The farm as a whole functions ‘off-grid’, with no mains water or power.
We have been gradually building up an on site mini grid as we install each element of the built development or bring individual facilities on line.
When fully implemented this system will provide full power throughout the farm, natural bio-gas for heating and cooking as well as solar and waste heat based hot water throughout all of teh buildings and beneath some of the growing areas.
All of the individual system elements are either helping run, or using waste from, on site enterprises in line with our metabolic approach. This allows ‘gross’ farm energy requirements to be initially minimised in the first place and then met by the farm itself wherever possible. As a result we can look at ways of creating greater independence and therefore greater security for farmers who adopt such systems.
All of this work is alied to and will be fed back into projects with CAAT and the Royal Agricultural Society’s ‘Power to the Farmer’ program
Power.
This comes from a mixture of wind turbine and PV panel generation to provide the most reliable production in a range of prevalant conditions.
As facilities are built we can devote more roof space to PV and when overall demand increases when the full farm scheme is in place then awe will look to install a larger 7Kw wind turbine to balance winter electricity production.
All power that is generated is stored in a dry cell deep cycle battery bank, made up of massive 2v cells, within our main barn which will hold sweveral days of backup power should all generastion cease for soem reason. This is linked to a Victron Pheonix MultiPlus Inverter/Charger. this amazing bit of kit reguklates the charging of the batteries and inverts the current so that we can run 240v and 415v mains throughout the farm to power various installations such as the workshop, commercial kitchen and office equipment.
Water.
We have a borehole supply which provides the farm with a pressurised ‘mains’ type supply for all agricultural and horticultural facilities. We also have an integrated storage system in the form of a huge network of draiange pipes and stormwater channels that all run to our lake. This effectively removes excess stormwater from all areass of teh farm and stores it in away that alows it to be utilsed for the horticulture and aquaculture enterprises as well as the liquid feed irrigation systems that form part of the perennial production area.
Heat.
Hot water is provided at the farm by solar means. This includes evacuated tube systems, passive heating and through the storage and re-use of waste heat from other systems which are themselves bio-fuelled such as woodburing furnaces.
This hot water is usewd for commercial kitchen applications, general washdown facilitiues and also for under-soil heating in the poly-tunnel and perennial bed areas where it allows season extension and specialist conditions for certain crop growing and seed production enterprises.
Passive systems are also fundamental to the farms production through the use of such systems as trombe walls, high mass absorbtion/radiation and south facing glazed elements for poly-tunnel growing, greenhouse heating and the herb drying and food dehydration room.