Crowley Carbon is helping one of the world´s largest bird-rearing farms to maintain its “Big Green Plan” by introducing measures to contribute towards a 30% reduction on energy use and carbon emissions.

More than seven million birds are reared on Bernard Matthews’ turkey farms in Norfolk and Suffolk each year. Heating the sheds the birds live in and getting rid of the waste they produce is at the heart of the company’s “Big Green Plan”.

Bernard Matthews aims to be the UK’s greenest farmer and food producer. So far, biomass boilers have been installed in thirty farms and four wind turbines have started generating power. Another five will be operational this year and will provide 2.3MW of electricity.

The company has also installed solar panels, wind turbines and biomass plants for its farms and factories, and is developing a second 500m³/hour anaerobic plant to supply gas to the national grid. It hopes it will eventually be able to turn waste into pellets to burn in the boilers

The input from Crowley Carbon consists of advanced heat exchangers to recover heat from borehole water, a redesign of the refrigeration systems and the replacement of fluorescent lights with LED lights. The project will keep Bernard Matthews on course to be 100% self-sufficient in renewable green electricity by 2016 and carbon neutral by 2020.

In order to fund the improvements to its energy efficiency systems, Bernard Matthews has raised £100 million from investors. The company describes its recent years as “financially challenging” and admits that without funding for the “Big Green Plan” from Equitix and the Green Investment Bank, the project would have become impossible to maintain.