Martin Barker is UK Sustainability and Compliance Manager for Duynie, Europe’s biggest company valorising co-products from the food, beverage and biofuel industry. Martin is an innovator, developing and patenting several innovations during his career, from algorithms used to score farm management quality, to high welfare pig birthing pens, sold around the world.
Martin joined Duynie in 2020, with a remit to develop pig sales in the UK and Ireland, a sector synonymous with peaks and troughs, it needed a bit of ingenuity. He set about making Duynie different than its competitors, identifying with senior management, the potential of co-product animal production to be the optimum in environmental solutions for livestock production. Duynie was the first animal feed company to join WRAP in the year Martin joined the company. Duynie provides customers with feed carbon footprint analysis and has product carbon footprints (PCF’s) alongside nutritional value for products on its UK website. So, what else is different about Duynie, Martin explains - “we set out to develop a livestock system measured by how low we could get the carbon footprint of an animal, but more importantly in a more profitable way than traditional production or what’s the point. Our customers need to be more sustainable and resilient, and we can help them achieve it.” Duynie also identified what Martin calls “carbon architecture” – To remove it you have to understand it. Co-products from the human food supply chain are classed by the United Nations FAO LEAP guidance as having no upstream environmental impact, if fed to livestock and without further processing. So, feeding co-products in rations, rather than using land use products of the same nutritional value, like grass, wheat, soya etc, automatically reduces animal carbon footprint. Duynie also realised customers are under increasing regulation from emissions associated with the manure, a by-product of meat, milk and egg production. His carbon architecture mentality suggested there must be a more circular way of processing manure. For example, food going into an animal always comes out at 37°C, regardless of temperature going in. Biogas plants need feedstock at 37°C so he worked out how to collect slurry without losing the calories needed to produce that heat. Then separating the urine from the solids, the urine can be harvested for the world’s only fossil free aqueous ammonia NH³, the N can be recovered for fossil free fertiliser, leaving the three molecules of H to be harvested as fossil free hydrogen fuel, to power cultivation machinery. The spent liquor, which is 90 percent of the manure volume is then able to be evaporated and condensed back to clean water, using an evaporator running on biogas produced from the solids, in a 90 percent smaller biogas reactor. Duynie instigated and partnered in a large-scale project to test the system of decarbonising livestock on farm in the UK, following successful laboratory feasibility, the project reduced carbon footprint per animal by 71 percent, with Eutrophication (Green Algae) down 66 percent and acidification down 55 percent (Leeds University LCA 2023). We have since reduced the carbon footprint further, to 87 percent, by increasing the percentage of co-product feed use and refining the manure management process. There is also an added bonus of much less potential soil compaction, NP&K is not only retained as a dry product, but the process the manure goes through increases its availability to plants, so residues are much lower and you can put 30 percent less nutrients on to get the same crop yield as raw manure. New incomes streams from the manure management system are now potentially more valuable than meat, milk and eggs. Martin has been characterised as the Willy Wonka of farming, but to change what we have done with manure for over 2000 years, takes more than a bit of imagination.