Squirrelling away the Squirrels
The smell of cowpats crusting in the sun, and the sudden swirl of dung flies rising as I pass, or the smell of manure drying in the summer sun in the empty cattle fold as a stock-dove rises with a sudden clap of wings, and I’m back as a boy mooching around the farm in the summer holidays. Manure has many pleasant associations for those of us brought up on farms. The faint whiff of dried cow-muck on my father’s overalls was part of his comforting warm aura. He used to say that when he mucked out the rows of pigsties (before whitewashing them and putting nice fresh straw down for the hop-pickers) that the smell of pig muck gave him quite an appetite. I hope that worked for the hop-pickers too, eating their bread and jam.
So of course my nostrils started to twitch when I smelled a new kind of black manure being spread on the fields this autumn. Manure should smell good, and when it doesn’t I need to know why. It turned out, as I had suspected, to be ‘digestate’ – the residue from an anaerobic digester the size of a gasometer, the residue from the biogas production process on a nearby ‘farm’.
There are only five kinds of renewable energy – solar, wind, tidal, hydro and geothermal. All these come from outer space, from the sun and the moon acting on the earth, except for geothermal, which will continue to be available as long as the earth has a hot core. And all of them, once the collectors are in place, require a minimal level of maintenance.
Any other kinds of energy generation need to be viewed with scepticism at best. If it comes from earth, it can run out. If it comes from space it can’t. If it comes from space, we just collect it. If it comes from earth we need some kind of industrial process to produce it. Using wood or plant material to produce energy may not be directly using fossil fuels, but the production process uses large amounts. The carbon from trees or energy crops used to produce heat or power may be recaptured when we plant new trees or energy crops, but this short-cycle use of carbon is not carbon neutral as long as we are not using truly renewable energy to power its production, transport, harvesting and so on. And it all requires us to use precious land which could be better used either to produce food or to give space back to nature and revive the biosphere. We on earth need to outsource our energy supply. And we need to be wary of the greenwashing of energy suppliers who claim, for example, to be selling ‘green gas’. There is no such thing, and to we need to be aware of the practice of adding small amounts of biogas to fossil gas in order to greenwash it.
We are all paying for the generation by bio-digesters of phoney renewable energy at the expense of both the biosphere and food production. There would be no good reason for having an anaerobic bio-digester on a normal farm if the market wasn’t rigged its favour. It would be an expensive and unprofitable investment were it not for the EU support that has been available, and our Renewable Heat Incentive Scheme, under which producers of ‘renewable biogas and biomethane’ are paid for the gas they produce. It’s like the scheme under which you get paid for the electricity you generate with solar panels on your roof. The stated aim is to support the production of energy from renewable sources, meeting targets no doubt promised at climate summits. Some government support – for genuine renewables like wind and solar - has been very successful in getting renewable energy generation going in this country. Other schemes, like payments supporting wood fuel or biogas, have been very questionable. All these schemes have served the interest of governments with targets to meet, and been good for wealthy people who can afford the investment. Less good for the ordinary people who pay for the generous Renewable Heat Incentive payments out of a levy on their fuel bills. They have been good for landowners and farmers too, because of the loopholes which allowed landowners to get paid to generate more heat than they needed. Chicken sheds around here, when they were being cleaned between crops of chickens, were said to be often heated to the max with the doors open because the RHI scheme paid the farmer for the heat generated and asked no questions. It was loopholes and abuses of this kind that caused the scandal that brought down the power-sharing government in Northern Ireland.
The whole Renewable Heat Incentive scheme is actually a form of Private Finance Initiative (PFI). Under PFI, first thought up by John Major in 1992, the government got private companies to pay for building hospitals and bridges and other bits of expensive infrastructure. This kept the cost off the government balance sheet for a while, but repaying capital raised in this way for public projects actually costs the public three times as much as it would do if the government raised the cash in the way governments normally borrow money. People who could afford to invest their savings in solar panels keep the cost of solar power off the government books and their generous rewards are paid for out of levies on all our fuel bills.. This was the environment that encouraged the development of on-farm bio-digesters.
Farm digester plants have also benefited from various other European initiatives since they started to get popular about 10 years ago. They would not have happened without such support because they do not make much sense on a normal ‘traditional’ UK farm. Anaerobic digesters were originally seen as a ‘solution’ to problems with industrial farming. In the Netherlands, for example, intensive pig farming produce daunting and damaging quantities of manure. In the USA there are feedlots with many tens of thousands of animals, and the manure becomes an intractable problem, a pollutant, not economic to truck to distant farms that might use it to manure crops. Stacked in massive piles or in huge lagoons, which reduces the supply of oxygen, this manure breaks down anaerobically, producing methane, a greenhouse gas 25 times more serious than carbon dioxide. When such farm waste is put in digesters this methane is captured, but when the methane is burned to generate energy it releases carbon di-oxide anyway, the same carbon dioxide it would have released if it had been treated like normal manure. Biodigesters are an industry that depends on and grew out of a way of producing food that you may think, members of the jury, is inhumane and unhealthy, apparently unable to exist without the use of hormones and antibiotics because the animals are kept in utterly unnatural conditions and proximity, where diseases can flourish, without fresh air, exercise or a normal diet. Cows did not evolve to eat maize.
In the UK, livestock raising has traditionally been part of mixed farming, with the manure being recycled to fertilise crops and improve soil quality. Fodder may be grown on the farm, and the cattle will be able to graze in open fields for at least part of the year. Such farms do not produce enough manure and farm waste to cause a problem, or to make the investment in a digester worthwhile. Even buying in manure from neighbouring farmers is unlikely to provide the quantity or quality of feedstock needed for the digester to be a viable proposition. So most of the digesters you see will be being fed by crops of rye and maize grown specially to feed them.
Whatever the case for bio-digesting manure mountains, where they exist, there is no rational case for growing crops just to feed a digester. Or if there is it is based solely on the profit of the farmer, not on any environmental case, and the farmer’s profit is the result of a market rigged by the Renewable Heat Incentive. The source of the energy in the waste is, ultimately, the sun shining on crops that capture the energy of the sun through photosynthesis and are then eaten and turned into manure by farm animals, but the whole industrial process of planting and cultivating and harvesting and processing in a digester is much more complex and inefficient than simply harvesting the same solar energy directly using solar panels, and it also uses fossil fuels to power every stage of the process. Very little renewable in any of that, though its advocates claim it is slightly better than burning gas derived from fossil fuels. My reply would be, don’t burn that either.
The digesters you see – and when you start looking there are a surprising number around - are actually industrial operations masquerading as farm operations and benefitting from all the subsidies and lax planning controls that apply to farms. We do not need these digesters. Methane is produced by microbes in the absence of oxygen. So it is produced inside cows, and inside anaerobic digesters, but properly managed farm manure is not an important source of methane. It does give off some carbon di-oxide, but digesters do not reduce the impact of that in any way. Without oxygen, in an anaerobic digester, methane and carbon di-oxide are produced. Methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas, reckoned to be about 25 times worse than carbon di-oxide, but when the methane is captured and burned to generate power the by-products are water and carbon di-oxide. So the process on a normal farm does nothing to combat global warming. It just holds some carbon di-oxide for a while, tied up in methane, to be released later when the methane is burned.
In the UK there are not so many extraordinary mountains and lagoons of manure to supply bio-digesters, although the industrial chicken farmers round here are working on it, producing quite enough to foul up the River Wye. So farm bio-gas plants need to truck in the specially-grown feedstocks - crops like maize or rye grown specifically to feed the digesters – from some distance. Manure may only produce about 15 to 25 cubic metres (m3) of biogas per tonne of material. Purpose-grown crops are much more productive. Grass silage produces 160-200m3 per tonne, while silage made from maize generates 200-220m3, and potatoes 280-400m3. These crops are grown using all the fossil fuel inputs farmers use, such as diesel, pesticides and chemical fertilisers, and they also take up large amounts of land, taking high quality land out of food production. According to an article in the Farmers’ Guardian, a biogas plant with a capacity of one megawatt "requires 20,000-25,000 tonnes of maize a year, accounting for 450-500 hectares of land". As George Monbiot pointed out years ago, this compares rather badly with the area of land (or seabed) taken up by the slim concrete pillar of a wind turbine. The average size of a UK farm is 54 hectares, so if the figures above are correct that’s 10 farms to run a one megawatt digester. Most onshore wind turbines in the UK have a capacity of between 2 and 3 megawatts, though their output may be reduced by lack of wind at times.
When farming comes under any sort of criticism for effects on the environment, it is customary for the National Farmers Union to tell us that farming is feeding the nation. But it seems that if economic conditions favour an industrial gas plant on the farm taking hundreds of hectares out of food production, food production is no longer so important. The case made then will be around providing renewable energy, although farm biogas is not green energy in any meaningful sense. And if the conservation movement’s target, acknowledged by Boris Johnson, to allocate maybe 30% of the land to protect biodiversity and sequester carbon and so forth is to be realised, there is no space for using prime farmland and high-input agriculture to feed digesters. Wind and solar are simpler, genuinely renewable, and do not compete with either food production or nature conservation. We don’t need farm biogas that is not made from genuine farm waste, and we particularly don’t need its addition to the gas grid to be a cover for phoney claims by energy suppliers to be selling green energy.
The owners of the biggest on-farm digester that I’ve seen round here seem to be so concerned to smuggle loads of crops trucked in without snarling up the village that they have built a tarmac road alongside the Lammas Meadows, where years ago we campaigned to stop a bypass. It seems that farmers can build farm roadways without much scrutiny under the useful ‘Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) Order 1995’. The farmer must be able to demonstrate the track is reasonably necessary for the purposes of agriculture within the holding. This begs the question as to whether such industrial operations sited on farms should claim to be part of farming. (Could you claim hauling straw to your strawboard factory was a farming operation for planning purposes, I wonder?)
Behind all this of course are fundamental questions about how we live, how we occupy our only planet. And farming is crucial to this, because farming occupies the natural world in a very different way from any other industry. Industry affects the natural world, of course, and exploits its resources, but farming uniquely has almost entirely replaced the natural world and continues to exploit its surviving remnants. All the land in this country that can support biodiversity, our planet’s biological capital, is also seen as farmland, a resource that can be owned and exploited for the benefit of individuals that we allow not to be very answerable to the rest of us. The impact of farming on the remnants of our natural world is incalculable and ill regulated, which is why any writing on the state of nature must always come back round to the question of how we farm, because we farm everything. How we farm, and on what terms we hold or use land, are crucial to the survival of the biological capital of the planet, to our actual survival, because farming increasingly involves squandering the biological capital on which we depend for our survival. We act as if the biological and natural resources of the planet are just running expenses. Biological diversity, the real capital on which we all depend for our survival, is declining faster now than at any time in our history. Since 1970, there has been on average almost a 70% drop in the populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians. Around one million animal and plant species – almost a quarter of the global total – are believed to be threatened with extinction. We carry on ‘spending’ this biodiversity capital, these creatures, in the hope of getting a cash return, but we have not yet developed methods of accounting for the value of things that the farmer cannot sell, things that farming threatens, that we need for our survival – everything from carbon sequestration, soil quality and flood protection, to the joy of wild flower meadows and birdsong. We act in ways that deplete the natural capital that is the biosphere, but account for this as if it was just running expenses that can be set against cash income and seen as profit or loss, though in planetary terms it is simply loss. The accounting system which says that farming makes a profit from growing crops to generate biogas, because the subsidised cash receipts are greater than the running costs for the individual farmer, takes no account of carbon di-oxide generated or of the loss of land to biodiversity, the loss of biological capital, that results from the increased pressure on land, which may happen because a few people can make money by running completely unnecessary digesters to produce a spurious form of renewable energy. This accounting system is a fraud we are perpetrating on our planet and our children, a fraudulent project to squirrel away their very futures – and their squirrels - in our bank accounts.