N2 Applied, the European agricultural technology business, has welcomed UK government guidance on a new slurry infrastructure grant scheme that means farmers can use new technology to acidify animal waste rather than have to fit costly new covers and associated equipment to storage facilities.
New guidance from the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) covers grants for slurry infrastructure on English farms.
Defra has now specified that farmers using acidification, by means of acid or plasma treatment, to lower and maintain slurry below a pH of six do not need to bear the expense of fitting covers or apply for grants, as ammonia emissions will be sufficiently reduced.
This makes acidification a viable alternative to covers.
N2 Applied’s N2 Unit uses a scientific technique that applies just air and electricity to slurry, performing a plasma conversion that ‘locks in’ both methane and ammonia to the treated acidified material and increases nitrogen levels to make it as effective for crop production as chemical fertilisers.
“Defra’s clarity on acidification helps farmers to reduce the overall cost of treating slurry to safeguard the environment and counter soaring fertiliser costs,” Russell Jones, UK director, N2 Applied said.
“It strengthens the pathway to more sustainable food production that acid and plasma treatments like ours enable, because the capital and operating costs of the equipment are partly offset by not having to fit covers and being able to produce their own sustainable form of fertiliser.
“We look forward to further information from Defra in due course about how grant funding can potentially support the capital purchase of equipment like this to encourage take-up at scale, particularly on farms already generating renewable electricity,” he said.
The Defra scheme aims to drive investment in covers on above-ground, pre-cast concrete and earth bank storage facilities to improve the use of organic nutrients on-farm and reduce water pollution from farmers that have insufficient storage capacity.
It has been designed to enable farmers to increase stored volume from a minimum of four months required by the SSAFO (Silage, Slurry and Agricultural Fuel Oil) to six.
