Specialist vegetable and sweetcorn producer, Barfoots, has opened an anaerobic digestion plant at its farm near Chichester, West Sussex.

The 1.1MW facility cost £3.8m to build and will convert between 25000t to 28000t of vegetable by-products and sweetcorn trimmings from the existing packhouse into electricity for up to 2000 homes via the national grid.

Some 20,000t of digestate, equivalent to the fertiliser needs of approximately 400ha (1000 acres) of sweetcorn will be produced annually, along with 3.6m gallons of water, which will be used for crop irrigation.

The firm said that using all of the farm’s vegetable and sweetcorn trimmings in the AD plant would remove the need to transport by-products off the farm and no additional HGV trips would be generated.