A real muck of lidded manure decision
The CLA has called on the Environment Agency to reverse its decision to treat farm-based digestate as waste, saying it is putting an unwarranted burden on biogas production on farms.
The management of waste – from the food industry or kitchens - needs strict controls and incurs high fees, which go to the Environment Agency (EA), but the CLA argues that applying these controls to clean farm manures and clean crops when digested causes more harm than good.
The EA currently differentiates between the manure that farmers keep in a container with no lid, and manure kept in a lidded – or canned - container, which captures the methane produced - a process called anaerobic digestion (AD).
The Environment Agency classes AD as a waste process, presumably because it mistakenly thinks it equivalent to incineration, but farmers can use manure on their own farm without it being waste.
CLA President Henry Aubrey-Fletcher said: "The Environment Agency has made a muck of this decision. It is a great shame it considers agricultural crops, manures and slurries if treated by anaerobic digestion as waste."
The CLA President added: "Under normal conditions, raw manure in an open tank will start breaking down, releasing quantities of methane into the atmosphere. By contrast, AD captures this gas, which is 23 times more damaging as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
"Moreover, researchers have proven that processing manure with AD reduces the risk of animal disease, and kills most of the weed seeds too."
He said that AD also improved the availability of the nitrogen in the manure, making it easier for plants to absorb, and helping to reduce in-field nitrogen emissions as well as improving yields.
Henry Aubrey-Fletcher added: "Furthermore, the methane captured can be used as a fuel for renewable energy.
"This burden is not applied by any other waste regulators in the EU, save France, which unsurprisingly has very few AD plants. Certainly the leading proponents of AD - Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Austria - do not treat farm-based digestate as waste under the same EU waste regulations."
