Beef ending and anaerobic digestion on Scottish farm

John McIntosh finishes 2,000 cattle on an annual foundation whereas additionally managing an anaerobic digestion (AD) plant on his farm at Dunragit, near Stranraer in south-west Scotland.

The preliminary funding in AD was made round eight years in the past. The feedstock for the system contains a mixture of cattle slurry and silage – grown on the farm.  

John defined: “By way of our livestock enterprise, we handle a herd of suckler cows with their progeny supplemented with bought-in shops.

“Now we have all the time dedicated to creating greatest use of all of the assets obtainable to us on the farm. Given our location, we will develop glorious crops of high-quality grass. That is the primary focus of the enterprise, which can be utilized to drive each the meat and AD operations.

“Now we have all the time regarded slurry as a beneficial fertiliser supply. And naturally, it constitutes a elementary a part of the feed inventory combine used for the AD plant,” he added.

The environment friendly administration of an AD operation signifies that the plant is working at round 100% capability on a 24/7 foundation. This leads to the digestate from the system being produced on a complementary foundation.

“Now we have discovered the digestate from the plant to be a really excessive worth fertiliser. However to make greatest use of the product, we have to discover a extra environment friendly method to retailer and transport it across the farm,” John defined.

Given this backdrop, John dedicated to spend money on a 1,000,000 gallon, post-tensioned above-ground slurry retailer, as a method of giving him the year-round digestate storage capability that he wants.

Furthermore, the choice was taken to find the tank on a web site that’s 500m from the primary farmyard.

“The brand new set-up permits me to pump the digestate from the unique retailer to the brand new tank through a 6″ underground pipe. A Doda pump meets this requirement in full.

“Because of this, we will now simply entry digestate at any level on the farm, at any time when we have to.”

Moore Concrete, based mostly in Ballymena, Co. Antrim, was commissioned to design, manufacture and set up the aboveground retailer.

“Participating the group to design and set up the brand new aboveground retailer was a simple choice,” john McIntosh added.

“Our job was to arrange the location. Moore Concrete took care of all the things else, from appointing the engineer to arranging all the required pre- and post-site checks.”

Moore’s above-ground tanks can be found in three heights: 4m, 5m and 6m. This affords a variety of capacities from 74,140 gallons to 1,034,000 gallons.