There has been a recent application by the Dillington Estate for an anaerobic digestion plant to produce methane. This would digest slurry from two milking herds plus chicken litter, all from within the estate. All admirable stuff.......
However it is proposed to take about 440 ha out of some 800 ha of the estate's in hand land to produce silage crops to be used solely in the digester. The result would be the production of 1 mW of methane and the loss of about 3,000 tonnes of wheat and some oilseed rape yearly. The attraction for the applicant is that the Government would pay twice as much again as whatever was paid for any power fed into the electric or gas grid. In landscape terms the project looks unobjectonable. SSDC has been asked to make it a condition that the origin of all feedstock is restricted to the estate, so that there isn't an increase in road traffic.
What is a worry though is the loss of wheat/rape/food production in a time when food security is an area of increasing concern. Does anyone agree?
