Teesdale Moorland Biomass Project – Gaining value from moorland biomass: novel uses for heather and other upland crops
Teesdale Moorland Biomass Project
Heather has the potential to replace peat-based compost – and trials are assessing the most sustainable way to harvest and process this untapped natural resource.
England alone is home to around 350,000ha of managed moorland – a sizeable percentage of the estimated 1m ha or more that covers the British Isles and Ireland.
Although steeped in tradition and history, the practice of burning heather in order to manage moorlands is not the only way to tackle the needs of land managers. This project is investigating ways that retain the benefits to the landowner for vegetation control, but also adds a potentially lucrative additional revenue stream from the asset that is literally growing wild on the moors. Controlled burning on moorland is controversial but effective; but harvesting the heather achieves very much the same effect, has none of the downsides, and has the benefit of a commercially viable product and revenue stream.
Background
Moorland has a diverse ecology, from lower lying wetlands to the uplands and hills. It supports an abundance of wildlife and vegetation, including species which rely on a single defined geographic location. But it has to be managed – and that presents an opportunity for better use of natural resources, which the Teesdale Moorland Biomass Project is seeking to understand. If left unmanaged, heather, grasses, gorse, bracken, and bilberry, become overgrown and invasive, forming tall, dense swathes of vegetation. This has negative, and potentially disastrous, consequences for moorland life:
- Loss of ground-nesting and hunting sites for vulnerable species like skylark and short-eared owl, respectively.
- Lack of moisture getting to soils, drying peat soils and increasing carbon emissions.
- Uncontrollable wildfires.
- Loss of grazing areas and grouse habitat, impacting rural enterprises and communities.
Moorland vegetation has traditionally been managed using methods like grazing, cutting and controlled burning. However, there is now increasing pressure to end reliance on controlled burning as a land management practice.
Project
Recognising this change in social licence, Ewan Boyd, director at North Pennines-based company Teesdale Environmental Consulting (TEC-Ltd) – in collaboration with Sir Edward Milbank of Barningham Estates – started the Teesdale Moorland Biomass project, enabled by the UK Gov funded, Biomass Feedstocks Innovation Programme (BFI).
With potentially up to 30,000ha of heather burned each year in England alone, the project sought to explore a switch from burning heather to using it for commercial biomass production.
The project initially undertook trials on Barningham Estate heather moorland in North Yorkshire to produce a sustainable solid fuel for domestic heating systems. It carried out small and then larger scale harvests to understand harvested crop quality and the impact of machinery on the land, with the crop dried in a bespoke drier and pressed into briquettes.
Despite successfully producing four tonnes of heather briquettes, the products failed to meet ‘ready to burn’ emissions standards. After consulting with the Biomass Connect Team at Bio Global Industries Ltd (BGI), it was determined that the heather had potential as a high-value, eco-friendly growing medium. BGI advised the refocussing of this project from a solid fuel model to one aimed at composting.
Latest
Maintaining its net zero ambitions, the project is now focused on producing a high value ericaceous compost for the domestic horticultural market.
Heather-based compost is also a strong candidate to replace peat growing mediums. With a ban of horticultural peat to retail consumers looming, this stands it in good stead as a high value, sustainable commodity.
The project has now completed the Biomass Feedstocks Innovation funded research programme. This has been considered highly successful, with significant findings that are being taken forward by the project team.
Key successes include the creation of a comprehensive yield assessment tool which can be applied to other moorland sites to assess likely yields, harvest and production costs, and which provides a commercial business planning tool to assess likely profitability.
A number of different composting methods have also been successfully trialled, with traditional thermophilic composting used for conventional bulk composting alongside two different rapid processing methods which can produce high quality growing media from 100% heather feedstocks with as little as two hours processing.
Initial growing trials with the resulting products have been highly encouraging, with further longer term trials underway with more comprehensive results anticipated in 2026.
The project team has established new joint venture, Moorland Biomass Ltd to take the project forward to full commercialisation, and which completed it’s first full harvest at Barningham in spring 2025. A second operations base has also been established in Scotland to enable Moorland Biomass Ltd to further develop heather processing north of the border, and other potential feedstocks are also now being explored from this new site.
“Initial soil analysis of peatland moisture retention and compaction has shown no degradation”
Next Steps
The project is seeking some further research and development funding to refine the various production processes, identify the most appropriate end products and market entry points, and to develop a robust operational model that can be replicated elsewhere. Further work will also be targeted at other discarded biomass feedstocks to identify whether the lessons from the Teesdale Moorland Biomass Project are transferable to other crops.
Further Information
To learn more about the Teesdale Moorland Biomass Project, or to understand how you can get involved, please contact:
Ewan Boyd: [email protected]
Tel: 01833 640327
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