EDITORS CHOICE
The hills are alive with the sound-thinking of sustainability
As the saying goes: ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’. A partly submerged tank containing a chopper pump and a mixer at Hendwr Farm’s biogas plant probably won’t win any industry awards in the ‘aesthetically pleasing’ category. But who cares? Least of all, Phil Hughes, who runs it.
A traditional hill farm in North Wales that produces lamb and beef? Yes. A highly innovative visionary business that leads the way in diversification by taking a truly circular view of its future? Ditto.
The farm (about 25 miles west of Wrexham) began in 1902, when it was purchased by Phil’s great grandfather, Cadwalader Jones Hughes.
‘Diversification’ is of course a big current buzz word, and good job too, but John Hughes (Phil’s father), saw the benefits of it back in the
late 1960’s when he began offering camping at the farm, which then evolved into the thriving Hendwr Caravan Holiday Park. Income from the serenely-set medium-sized static caravan holiday park was and continues to be a success, but its growth meant plenty of electricity consumption, so as the next Hughes’ generation brought its influence to bear, Phil (in 2011) went ahead with the introduction of ground- mounted solar panels.
“We wanted to limit external inputs into the farm,” he said, “and when we saw the benefits of this first venture into renewable energy, we started looking at how else we could expand it.”
Producing a modest amount of manure from 120 Angus calves, a plan emerged to combine this with waste, corn and chaff to feed a biogas plant that would not only produce energy, but fertiliser too, which especially given the rising costs, the farm didn’t really want to have to buy any more. The key ingredient though would be to use chicken litter, which has proved to be a very fast and efficient feedstock.
‘Strong financial case for making this source of renewable energy work’
“I would say that when we started building our biogas plant in 2015, we were gloriously ignorant,” added Phil Hughes. “It was a thousand times harder than we thought it would be! – but when you look at the value of farm produce compared to the value of anaerobic digestion (AD), there’s a strong financial case for making this source of renewable energy work and work well. Food is so undervalued. We’re incentivized as farmers to produce food as cheaply as possible, rather than look at the whole food cost and the effect on land and our wider society.
“We have almost 100 control signals on our biogas process, so if something isn’t right and an alarm goes off (typically in the middle of the night!) you have to deal with it straight away if you want to keep the plant up at its target performance levels, which for us, is a minimum of 95%. We have a 200kW engine, and a digester that very much fits our farm size. I’ll admit that we’re obsessive about maintenance, but we have to hit high numbers to be profitable, and you just can’t neglect the biological process. It’s not like a light that
20 | February 2025 |
draintraderltd.com
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