Sustainable Energy at Sheepdrove

Sheepdrove Organic Farm believe that to continue relying on fossil fuels is not sustainable. We believe that everyone should make an effort to use more clean and renewable sources of energy where they can.

Together, a mix of Renewable Energy options and improved energy efficiency could help to meet the farm’s heating, electricity or transport energy demands – and shrink its ‘Carbon Footprint’ - the amount of greenhouse gases created by the farm's activities.

Sustainable development

We need to consider many issues, especially landscape. Sheepdrove is located on the Berkshire Downs at the heart of the North Wessex Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB). New energy developments have the potential to impact on our special landscape - and wind power is one of our ideas - so we carried out a case study to look at this. You can download the study reports free. Read more...

Our aspiration is that a mix of renewables - including wind power - should make a valuable contribution to our energy needs but in a way that is acceptable within the North Wessex Downs AONB. It is important to stress that the farm is thinking small-scale for the sake of environmental sustainability, as well as self-sufficiency in energy. We are certainly not considering a big, commercial ‘wind farm’ type of development. (Not that large scale would be allowed in an AONB.)

Our achievements so far

Energy is just part of the farm’s efforts to continuously improve how environmentally sustainable its activities are. Sheepdrove has also become more sustainable with achievements such as:

• new electric-powered vehicles
• vehicles running on LPG (Liquid Propane Gas) which is a very clean fuel
• eco-friendly materials and architecture for Sheepdrove Eco Conference Centre
• energy-saving design such as with passive (non powered) ventilation within Sheepdrove Eco Conference Centre
• water efficiency in Sheepdrove Eco Conference Centre and around the farm
• creating a unique reedbed system to clean and recycle its wastewater
• reducing food-miles by having on-site chicken slaughter
• reducing food-miles by selling home delivery meat boxes
• making a special effort for wildlife
• managing a massive 150 hectares (370 acres) in Countryside Stewardship
• planting thousands of trees and miles of hedges
• and of course we farm organically .

 

For some years Sheepdrove Organic Farm has successfully used solar heating to reduce our fuel needs for our farm offices and conference centre, heat exchangers in our kitchen, and solar cells to charge batteries for our automatic chicken feeders. Sheepdrove now seeks to add to what has been done so far.

Work with Forum for the Future looked at the farm's energy use and lots of renewable energy ideas. This helped us to prioritise solutions such as waste digestors, bio-fuels, heat exchangers, Sterling engines, solar electricity and small-scale wind power.

Forward thinking

Recently the farm has made excellent progress with Sustainable Energy. We have installed our first combined solar and wind microgenerator to power a remote automatic gate. Then we put similar combined wind and solar microgeneration on our new chicken sheds!

We took our first delivery of bio-diesel (made from rapeseed oil which you might cook with at home!) and we trialed a small anaerobic digestor that can produce methane gas for us. We also signed up to green electricity providers Ecotricity.

We had help from The Carbon Trust who funded an energy efficiency survey at the farm, and we have begun an efficiency drive with the farm staff.

All our studies are helping us to decide how to take forward our work with energy, such as our new Renewable Energy targets.