The UK-based bank Barclays has launched a £100 million fund ($163 million) to help farmers finance renewable energy projects on their land after a survey found growing interest among farm owners in installing such projects to offset energy costs and generate new income.

According to the survey, about 37 percent of the UK’s 200,000 farmers say they expect to invest in renewable energy technology — including solar panels, wind turbines, and hydroelectric plants — with the expectation of ultimately receiving an annual return of £25,000 pounds.

According to the survey, most farmers want to make that investment in the next year. UK farmers “are looking forward to many further years of lower energy costs and a potentially new income as they sell energy back to the grid,” Travers Clarke-Walker, a product and marketing director for Barclays, said in the statement.

The British government, which hopes to achieve 15 percent of the nation’s energy from renewable energy sources by 2020, reduced financial incentives for large-scale solar projects last month over concerns that a handful of massive projects would consume funds intended to help smaller residential and commercial projects.

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

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Farmers are increasingly taking advantage of the space they have to generate their own electricity, a new USDA report reveals.

The survey found that 8,569 operations produce renewable energy, according to the 2009 On-Farm Renewable Energy Production Survey released recently. The survey was carried out by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service.

Conducted as a follow-on to the most recent Census of Agriculture, the 2009 On-Farm Renewable Energy Production Survey focused on three principal renewable energy systems: solar panels, wind turbines and methane digesters.

Solar power is farmland’s top choice in renewable energy. It was found to be installed on 7,968 farming operations across the country, including photovoltaic and thermal solar panels. Wind followed with 1,420 operations across 48 states. Finally, 121 operations used methane digesters across 29 states.

In terms of regions, California topped the ranking with 1,956 operations, or nearly one quarter of the total. It was followed by Texas, Hawaii and Colorado, where farmers on at least 500 or more operations were producing their own renewable energy.

Besides the environment, farmers who produce their own electricity are also reaping the economic benefits of using their land for that purpose. In nearly every state they reported savings on their utility bills, sometimes as much as $5,000 during 2009, as was the case in New York State.

“These results indicate that farmers and ranchers are increasingly adopting renewable energy practices on their operations and reaping the important economic and environmental benefits,” said U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.

Community Wind Farms

The USDA report did not take into account farms that produce renewable energy to be sold to utilities that feed the grid, but this is a growing market, one that contributes towards decentralizing energy generation.

An example of that is community wind farm. One company that is active in this sector is OwnEnergy, which teams up with landowners and local developers to get such projects off the ground. Ownership is retained in the community and profits are recycled. This leads to new jobs and development in the region.

“They have ownership share while we provide them with know-how they may not have. They may be successful entrepreneurs in their community but they may not have developed wind farms before so we help them through that process”, Mr. Crowell recently told alternative energy blog Energy Refuge.

OwnEnergy says on its website the only obstacle it faces and which prevents it from developing the kind of relationship they would like with potential electricity buyers is time.

“After signing the agreements project developments can take several years so we’re just now reaching the point where we are able to have substantive conversations with folks in the utility and buyers markets,” said company CEO Jacob Susman.

That said, he says the company is making waves in the wind energy market and attracting attention from venture capitalists while it completes its early wind projects.

It’s only in the U.S. that community wind farm is taking root, though. Over in the UK, the biggest ever wind farm development has been given the go-ahead by North Lanarkshire Council, according to a news report on Click Green. The Torrance Farm Community Wind Energy project has met the criteria outlined by North Lanarkshire Council’s requirements to be considered environmentally sustainable.

Marna McMillion, CEO of one Energy4all, one of the project’s developers, said: “Collectively, individuals and communities can make a much greater contribution to the renewable energy revolution than they can acting alone”.

Article by Antonio Pasolini, appearing courtesy Justmeans.

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A group of Colombian farmers has filed a lawsuit against the oil company BP, claiming that construction of a 450-mile pipeline in the mid-1990s has caused landslides, permanently damaging soil and crops and harming livestock.

In the suit filed in a London court, 95 farmers claim that BP Exploration Company ignored evidence that the pipeline would damage the land, and never informed the property owners, many of them illiterate, of the risks.

The pipeline, which delivers as much as 620,000 barrels of crude oil to an export terminal daily, crosses 192 rural villages. Farmers say that during construction, natural vegetation that protected their soil from the elements was removed, leading to significant erosion. Additionally, they say BP never paid them for the damage, which made their farms unsustainable. “The region has been profoundly and adversely affected causing many farms to close or drastically reduce production and causing some farmers to leave the land,” according to the suit. BP denies negligence, claiming the soil failed because the farmers removed forests for cattle grazing.

Article appearing courtesy of Yale Environment 360

[photo credit: ciponline.org]

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Iraqi officials have endorsed a plan to convert dates into biofuel, an innovative project they hope will boost a once-thriving agriculture economy burdened by years of drought, government sanctions and war.

A United Arab Emirates-based company will produce bioethanol from the dates that farmers can no longer use because they are rotting, said Faroun Ahmed Hussein, head of Iraq’s date palm board.

The nation produces about 350,000 tons of dates annually, but consumes only about 150,000 tons.

While Iraq once was a major date exporter, farmers now feed much of the rest to animals rather than export them because of the poor quality, Hussein said. Government sanctions and war have exacerbated entrenched problems such as high soil salinity and inefficient irrigation to ravage Iraq’s farming sector, the nation’s largest employer.

“Farmers will be happy to sell their rotten dates instead of throwing them away,” Hussein said. He would not identify the company, how much bioethanol it would be able to produce, or how much it would cost.

Appearing courtesy of Yale Environment 360.

[photo credit: Flickr]

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