Solving the digestate dilemma

A new green digestate assurance scheme is set to resolve the dilemma currently faced by arable growers supplying both the distilling and the anaerobic digestor (AD) sectors.

Giving the scheme a “soft launch” at yesterday’s Arable Scotland, Scottish Quality Cereals (SQC) executive director Alistair Ewan, said it was set to make the use of approved digestate on land growing malting barley acceptable to the whisky industry by guaranteeing it came only from farm sources.

With 60,000ha likely to be devoted to growing AD crops by 2022, Ewan said that there was a real need to ensure that the digestate returned to farms could be used effectively and efficiently without threatening the ability of grain growers to meet the requirements of high quality markets such as malting.

“However, to date, there has been a reluctance amongst distillers and maltsters to accept grain from crops grown using this useful source of plant nutrients,” he said.

He explained that while all digestate returned to farms had to meet the BSI PAS 110 industry standard, there had previously been no guarantee that it came from farm sources – as other bio-wastes such as supermarket sandwiches were used in some AD plants.

However, he said that the “simple but robust” scheme using digestate passports would ensure the provenance of the product being returned to farms – making it acceptable to the whisky industry while at the same time allowing the nutrients and conditioning elements in the product to be returned to the land and effectively recycled in line with good farming and environmental practices.