Shropshire house that was once the first to be Biogas powered.

We travel to a Shropshire Farmhouse that played it's part in history of Biogas and Solar power as alternative energies.

Transcript

00:00We're here in Linley Shropshire and a rather special house behind and currently the man

00:05that lives there is, introduce yourself sir. My name is John, John Letcher. I've lived here for

00:11about 40 years. It's in some ways obviously a typical Shropshire farmhouse but there's something

00:19very very unusual about it because this was the place where my former partner James Mercott

00:27developed the very first working farm digester which made this the first farm in Britain to have

00:34its heating and cooking supplied by biogas. Yeah, yeah. 50 years ago. 50 years ago and even that, I mean

00:43there's a funny looking bit on the roof there but even that has got a tail to it hasn't it?

00:48That's right. The only evidence of the work that he did now is you can see on the barn roof just

00:56behind me. There's remains of some experimental solar panels because he was very interested in

01:02renewable energy in general to begin with before he really specialised. In fact he became really a

01:09world specialist in farm digesters. So he sounds like a bit of a character and was he a bit of an

01:16all-round inventor always looking at problems and working out ways to solve them? Well to be honest

01:21no not really funnily enough he was actually originally an aeronautical engineer but he became

01:28really concerned about environmental problems back in the 1970s and first of all was looking at

01:35renewable energy in all kinds of ways but the thing about farm digesters is that although they

01:41are best known for producing this biogas they're actually really important for controlling climate

01:47change because they control methane emissions from farm waste which is now known to be one of the

01:54biggest causes of climate change and also they have lots of other effects like they produce

02:01really very good on-farm liquid fertiliser that reduces the need for artificial fertilisers and also

02:10I used to work with him for quite a long time and one of my parts of the whole business was taking

02:17another by-product which is kind of very rich organic fibre and turning it into one of the very first

02:24peat-free compost ranges. This was back in 1991 we actually won Britain's number one environment award for it

02:33and it was based on digested farm manure, coir and wood fibre. So you were quite ahead of your time then you

02:40guys weren't you really? Well it's interesting people often say we're ahead of our time we thought otherwise

02:47we were very concerned even all that time ago about how we were going to build these things fast enough

02:54to help to control climate change and that was 40 years ago and unfortunately for various reasons

03:04even today we really don't make proper use of them at all. In some countries they use them a lot more than we do

03:13and that's tragic really because we were certainly James was the world leader in that field 40 odd years ago.

03:21So