Integrating AD into your farming business to treat farm waste, food waste or purpose grown crops can provide a lucrative additional revenue stream and save you money on energy generation, fertiliser production and waste management. See below to find out what’s best for your farm.

AD can help tackle the rising cost of heating and powering on-site operations on all areas of your farm, even your tractor. As well as protecting the energy your farm uses from exposure to fossil fuel price rises and giving you a significant carbon saving, any excess energy will not be wasted – it can be sold back to the grid and a renewable energy payment can be received from government.

Not only that; the biofertiliser (digestate) produced in the process can be applied straight to land as a replacement for expensive and carbon-intensive artificial fertiliser, improving yields while conserving valuable nutrients which can otherwise be wasted. And as the digestate market develops, this could become another profitable product and a further revenue stream in the future, with a potential value of well over £200m.

AD systems are able to treat almost any organic waste – slurries, chicken litter, vegetable offcuts, outgrade crops, animal by-product material and more. Using AD on your farm could reduce costs and greenhouse gas emissions from waste treatment and slurry storage, as well as providing revenue from the energy and digestate generated.

• Provide reliable energy to meet on-site demand, and give farms a diversified source of revenue from selling energy and digestate
• Produce a more stable product from slurry to spread back to land, and cut emissions from slurry management by capturing methane
• Make break crops profitable by turning them into energy, along with other farm waste such as vegetable offcuts and outgrade produce – improving yields from food crops
• Provide bioenergy which returns nutrients to land and rotates with crops for food production, rather than tying up land solely for bioenergy production. Growing crops to produce bioenergy also aids pest and weed control by, for example, controlling the growth of blackgrass – plus it generates a low-carbon biofertiliser

There are a number of different options available for becoming involved in AD, depending on the size of your farm, feedstock used, type of land you own, knowledge of AD, and how much time you are able to dedicate to your AD business. You can build your own plant, lease land to an AD developer, grow and sell crops for AD, join an AD co-operative, or go with a combination of these options.

Purpose grown crops, farm waste and food waste are the three principle groups of feedstocks that can be used on your farm in the AD process. You can use one or any combination of the three, dependent on your farming operations and access to reliable supplies of food waste.

We’ve compiled a range of reports and studies, for further reading on all aspects of AD in farming. If there’s anything else you’d like to know about AD and how it could benefit your farming business, please get in touch.

• Additional income from AD Centreforum report
• AD’s benefit to farming RASE AD plants on UK farms
• Beneftis of using crops for AD PGC briefing document
• Biofertiliser Beat rising cost of fertiliser and extreme weather by using digestate and compost
• Get paid to recycle waste WRAP 2012 Gate Fees report
• The value of digestate fertiliser CentreForum report, p. 8.
• Feedstock options KWS Energy Crops guide (2012)
• Building and operating a plant EA permitting guidance for AD (April 2010)
• Conserving nutrients Nutrients position paper

If so, we have compiled a list of frequently asked questions that can be found here