Techno-economic issues in the 1950s

Century of Endeavour

Techno-Economic Issues in the 1950s

(c) Roy Johnston 1999

We consider the techno-economic implications of JJ's attempt to link market gardening with small-farm livestock practice, in his Grattan Lodge project, near Stradbally in Laois, which ran from 1953 to 1959.

We also consider here the 'anaerobic digestion' project, as it arose initially via JJ, later involving the engineer Padraig O Hailpin, leading to an encounter with the Sugar Co.

The Grattan Lodge Project

Grattan Lodge is a substantial 1880s house at Vicarstown, which is on the canal, on a secondary road linking Stradbally to the main Athy-Monasterevan road. JJ went there in 1953, having been sidelined in TCD politics by the McConnell revolution. He had about 10 acres of good land, and some farm buildings. He employed a local man, called Ned.

He fenced off some of the field near the house, ploughed it, and put down some current bushes, raspberries, strawberries, and a range of vegetable crops, which he fed with farm-yard manure. This he obtained by the expedient of building a small shed to which his cows and their followers had access, and where he fed them with hay and silage in the winter. The animals preferred the shelter in the winter, and he kept it well bedded with straw, which he got from a neighbour.

He explored the idea of digesting and concentrating the manure and making it more easily usable in a market gardening context, drawing on the technical experience of some French contacts, who had done this, though on a substantially larger scale. In this context he invoked the help of the present writer (see below) who identified the scale problem. He was however on to the basics of a good idea, which may yet get adopted, if Irish rural civilisation can be persuaded to evolve back to its earlier clustered mode, and away from the isolated farmhouse.

He sold the produce of his garden to the Trinity College kitchen, and an agreed price based on the current price in the Dublin market. He quantified the overall economics of this marginal-time experiment in an SSISI symposium in 1959.

Methane from Manure

This was initiated by JJ who in his Grattan Lodge farm had an energy supply problem; there was no mains electricity supply, and for cooking they had a solid fuel range. He was keeping a few cows and bullocks, and these had shelter, so there was a supply of manure. He came across some technical reports in French: Gaz de Fumier a la Ferme by F Mignotte (Maison Rustique, Paris), and another book along similar lines by E Lesage and P Abiet published in Soissons; the authors were prestigious engineers, Lesage being from the Ecole Polytechnique. He suggested I use the as the basis for an couple of articles in the Irish Times, which I did. In France at the time there were some thousands of installations.

Much work has been done in this area since the energy crises of the 1970s, and economic installations exist for the anaerobic digestion of sewage on a municipal scale. Digestion of manure to generate methane as a local power source is, I believe, common practice in China, and some attempts have been made to introduce it to Africa; I witnessed a pilot project in Kenya in 1982 in the context of the UN Renewable Energy conference in Nairobi. In Western Europe however it has never become widespread, due to the amount of handling of material that has to be done. This on a small or even medium scale is essentially a manual job, though some attempts have been made to apply process engineering ideas to the handling of slurries.

A small-scale operation, as described by Mignotte, involved surrounding the digestion vessel with straw-rich manure, in its initial aerobic digestion stage, in which heat was generated and transferred to the digester. The amount of handling involved was considerable, and would have been dependent on the availability of low-cost farm labour. To maintain continuity of supply it was necessary to rotate between three digestion vessels. Attempts subsequently to develop a continuous process, with one vessel, have run into to problems of build-up of solids.

This process remains on the agenda, and will eventually become economic where a large-scale livestock project can be linked to a combination of dead meat production and market gardening. The quality of the fertiliser produced after the digestion process is superior to that of raw farmyard manure, and it lends itself to easier handling. The methane produced in such a centre could be a local energy source suitable, for example, for powering a cold store, in which case the waste heat from the gas engine could be recovered to speed up the digestion process. The motivation of producers to co-operate on such a scale, and to bring in the necessary process engineering and management knowhow, however needs socio-technical analysis, and the right political environment.

On the scale available to JJ it would have not been feasible, and the idea was dropped. For a while O Hailpin was interested, and he had a look at some earlier attempts which had been made at the Irish Sugar Company at their Tuam plant, on the initiative of MJ Costello. These would have been quite large scale, but they were abandoned, presumably because MJC ran into the socio-technical barriers caused by the existence of small-scale scattered individual farms in the Irish context. O Hailpin put some thought into the design of possible installations, but rapidly came to the conclusion that under the then conditions it would not be economic, as indeed I did also.

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