Peacehill Farm is a family farming company based on the fertile banks of River Tay, producing cereals, potatoes, vegetables, chickens, pigs and cattle. In addition, a significant investment was made in 2015 to add an Anaerobic Digestion plant as an additional revenue stream and to reduce the farm’s operational costs. The farm recycles the manure from the livestock and the 2.5 million broiler chickens it produces annually alongside AD crops, to generate 5MW of energy and produces predominantly biomethane which it exports to the national gas grid. The plant provides enough renewable electricity to power 5,867 homes, and enough gas for heating and cooking for 2,623 homes.
Farmed by the Forster family since 1926, the farm has supported four generations and, in that time, has expanded from tenant farmers to landowners in 1992 with further expansion in the purchase of additional farms in the area. These farms now work toward a common plan in food, land management, and renewable energy production.
The Peacehill Farm AD plant is accredited under the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) and Feed-in-Tariff (FiT) schemes but initially the family had depended almost entirely on investment for the plant’s construction leaving their own stake at only 10%. With ambition to increase productivity and the efficiency of the plant, it was important to own a controlling stake and a restructure in 2020 allowed the business to benefit from an £11 million investment while increasing the farm’s stake in the plant to 51%. The family will now see the long-term benefit of the plant and existing feedstock contracts and can turn their plans of increasing productivity and efficiency into a reality.
The crop side of the farm comprises potatoes and vegetables, with cereals making up the rest of the rotation. The vegetables are grown and marketed through East of Scotland Growers, a farmer-owned co-operative, which supplies all the major multiples.
East Coast Growers was established in 1987 with the purpose of providing the industrial grower with the benefits of being part of a larger group, allowing members to grow together for the future. To this day, ESG is still focused on achieving its founding aim by providing the maximum return to the grower.
A wide variety of potatoes are grown, and all are aimed at the pre-pack market with cold storage used to maintain quality throughout the year.
The family has made significant investment in other renewable energy and technology including biomass boilers, solar panels across the chicken shed roofs and a Combined Head and Power (CHP) engine on site to capture the heat that would normally be wasted in electricity generation and supply it to local buildings.
An albeit unusual crop that is included, making up about 9% of the fuel ration, is barley grain which is harvested mature and lightly milled to make the starch more available to the AD plant’s bacteria.
In a cyclical relationship, digestate from the AD plant then goes back onto the land which helps boost fertility and organic matter on the farm’s light to medium soils for a range of crops.
The other bonus from the barley is its straw yield. The digestate is potash-rich and by removing the straw, this can avoid soil potash levels getting too high from the digestate. All the straw is sold to local farmers.
The barley is drilled early and then grazed with sheep over winter. The sheep manure helps with soil fertility and canopy management. The grazing does no harm, aids tillering, and helps ensure the canopy isn’t too big in the spring. The farm can reduce plant growth regulator use where it is grazed, and by eating the older and dead leaves, the sheep also reduce disease in the crop, leaving clean and new growth.