On-farm biogas plant: anticipate your handling work!

You have a biogas plant project on your farm, have you foreseen the additional handling workload? On-farm biogas production units have flourished in recent years and continue to enjoy a favourable growth. Diversifying your activities, upcycling manure or improving your energy balance, there are many reasons to choose this path. Are you considering setting up a biogas plant on your farm? Here is what we have observed in the field. Although project owners are well supported in terms of technical aspects or relationships with neighbourhood, there is one task that often falls to them: choosing the handling solution for loading the digester with organic matter and ensuring that this task is carried out in the long term. On the farm, there is often more than one machine capable of doing this daily loading (a wheel-loader, a telehandler, a tractor-loader). At first sight, this does not seem to be a particularly demanding task. However, it is still a burden. Thus, the recurrence of this action, coupled with the weariness of the repetitive gesture or the operator's level of experience, are sometimes a source of accidents. And there is always this incompressible time which could be better valued. Here we can talk about two hours recovered each day, i.e., 14 hours per week. This extra handling is not directly visible, but it should not be overlooked when building your project. Now imagine delegating this task to an autonomous machine, which will carry out its daily mission without having to set it up each day. Because it's a robot, Loadix is basically always at its maximum attention span, so fatigue or mental strain doesn't affect it. It has anti-collision technologies that make it extremely safe. For Loadix, recurrence is not a chore, it is a guarantee of efficiency! Handling is part of your biogas plant project, and you need to anticipate it in order to size your equipment or recruit accordingly. Don't forget it in your study!