Nottinghamshire farmer John Strawson and his family business Strawsons Energy grows 1160 acres of willow – more than anyone else in the UK.

He is also the only UK farmer to sell processed willow as a fuel to the big power stations, schools, district heating schemes and homes.

This fast-growing energy crop is certainly not the only string to his bow, either. From his base near Retford the family now farms more than 7400 acres in all, with a big acreage of combineable crops and lots of land in environmental schemes.

The 10-year route to becoming Britain’s biggest biomass-to-energy farmer has been a rocky one at times, he admits. But the growing and processing system has developed into something that has worked well for several years.

Instead of immediately chipping the harvested wood and leaving it in a damp heap, he uses a converted sugar-cane harvester to produce 25mm diameter x 200mm long billets. These are then left in a heap for 3-6 months for the moisture content to drop from a typical 56% to nearer 25%.

And the great thing is there’s no need to turn the heap – the relatively large spaces around the billets means air can flow through naturally to take away the moisture.

However, there were no machines on the market that could chip this raw material at a reasonable speed, so Mr Strawson’s team had to design a processing machine from scratch.

The finished product is sold under the farm’s Koolfuel brand, primarily to the big EDF Energy Cottam power station just five miles from the farm and also to Drax. At the other end of the scale, it heats the local primary school at Dunham-on-Trent very reliably indeed.

“In six years the school’s biomass boiler has never let them down,” he says. “The old boiler was always breaking down – I remember my kids shivering in the classrooms.”

He also practises what he preaches, with the fuel being used to power a biomass boiler that provides heating for businesses operating in converted buildings on the farm as well as for the farmhouse itself.

Some 5000t of willow is produced annually by Strawsons Energy. From being a failing crop across the UK nine years ago, willow is now a steadily growing enterprise. The value of the crop is rising too, from 20/t in 2002 to £50/t now, and the future looks bright.

And Mr Strawson hasn’t just focussed on the fuel production side of things. He’s equally fired up – if you’ll excuse the pun – about all the other ways of producing green energy, though perturbed by the lack of information available for comparing the output and efficiency of different energy sources.

So, in characteristic no-messing-about Strawson fashion, he decided to do something about it. The farm’s Centre of Renewable Energy (CORE) building, finished in September 2009, has within its walls (whose plasterboard was made, incidentally, from the recycled willow ash from the local power station) just about every form of domestic-scale renewable energy plant.

So there’s a wind turbine, solar electric panels, solar photovoltaic panels, a pellet boiler, a woodchip boiler, a ground source heat pump and even a rainwater harvesting set-up. Even more helpful for visitors is a big screen that shows exactly how much energy is being produced by each unit both currently and historically, plus what it has cost to produce and what the likely payback period is.

You almost certainly won’t find information as helpful and detailed as that anywhere else in the UK, and it neatly encapsulates the professional and enthusiastic approach the farm takes to every aspect of green energy.

THE JUDGES LIKED

• Highly professional operation

• Never cuts corners

• Virtually created a market by himself

FARM FACTS

Farming enterprises

•7400 acres farmed in all

•Winter wheat is main combineable crop

• Much land in environmental schemes

Energy Enterprises

• 475ha of willow grown for fuel

• 5000t delivered to power stations, schools and district heating

• More from the 2010 Farmers Weekly Awards

• More from the 2010 finalists