How we benefit communities
While helping to tackle global climate change by reducing the country’s carbon emissions, Future Biogas facilities also help their local communities, both directly and indirectly.
Our supply contracts with local farmers can help to make local agriculture more sustainable, more resilient and more diverse, which also supports related businesses.
Our sites also employ people directly and indirectly. We have around six or seven people on a full-time basis on site and many more in local trades, agriculture and our wider engineering and maintenance team. But we also offer funding to local organisations through community support schemes.
There is no hard and fast rule about what kind of community projects can be funded. They are run on an annual application basis, ensuring it is causes important to local people that receive funding.
Examples of these include:
• 20 projects across Lincolnshire, Yorkshire and Norfolk dedicated to local heritage.
• Support of cultural and sporting groups local to site, such as theatre and youth football.
• Committed to improving social value local to site through foodbank and healthcare support projects across Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire & Norfolk.
• Supporting a local drama group in Lincolnshire.
• Long term patron for the Lincs & Notts Air Ambulance.
• 5 rural defibrillator installations and training projects across Lincolnshire, Yorkshire and Norfolk
• Support of environmental projects that have planted thousands of tree saplings and wildflowers to enhance biodiversity
Wildflower planting, South Yorkshire
Local school educational visit to Grange Farm Energy, Lincolnshire
We would love to hear from you about what kind of projects you think could benefit from our support.
Please let us know by filling in the online feedback form on the feedback page.
A byproduct of the biogas facility is a nutrient-rich biofertiliser (known as digestate), which is collected in solid and liquid form. Over time, this digestate can help build vital organic matter in soil, which has multiple benefits including improved structure, water holding capacity and nutrient retention and release.
This is much needed at a time when many arable soils around the UK have been farmed intensively, with lots of artificial inputs.
Biofertilisers, like digestate reduce the need for commonly used artificial fertilisers made from fossil fuel gas, which have seen steep price increases in recent years.
So rather than reducing the amount of food which can be produced per acre, over time the use of crop rotation and biofertiliser improves soil quality and thus its productivity.
Future Biogas signs long-term agreements with its suppliers. These agreements offer farmers a guaranteed income, at a time of great uncertainty over the future funding of agriculture in the UK.
This income helps support not just the farmers themselves but the rural economy as a whole.
Benefits to farming and nature
While replacing fossil fuel gas with biogas helps to tackle the climate crisis on a global scale, the way the fuel crops are grown also benefits nature, and farmers, locally.
Energy crops can be incorporated into existing crop rotations on farm, extending these rotations with a more diverse range of crops helps improve diversity and can reduce the pest, weed and disease burdens faced by farmers.
Future Biogas also encourage the very best farming techniques through our sustainable farming premium which incentivises growers to improve soil health, increase biodiversity, reduce inputs and reduce emissions from farming.
Food, fuel and biodiversity
Benefits
• Builds resilience through diverse crop rotations
• Provides opportunities for cover and companion cropping
• Encourages farm diversification
• Helps reduce inputs such as chemicals
• Replaces artificial fertiliser with digestate
• Provides profitable break crop options
What happens next?
Thank you for taking the time to view this online exhibition.
We will carefully consider all the feedback we receive before finalising our proposals. We will then prepare a formal planning application to be submitted to South Cambridgeshire District Council.
The council would then undertake further consultation with the community, the parish council and a range of other organisations. This might result in amendments to the proposals, prior to the application being considered by councillors on the planning committee.
It is difficult to say how long this process might take because each application is unique. Should the application be approved by councillors, some final details would need to be signed off by planning officers before work on site could start.
It would then be some time before the site is built and the facility becomes operational.