Agri-Epi Centre speaks to Analox about our recent innovations in the farming industry…
We are thrilled to be a member of the Agri-EPI Centre and to learn from, inspire and educate its members. Our college David Booth speaks with Thomas Slattery from the Agri-Epi Centre in their latest Seedling Session podcast…
Thomas
Hello and welcome to another episode of Seeding Sessions. Today I’m speaking to David Booth, group technical sales manager at Analox, a cutting edge gas analysis and detection company who are helping organizations across the agri food sector, from farmers all the way through to retailers like McDonald’s. Today we’ll be speaking to David about some of their recent innovations in farm tech.
Hello, David. Thank you very much for taking the time to speak to me. Yeah. Thank you, Thomas. A pleasure to be here. I think it probably might not be a bad idea to kick this one off with a little bit of your background because obviously you’ve got a long career and experience in this sector, so it’d be interesting first off to hear a little bit about yourself.
David
Yeah, thank you for the introduction, David Booth. As you said, I’m currently the Group Technical Manager for Analox, and after a classic education in nuclear science, I think I decided I had a tongue in my head. And so I moved straight away into sales quite a long time ago now, but it’s always been in gas analysis and gas detection. In the recent past, I’ve specialized in infrared gas analysis, which is very specific for a number of gases, and this introduced me to the first of the applications in the agri sector, mainly supplying equipment to monitor ruminant gas emissions from universities, research institutes around the world as far away as Australia and India.
I now support Analox group across the new growth areas, including smart farming, applying gas measurements, where you’re trying to reduce the impact of the methane or the carbon dioxide or even ammonia.
Thomas
So just a quick step back then it’d be useful to understand a little bit about the history of the company. And my understanding is that obviously you’re focusing a lot on these agricultural and agri food use cases, but the the organization itself works across a much broader spectrum of industries.
David
Yeah, that’s right. Originally started in 1981, our chairman started in his backyard, in his shed, like all great companies, I guess. And we’ve progressed over the years since 81. We’ve got our headquarters in Stokesley in North Yorkshire. We’ve got over 100 staff. We do all the design and manufacturing work is done here, ready for our clients across the world, and we’re supported by a US office and a global network of distribution outlets. I’ve been at Analox about five years, and I’m still waiting for my transfer to California to be approved to Huntington Beach, which is very nice indeed.
Thomas
So I think what would be really interesting is to kind of dig in. Obviously, given the context of the listeners of the podcast, it’d be really good to try and understand what’s the kind of work you’re doing in agriculture.
- Who are the customers?
- Were you focusing more on farmers at this stage?
- What are the challenges they’re facing at the moment?
There’s an enormous amount of pressure in the agri sector to consider emissions and how they will achieve the future net zero obligations.
David
Yeah. Our systems can help by offering a method of measurement, recording and validation. Animals are going to be legislated against specifically, different governments will decide to do things whereby they say to a farmer, you’ve got to reduce your methane output coming from your farm and there’s going to be methods, but all this has to be validated.
K1nd of like farming, agriculture, food and technology, it’d just be good to understand with the specifics of where Analox. #have you got any case studies? For example, are you working directly with farmers at the moment or is it more at an academic level with the likes of SIUC? What are the specific areas of farming that you’re mainly working in?
Until recently, I guess the basic markets that we’ve been in is working with the institutes and the universities specifically on research centers where we’ve supplied significant gas analysis systems to cover a wide range of applications. Specifically in the animal sector. The presumption there is that’s methane and has that been both with livestock housed and out in the field or is it predominantly been housed livestock? It’s been in both areas. We’ve worked with both SRUC and also Aberystwyth University, for instance. They have done a lot of their work in the fields.
Thomas
Yes, of course. I guess the question for me, and this is going to sound very naïve, given my background working with Agri-EPI Center, but I’ve always wondered, how do you take accurate methane measurements, even with the high tech, cutting edge sensors that you’ve got out in a field? It’s a question that I’ve always been keen to ask someone with your experience. It makes sense to me how that works in a housed environment. How does it work out in the field?
David
The infrared sensors that we manufacture, specifically both the high-performance variety, the GFC sensor, have always been developed for an industrial application, so they’ve always been designed to be able to be taken out in the field. For many years, the same technology has been used for somebody to climb a chimney stack and measure chimney stack emissions. It’s a change of gas, but it’s no difference in the technologies. And the original design for the high-performance GFC sensor came about from British Gas back in the 1990s, saying they didn’t want to take a 45 kilo ton of metal up the side of the stack to make gas emissions. They wanted a portable one that weighed less than six kilos. The idea of measure to manage is central to a lot of this stuff when it comes to kind of livestock GHG emissions.
Thomas
Where is this data helping? Is it allowing you to advise stockmen producers or researchers on different kind of livestock management techniques or different feeds ? What point is this kind of data on GHG emissions around livestock used?
David
At the moment the way the market is developing, specifically with the need to meet net zero arrangements, farmers are going to be asked to reduce the methane by different means, whether it be feed additives, whether it be selective breeding and other aspects of nutrition. And the way forward is very much like the carbon credit schemes of ten or 15 years ago, where people were told to measure emissions from a chimney stack, perform some reduction measures on reducing what was going out the stack. And they effectively created carbon credits by the differential between what they originally were emitting and what they now emit. And very much the same pattern may emerge as the years go by with methane from ruminant animals, is that a farmer may well be told to say, right, this is your normal pattern with your breed of cattle or breed of sheep. And then what happens is we come along and do some fairly easy measurements from the feeding hood or the milking parlour. And then we go away and the farmer starts using a new additive or something else that he may come across. And then along comes we come along again and take another measurement to say, oh, look, this farmer has reduced his emissions by 20%, 30% or whatever it is. And that provides a mechanism by which the farmer can actually achieve some cash back, some formula that would allow him to say, look, I’m doing my job for reaching net zero, therefore you pay me, I‘m having to spend X amount of money extra to achieve this. So I think I should be paid a little bit. And those carbon credits can be sold anywhere in the world to other farmers, to industry in general, because if a farmer takes out some of the carbon coming out from his farm, he’s able to sell it and that is still currently traded. I think the last trading event I looked at it was selling for about €100 per metric ton of CO2.
Thomas
Yeah, it’s an interesting market and it’ll be interesting to see how that develops over the coming years, the MRV. We’ve actually kicked off relatively recently with a really interesting project with one of our satellite farmers, the Kaiapoi Farms, who are doing a project around ultra low emissions sheep, which is a genetic project for sheep emissions. So that would be an interesting one if we’ve not already put you in touch with them from a measurement point of view. So obviously livestock is the obvious use case with this, I’m presuming that there’s also some use cases around arable and crops and horticulture as well.
David
Yeah, the one extra on animals is obviously animal health. And farmers and producers are always looking for new methods of keeping their animals safe and understanding when and if they become ill or diseased or whatever it is. And again, smart sensing and smart farming lends itself to gas analysis in these areas. I did some work a few years ago with measurement of acetone, which everybody knows used to be nail varnish remover. But acetone is a natural product the animal produces and can appear in milk. And if it gets too high, then that is a good indication of some ill health on the animal and so the animal can be taken out of use, treated and brought back to use much quicker, so again, keeping the production going.
In other areas like arable, the use of fertilizers across the land is always an opinionated sector where people say, I can just throw fertilizer here, fertilizer there. But as we all know, the water industry suffers from overuse of fertilizer. But also the use of fertilizer on land allows the escape of another greenhouse gas which has been in the news recently – nitrous oxide.
Nitrous oxide comes out the ground, it’s 300 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. And so it doesn’t take a lot of CO2 and we’ve got a lot of land for N2O to come out of the ground. And so people are looking to control the amount of fertilizer and how we fertilize the land and they’re looking at measures of understanding how the nitrous oxide comes out of the ground. And again, our products can be linked into that can measure down to very very low levels, which we’re expecting from these areas. And so we can again advise the farmers and there’s even schemes, I’ve read schemes whereby people are actually doing the measurements on farm, measuring the nitrous oxide and then coming back and averaging out how much fertilizer they really need to put on the land to do exactly the same job without a detriment to releasing too much nitrous oxide.
Thomas
Yeah, absolutely fascinating.
So how do you and your team work with farmers? Is it directly? Is it through agronomists? How does that work?
David
We expect the market to develop, really, and possibly we’ll be working through the feed additive companies, farmers cooperatives. I don’t think we’ll have much direct interest from farmers direct because they’ll come together as a grouping in big areas. I know there’s a few large farmers cooperatives which cover vast areas of the UK and they’ll come together and say, look, we’re going to offer a service, we’re going to do this, we’re going to do that, and the farmers will share the equipment around the area. Feed additive companies might produce incentives by which they will have equipment and say, look, if you want to use our feed additive, then please, we’ll support you in this and we’ll help the farming industry forward with looking at how we can improve all these things.
Thomas
Yeah, I had an interesting conversation with Rich Vecqueray at Map of Ag on this podcast a few weeks back and they bridged that interesting gap between farmers who are collecting data across all sorts of things, not just GHG and then the processors and retailers further at the food chain. And of course, a big motivational factor which you’ve already talked about are these net zero and general ESG reporting both kind of at a processor and retailer level of which those organizations are looking for both to support and support from their vast networks of farmers. And I can see how these kind of technologies and being able to record stuff, high quality data collection on GHG and other gases would be very helpful indeed.
David
Yeah, we’re looking closely. Some of the gases are very difficult to measure, in some cases. Ammonia as a result of what the animal puts on the land, for instance. It’s a very difficult gas to measure and it actually loves water. And once you get any water and ammonia together, one just dissolves in the other and you can’t measure the gas. So you don’t have an easy understanding of how it’s measured. So we’re looking at new technologies to make this easier by a different method. We won’t measure direct, we’ll measure it in a different way.
Thomas
Okay, yeah, well, it’s very high tech. So what are the big growth areas you see as an opportunity for both the organization and also just for general kind of measurement in this area?
David
We are pushing very hard into the green economy and we make some assumptions in the Agri industry that some legislation is going to come through. We know New Zealand has already introduced it and that’s simply going to progress around the world. We see that as a great opportunity to collaborate, to work with people like Agri-EPI and all the membership across Agri-EPI.
Within our defense sector that is continuously growing. We’ve just had the announcement of the American US and UK submarine agreement and that looks to the future. It’s not looking to the next five years, it’s actually looking to the next 50 years. So as a company we can look forward to that security of where we’re going in that sector. It allows us to look at other market sectors. Obviously, ruminant methane reduction is there and we’ve spoken about nitrous oxide, but similarly there’s a lot of gases released from things like water treatment facilities, which are unknown, which also affect that sector. And within the green economy, we’re expecting a significant opportunity in the shipping sector for instance. Alternative green fuels are coming through, fuels like methanol, which is very easy to produce. It’s less of a pollutant once it gets into the water, into the sea, for instance. But it’ll require new technologies to keep people safe on board ship because it’s a different sort of material, a different gas. It’s got different problems.
Thomas
I’ve got to assume that you’re not the only players in this market. How do you differentiate yourself to other competitors in this sector?
David
I think our biggest thing is that our people do care, as we’ve always been involved in the safety industry, the safety of people. Following onto that, into the environmental section is an easy step for us. We’ve got lots of experts and we pride ourselves in developing solutions. We recently did some analysis systems for a nuclear power station. They were doing something that’s never been done in nuclear power stations before and it’s extended the life of the power station. So we’ve now extended a couple of power stations in the UK. Now we’ll probably run for another five or even ten years, which they couldn’t before. And they had come to us saying, look, give us a solution. And within a collaborative nature, we supported them and helped them. Any challenge we get from a customer is always going to be our passion. It’s one of our strap lines that we use on our website.
We want customer excellence. It differentiates us from other people. We want this customer excellence. I think we recently won two awards for Customer excellence, the Institute of Customer Services and a Northeast Award as well.
Thomas
That’s always encouraging. And I know that you have an exciting project on the horizon, which unfortunately we can’t talk about just at this point. But it would be useful to know out of our Agri-EPI network and obviously the wider listeners of this podcast, which predominantly includes people, farmers, people in the agriculture sector and a lot of technology developers and innovators who are the kinds of people that you’d be interested to have a conversation with, who might be they want to reach out.
David
Obviously we continue to talk to as many of the university and institutional research centers as we can, but this is going to become more commercial. We’re going to have to look for further partners, people in the nutrition and feed additive industries as well as the consortia of farmers who are going to implement some of the changes that are going to take place. The networking with Agri EPI is second to none. We had a great introduction at a recent meeting in Telford. We want the collaboration with people we want to know and try and solve those sort of problems and we want to share our knowledge.
Thomas
Absolutely. Well David, it’s been absolutely fascinating talking to you and I think one of the things I’ve really taken away from this is realization of how predominantly this technology is across the entire Agri food supply chain and as you rightly said, not just on farm or retailers but everything from feed manufacturers. And it’d be really interesting to keep abreast of how the technology develops in different areas as we work with you over the coming years.
Is there anything else you’d like to add? Obviously we’ll do a sign off after this to swap any details. If anyone wants to get in touch, they can do that via the Agri-EPI Center.
David
Yeah, nothing I’ve mentioned everything. I think. I think the big part of our business is customer funded projects. Our customers, as I said before, is our customers come to us with their challenges. We investigate and test the most appropriate solutions and we’ve got the engineers and the scientists that can actually go out there and look at solutions that nobody’s thought about.
Thomas
That’s, that’s an interesting insight.
Yeah, that’s really interesting.
Okay, well David, thank you very much for taking some time to speak to me today and yes, thank you very much.
David
It’s been a pleasure and maybe I talk to you again sometime soon.
To learn more about how Analox can help solve your agricultural gas sensing needs, please head over to our Agriculture page to see which products could help you.
