Video release: Our final project video that shows what the complete idea behind NOMAD was, explaining the big picture and how the individual demos and trial areas work together.
Did you know that our current food systems have over 8 billion people to feed, with 50% of food calories coming from small-scale farming systems?
Biogas plants on these farms or at the local level have benefits for these small farms and the environment, such as reducing greenhouse gases, processing their waste, and ideally producing their own organic fertiliser, which in turn reduces costs. However, to obtain organic fertiliser, the residue from the biogas plant (also called digestate) should be treated, and small farmers often cannot afford the equipment to treat the digestate.
This is where NOMAD comes in: Our solution consists of two trailers designed to tackle this problem head-on. Trailer one effectively separates the solid and liquid fractions, macerates, pasteurises and filters the digestate, while trailer two focuses on nutrient recovery, the removal of antibiotics and greywater recovery.
The biofertiliser we produced was then tested for its effectiveness in greenhouse growth trials and, of course, subjected to detailed chemical analysis in the laboratory.