Generating power from waste helps to solve two problems - what
to do with rubbish, and how to reduce our dependence on fossil
fuels.
Dynamic vegetable farmers Barfoots of Botley, faced with the
disposal of vegetable waste, have built a £3.5m anaerobic digestion
plant on their Sefter Farm, at Pagham near Chichester in West
Sussex. Anaerobic digestion breaks down organic wastes to produce
biogas, a story in which Shufflebottom plays a part in 2010, by
contributing a seven-bay steel-framed building.
Sefter Farm specialises in a range of vegetables including
sweetcorn, and each year has nearly 25,000 tonnes of corn waste to
dispose of. Sweetcorn is a summer crop, and to enable the digester
to keep working all year, Barfoots store 7,500 tonnes of ensiled
sweetcorn for use in the winter months. A new reservoir stores four
million gallons of water squeezed from the plant residues, to be
used for irrigating the next crops.
The plant itself has two primary digesters and a secondary
digester. The biogas fuels a combined heat and power unit, imported
from Austria and costing some £750,000, which generates 1.1
megawatts of electricity, for use on the farm and with surplus
power sold into the National Grid. The plant is low-lying, and to
protect against the possible threat of sea flooding, three-metre
high soil banks have been constructed around it.
Barfoots, founded in the early 1970s by Peter Barfoot and with
farms in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight besides West Sussex, are
the largest European processors and packers of sweetcorn, and 32
other vegetable products. The company has a global sourcing
operation active in 33 countries around the world.
Shufflebottom's role in this important British enterprise is to
provide a steel-framed building 40.95m by 20.1m, and 6.4m high to
the eaves. The building, in seven bays, has a roof clad in 0.5mm
plastic-coated leathergrain-finish insulated composite panel with a
80mm thick core, and with 82 roof lights each 1.5m long.