Nitrate Vulnerable Zones Storage Are You Ready?
Leading agricultural and environmental consultancy, ADAS is helping livestock farmers and landowners in NVZ designated areas to ensure that they are able to meet the 1 January 2012 deadline to have sufficient slurry storage in place (1 Jan 2013 in deferred slurry storage areas).
Steve Ford, Senior Consultant at ADAS heads up the ADAS NVZ Solutions DeliveredTM service said: Farmers needing additional storage need to make a start in planning to meet this deadline. To get a new store in place means deciding on the size of store required and the best option, obtaining planning consent and notifying the Environment Agency before using a new slurry store. Thats a lot to do to meet the deadline.
The regulations require farms to have space for 6 months slurry storage for pigs and poultry and 5 months for other livestock slurry. Careful calculations are needed to ascertain the correct amounts of storage required and ADAS can help with these
The calculations and regulations required for slurry storage are set out in the Defra and Environment Agencys leaflets or the calculations can be carried out using the new PLANET 3 software funded by Defra and The Scottish Government which can be found at www.planet4farmers.co.uk
Steve continued: ADAS specialists can advise on ways to reduce the amount of slurry storage required without reducing stock numbers. This is where the ADAS NVZ Solutions DeliveredTM service can really help. Our specialist advisors can visit the farm and look first at reducing slurry production and the exclusion of rain and yard water from stores. The ADAS team have a lot of experience at this and it can make thousands of pounds of difference in the construction costs
ADAS can also help to ensure that other aspects of the NVZ regulations are complied with and that farms are fully documented, guaranteeing that farmers will not face other financial penalties for breaching Single Farm Payment cross compliance rules.
ADAS also has specialist store designers and planners who can follow on with plans, costings and obtaining planning consents.
ADAS has a wide coverage with its staff and has also recently added to the NVZ team Helen Sykes at Leeds, Richard Reynolds at Cambridge, and Neil Cooper at Malvern.