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BioNomad(TM) utilises waste to produce clean biogas for electricity, heating and milk pasteurisation, as well as a high-grade organic fertiliser.
About
Agriculture in the UK alone accounts for about 15% of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Most of these emissions come from manure and other agricultural wastes that are usually not adequately treated in the smaller farms due to the scale and cost of conventional disposal methods. Given that 90% farms in the UK and mainland Europe are smallholdings, we have focused on a simple question: how can farmers recycle and obtain value from their agricultural by-products in a cost-effective and sustainable way?
By-products of livestock farming, such as manure, are difficult to dispose of, produce odours, and are potentially attracting insects that are disease vectors. The most widespread practice at the moment is to spread manure over open fields and let it slowly degrade as a fertiliser. However, this is an inefficient way of recovering nutrients and is harmful to the environment, and, with increasing pressures on land use and environmental regulations, it is becoming unfeasible as a waste management strategy.
Our technology is an innovative waste-to-energy platform based around the principles of anaerobic digestion (AD). It can be easily shipped and installed in small to medium-sized livestock farms (i.e. from 10 cows or equivalent). If compared to costly and complex AD plants that are available to large farms, installation of our solution does not require any complex equipment and entails little or no permanent infrastructure. Our solution enables farmers to produce energy and an environmentally friendly fertiliser with minimum effort.
Essentially, our technology contributes to the development of circular economy and the reduction of the environmental footprint of livestock smallholdings. It improves the efficiency of their resource management and agricultural waste recycling thus enabling their autonomy and self-sufficiency. To date, we have already installed more than 10 BioNomad(TM) units in the UK and Africa, with sales underway in the EU, UK and Latin America.
Key Benefits
While agricultural technology has made great strides in converting farm waste into renewable fuel, solutions available for farmers in the UK and EU are complex, expensive, and designed mainly for large-scale farming operations. Our solution reduces the cost and complexity for small farmers. Advantages of our technology include:
- Costs under £50k vs. £150k minimum for existing alternatives;
- Operates with waste volume starting from 10 cows or equivalent vs. 100 cows minimum for existing solutions;
- Functional in colder climates; two available versions, adapted to different climates
- It doesn’t require construction planning permission nor complex installation works;
- No need for extensive training or special skills to operate;
- Modular design that allows adding capacity without hassle or move the unit around vs. no such possibility for existing solutions (i.e. permanent installation);
- Does not require grid connection to operate and works in cold climates without external energy source.
Applications
Our target market is small mid-sized dairy farms (starting at 10 cows or equivalent). This is due to the easy accessibility to uncontaminated slurry in dairy farms as cleaning practices for milking cows are already in place. They also have an ample requirement for biogas-powered heating (pasteurisation, cleaning, disinfection).
Even though dairy farms are our ideal customers, we work with all kinds of livestock farms. We have already installed BioNomad(TM) in farms with horses, pigs, poultry, insects, and in mixed organic farms.