot leave the system partially digested, resulting in an efficiency gain of over 10%.

The digester is fed with waste dairy products, manures, crop by-products and crops. The crop element of the feed mix is circa 33% and dropping. Due to the increased fertility of our soils following 12 years of applying the valuable biofertiliser that is the by-product of the AD plant, the increased yields per acre more than match the amount of crop we feed to the plant.

We use some of the electricity on farm to run our operations and supply all our houses and the rest is exported to the national grid. The heat produced for our CHP (Combined Heat and Power) units is used to pasteurise the biofertiliser and dry crops via our drying floors.

Producing at our peak of 1900kw/hour, we produce enough electricity for over 5,500 households at any one time.

GROUND SOURCE HEAT PUMPS (GSHP)

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In 2019 began building our revolutionary GSHP drying floor system. Prior to this, GSHP had mainly been used for space heating and was thought not to suitable for drying wet products like grass, rye and lucerne. We proved that this could be done successfully and now have 4.8mw of GSHP’s installed. The heat from the ground is harvested via a 75,000m pipe system buried 1.2m below the surface.

We dry our cereals, oilseeds, rye and lucerne on these floors, using 100% clean renewable energy.

SOLAR

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In 2022 we started our latest renewable adventure by installing a 1mw ground-mounted solar array. By using an HV connection we were able to position the 3.5 acre site away from the main farmstead on poorer 3B classified land, well away from any houses. We placed the panels slightly higher and wider than is typical in order that we could plant wild flower mixes between them and allow grazing for sheep.