On 19th October the local (Kendal, Cumbria) National Farmers Union hosted a discussion on IcaRE4Farms. Cumbria is the county that produces the second-largest volume of milk in England.
Four leading dairy farmers plus two NFU officials joined Richard Turner (ICaRE4Farms partner University of Lincoln) for a lunchtime chat at the NFU regional office in Kendal (excellent lunch). The objective was to get to grips with the data that IcaRE4Farms has produced from its pilot site and to consider the pros and cons of solar thermal energy production on their farms in Cumbria.
Richard presented the IcaRE4Farms video of the pilot site that generates solar thermal energy for a commercial veal farm in North West France. Everyone was impressed by the interview with the farmer at the pilot site. Clearly, farmers are farmers in whichever country they reside so common issues were quickly identified. Energy price volatility and big increases in energy prices were of course the main topics but technical questions on the level of complexity, the lifespan of the system, data collection and system management of solar thermal energy production on the farm were also discussed.
We next looked at the experience of the pilot site during a full year of use and found that about half of the energy requirement for the commercial veal farm was provided by the on-site solar thermal energy provided by the project in that period. This prompted even more discussion and several rough and ready calculations were done using the farmers’ recent much higher energy costs and estimated water use on dairy farms. These ‘guestimates’ supported the enthusiasm which was already apparent in the group.
We then considered the results of a feasibility model which has been built by the ICaRE4Farms team. This model uses the data collected from the pilot site plus previous experiments to calculate the expected proportion of energy a solar thermal energy system would contribute to any particular farm in any geographic location. Richard had already had one of the UK farmer’s data processed through the model. The result looked very encouraging.
The result of this positive reception by UK farmers and the National Farmers Union has been to encourage the IcaRE4Farms team to press ahead with refining and extending the project and to facilitate more contact between dairy farmers and this project.
