Organic milk producer, Richard Tomlinson, turned the first sod yesterday on his Anaerobic Digester (AD) power plant in Holt, near Wrexham.The technology, costing more than £½m, will convert manure and other waste into bio-gas, which can be used to generate heat and electricity. Not that Mr Tomlinson has had any assistance from the Assembly Government.

“We had to spend £800 for a survey to find newts we knew weren’t there,” said Mr Tomlinson, going on to say “Although the Assembly Government is big on the word “sustainability”, it is very short on action”.The 11,000-cubic metre digester will extract methane gas from slurry from Lodge Farm’s 600 dairy cows – about 20 tonnes a day.

Once up to full capacity, the system should produce enough electricity for Holt village’s 800 residents, with leftover digestate injected into surrounding fields as odourless fertiliser.

Mr Tomlinson had hoped to process food waste from Wrexham Industrial Estate – including 25 tonnes of unwanted mayonnaise each month – but the town’s planners refused on public health grounds.

“We believe that eventually the rules will change but we couldn’t afford to wait for that to happen,” he said.

Mr Tomlinson has formed a new company, Farm Renewable Environmental Energy (FRE-Energy) with brother Jonathan, neighbour Chris Morris and AD pioneer James Murcott.

Jonathan is building the AD plant on site via his agricultural engineering business JFT Engineering.

FRE-Energy managing director Chris Morris pledged it would be the first of hundreds of on-farm digesters built using Welsh technology.

But he urged Cardiff to become more supportive of a technology that is more productive and less intrusive than wind power.

Germany and Austria already have more than 4,500 farm AD plants, equivalent to a nuclear power station. In contrast the UK has around 20.

The Assembly Government dismissed claims it wasn’t supportive of AD. It was the first UK administration to offer an AD grant scheme but it said it won’t back “out-of-date technology”.

Last week the National Non-Food Crops Centre launched a new computer calculator at Cereals 2008 to help farmers decide whether AD is feasible for them.