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Intake Farm, Skipton
Introduction
Through the RDPE, Yorkshire Forward has helped a farm in the region to buy the UK’s second bedding recovery unit.
- Recycles slurry into materials for bedding
- Requires no external energy
- Dramatically reduces costs and the incidence of animal diseases.
Summary
Yorkshire Forward has provided £119,000 from the Rural Development Programme for England (RDPE) to enable Intake Farm, Skipton, to purchase and install the UK’s second bedding recovery unit. Under the scheme, the farm was able to apply for 50% of the cost of the project.
The bedding recovery unit (BRU) extracts fibre from farm-animal slurry while reducing the volume and smell from waste-handling systems. The recovered fibre is dried and sterilised/pasteurised using the heat generated by microbial action within the material—no external heat is required.
The end result is used as bedding material on the farm, reducing the need for bought-in materials such as sand, sawdust, recycled paper pulp and straw. The problems with these traditional materials are that:
- They are expensive to buy and even more expensive to dispose of
- Some need to be ‘groomed’ with a large machine
- Deep beds may harbour disease and contain foreign materials/objects
- They add to a farm’s total manure volume
- They can change the soil structure in cropland
- They can be very abrasive to animals.
Waste transformed into bedding by a BRU bedding recovery unit is cleaner for animals and does not stick to their skin. It also reduces common pathogens by more than 99%—which dramatically reduces the incidence of mastitis.
