Session 3 of the Teagasc National Tillage Conference dealt with opportunities in the tillage sector. Mark Fenlon discusses plant proteins, John Spink speaks about Life Cycle Analysis for carbon Sinead Morris and Lisa Ryan discuss the malting centre in Oak Park.
Okay thanks derra so we’ve one more session to the lunch break so uh added value opportunities you’ve heard a lot about it and our next three speakers are hopefully going to give us uh some unique insight into the exciting work that’s underway both in Oak Park more
Park and with our uh Partners in satu as well so first up I’d like to invite Mark Finland he going to give us an overview of some of the ongoing research thanks y um so as you said I’m going to give you a quick overview of where we
Are in both Chagas in the research Community I suppose in general and also give you some industry examples of where we are with value ad in this space and there’s an interesting one at the very end which is directly related to to this conference um I suppose just to set the
Scene in the food program we’ve been looking at a total Food Systems approach which means we take right the way through to production all the way through to finished ingredients and all the way through to uh digestion and so on but the only Point that’s really relevant for he here
Today is the point number three which is alternative ingredients made from PL and crops grains and legumes so that’s what I’m going to concentrate on uh the value ad there uh we have made a lot of investment at both the ashtown in Dublin and mo Park uh particularly in the
Fermentation space so I’ll I’ll touch on that later on where that comes into the into the mix two projects really at the core of this one is U protein led by myself which is the department of Agriculture funded one five cha centers involved including our colleagues here
Uh at V Park um and also five universities involved in that and a number of Industries as well so the type of Industries then range from everything from seed crop people uh producers all the way through to the leg of pepico and so on um the second one then is the valro
Project as well which you coordinating so that’s the other project that it’s based on I promise I’ve only one Dairy slide but there is a reason why it’s up here um before I get myself in trouble the you’re starting with milk and a lot of people think it you must remember we
Export 90% of of our of our food and most of is exported as ingredients so we can’t export milk to far away market so we have to turn it into ingredients particularly dried ingredients so these are the type of things then that comes out of milk we’re talking about
Fortified liquid milks whe protein isolates Etc all the way up so you’re moving up the value chain here so the dairy industry’s been at this for the last 40 50 years and it’s LED m through the development of membrane technology giant Technologies and so on and so on
So the relevance to here which the rest of my presentation on is can we do this with plant and crops and cereals that’s what I’m going to talk to you about um okay I’m not expecting you to read this on the side but it just shows you
If you look at the very bottom is milk some of the ingredients that come out of milk today so these are uh shipped all around the world we don’t make all of these in Ireland but we make a lot uh different whe ingredients and so on and
You would be familiar with the comment that the whe is worth more than the cheese now and and that is true so remember cheese produces way that produced into a lot of different ingredients so the dairy industry been very good at valorizing this okay so
That brings us to our to this spe to the cereals then um this is U protein so we go from six tasks uh the one we’re interested here is Task three which is the protein processing so can we take protein out of plants or cereals but can
We valorize and this is the key thing can we valorize the rest of it and not just throw it away or use it for animal feed and so on but can we take the starch can we take the fiber can we upside CLE all the different parts of a
Plant the same way that’s done with a dairy the obvious first thing is that liquid milk is liquid plant or not so there is an issue up front but the technology has evolved now to do this so we’re looking at novel protein ingred products digestability score uh Etc land
Use models and LCA and we work with our rest of the colleagues in Chas on this so this is what we’ve done uh we have developed the process at more Park and at ashtown we developed a new process which we can uh Su successfully do that so we can fractionate different plants
Uh we have looked at optimizing this and we’ve also looked at the effect of the process and the functionality of the ingredients remember we’re talking about ingredients here so the ingredient has to rehydrate somewhere else in the world it has to be a nutritional base for
Someone else to build a product on and that’s what we do with skim powder and so on but can you use plant proteins to do that the answer is yes you can um so we have been working in this uh down and more Park using a lot in a lot of cases
The same equipment that’s used for dairy um so in case anyone is interested we have a review on it which is published in 2023 um and there’s another paper coming out this year which is on the fabine protein Etc so these are down there’s um uh one
Of the uh presentations here one the boots here has these are there so just to show you maybe the top one there which is the fabine protein isoli so that’s 90% protein uh ingredient which can be used in nutritional Beverages and so on on highend value products so we
Successfully made that at more Park but again the key is not to dis disregard the rest of the product so take the protein out but we also need to take the starch and we also need to take the fiber all be them Commodities but when you put the whole lot together the
Business model uh is much more favorable than just taking the protein alone so that means using the DEH hold the DEH holds of it as well and also and any other fractions that we get out of the process doing this and there’s a loop and protein uh there’s a loop and flour
Out as well and we’ve also done chickpea we’ve done a lot of tubers different types of tubers we work with a company called botanics in keni and we get unusual types of tubers and so on as well there so again it’s about fractionation into ingredients um and this this here the
Beverage you see on the top here is a beverage that’s made with faval looping and P protein isoli so this is a key thing because we successfully were able to make uh a beverage which we put in fat we put in a different carbohydrate uh so we can make that and use the
Protein from the plant proteins to successfully create the Emulsion there and it’s stable what I mean by stable is when you homogenize milk it doesn’t separate anymore you’re and that’s the dairy protein that does that the plant protein while processed correctly can do the same thing so just to show that that
Can actually that’s successful there and we’re working with a number of uh multinational companies in this space we also have a new drying technology here uh for drying fiber and so on so again we couldn’t dry that before you can’t put that through a spray dryer so we can
We can dry that now in more Park as well um I won’t labor on this slide but the I mean biot transformation is a fancy name for fermentation um at the end of the day you can produce some really high end ingredients in this case it’s beta cartin the precursor for
Vitamin A so again this is from using uh residue from tubers so I have two slides left uh and and these are probably most relevant just to show you what’s going on in the world in this space um so we can we can we can do this in Ireland we we have the
Technology at a laboratory level for doing it just to clarify um but for freezing capina has launched plant protein this is a dairy company um we’ve another Dutch Consortium here Peno has more but this one here uh nutrius in 2022 they opened a plant in Croatia
Where Fab beans and potatoes can come in and they can fractionate it into protein starch and fiber so they say it’s the first one in the world or in Europe anyway to do this so they’ve essentially done um what something which we would think is is is quite interesting so the
Farmers get paid a um you know contract will go under fa beans then it’s going in and it’s processed uh like you would do with uh with milk in this case um so we didn’t know this was here when we started out the project uh but we don’t
Know even if if it’s been successful and you can Google that yourself and see how it’s going but we’re just to show that that it has been done at that scale and we did we did talk to the equipment suppliers um on this and to be honest it
Doesn’t need too much more equipment other than what we have already in the country uh but there is equipment needed particularly on the starch side and the fiber side but you can develop a process which we have developed to do similar thing um this is another interesting one
Um this is myself and my colleagues John and laara were over in St Louis in the Budweiser plant and you’d say why are the dairy people over there um what they’ve done here is if you take the dry matter content of barley it’s about 11%
I think roughly am I right John so uh of dry matter but when you put that into a brewing process um the first thing you do is produce a brewer Sprint grain the carbohydrate component goes to make your alcohol so you’ve already made a valuable Source here which is we all
Know Budweiser cellara and so on of these companies it’s anous or bous are the company who who behind this um that’s their Brewing plant there you see in the picture but the Brewer Sprint grain now has gone from is up 32% protein so that’s what you know traditionally has been feed to the
Animals that’s I think that’s what we do here in Ireland as well or a certain amount of it but they have built a 200 million euro plant where they’re extracting the protein out of that and we’re working on that with them in more Park um but the real interesting
Part is that the other reason they’re talking to us is that the processing technology is similar to Dairy not all of it but some of it so it’s a very interesting uh story it’s the first one that I know in the world but the other interesting thing is you’re that Elite
Plant protein there uh that plant protein um and I think if you look at the Netflix um game changers I think it is um they actually use and as some of this so the point is if you Google that you’ll see it’s elite plant protein so it’s basically up cycling your barley
Protein so now where you would have had Brewing uh in the past the Brewers now uh and this is probably the first company I think that that has has completed this is now doing what the cheese in the way Story the beer and the protein story as well so there I think
They’re taking and they tell me there’s over 9 million metric tons of Brewers grain in the world that’s n that’s about three 3 million metric tons of protein so there’s a lot of this in the world so the point is as it added value and it’s the same processing Technologies and the
Same ingredient technology that we’re working on uh in the likes of Mo Park and ashtown so I think it’s an interesting story and it upcycles and also from sustainability point of view is very important um that that is the poster that’s outside so maybe uh Richard Lynch
My colleague is down there uh and you and myself are there as well so if you want to go down there um some of the isolates and so on are are down there yeah okay okay thank you Mark uh Mark if you can join me over here while uh John
Is next up so we’ve heard an awful lot about life cycle analysis and carbon footprinting so John hopefully is going to give us some insights into recent work being done between chugus and uh and our commercial Partners yeah thanks Jan uh just point out uh two of my colleagues Don O’Brien
And Gary Lanigan both from Johnstown Castle had a huge input into this uh don probably had had the biggest input and he’s here hiding in the audience somewhere so you have any very difficult questions uh ask him at lunchtime okay so uh Mark mentioned life cycle analysis of these ingredients
Obviously the first thing you’ve got to do is get an accurate carbon footprint for one a better description of the crop that you’re going to process and that’s what we’ve been uh developing over recent months so just to point out that there are two carbon accounting methods and people often get confused between
Them they have what I called different system boundaries so different things are included in them the first one is uh the the ipcc or intergovernmental panel on climate change approach and that’s what’s used for the national inventory uh you know for for calculating Island Islands emissions and the second one is
The life cycle assessment or LCA and that’s used to to calculate the carbon footprint of a product and it’s per kilogram of of grain or per liter of milk or kilo of me meat or whatever you want but it’s a it’s the carbon footprint of the
Product for both of these you need two things you need what’s called activity data so that’s things like the type of fertilizer you’ve Ed the amount of fertilizer you’ve Ed the cultivation methods that you’ve used and in the case of the of the LCA obviously you also
Need to know the yield of the crop because that’s what you’re dividing the emissions per hectare by however many tons you’ve produced um and uh the second thing you need then is an emissions factor and there are various options for emissions Factor the basic level is a tier one
International default value but you can produce more precise uh carbon Footprints by either using tier 2 or tier three uh values which are National fig National figures or then even more detailed where you need to model it but I think the point is that as you produce
A more precise uh um emissions Factor you also need more activity data to go with it okay and I’m not going to go through all the emissions factors and bore you with a heap of numbers but these are just some of the ones and these are particularly related to the to the
Nitrous oxide emissions the on-farm nitrous oxide emissions so for chemical n application you’ve got uh can or NPK at the top we have National figures for these work that uh we’ve done in Chas over the years has established how much of the nitrogen you apply is is emitted
So in the case of can it’s 35% of the N if we were to use the international default that would be 1% of the N so our emissions from can are about a third of what they would be but also to point out then there are emissions associated with
The nitrogen crop residues of the emissions from the uh nitrogen in organic materials and we don’t have uh local National emissions factors for those so we have to use in our calculations the tier one factor uh that’s obviously something we’re going to need to do more research on because I
Suspect and I think most people suspect that those figures uh are significantly higher than they will be in reality in Ireland now normally for an LCA you’re counting the emissions associated with producing something and you’ll all have heard of offsetting uh or in this case it’s in setting because it’s within the
System you don’t normally include them in in the LCA but we’ve we’ve we’ve included that we can add them into the calculations so this is the amount of CO2 per hectare that’s sequestered if you incorporate the straw and this is assuming a straw yield of four tons a
Hectare and you can see that if you’re on light soils you you’ll of that four tons uh you’ll incor you’ll sequester just under a ton of carb of CO2 into the soil whereas if you’re at the other end on a heavy clay soil it’ll be about
Twice that are just over two tons so we’ve Incorporated that into the calculations and what we’ve done is we’ve run through some of the data from dermat rotation experiment that Jack and der mentioned earlier and this is 5 years of data from 2016 to 2020 so I’m
Just going to go through some of that very briefly with you so these are the calculated carbon Footprints uh for each of the crops in the rotation you’ve got the rotational crops there from uh left to right and then uh the last two columns on the right hand side compare
Winter weat grown as part of the rot ation or continuous winter wheat and these are for the plow based cultivations and you can see the continuous winter wheat has a slight slightly higher carbon footprint that’s because it has slightly higher nitrogen uh rates applied and also because it’s slightly lower
Yielding and just looking at the uh what contributes to that carbon footprint of the wheat you can see on the on the right hand side is the is the carbon that’s embedded in the fertilizer we use and that’s accounting for nearly half of the total CO2 emissions for our crops
And then uh the lighter green slice um is the is the emissions that are associated with applying the fertilizer not the desel for the tractor but what comes off when you actually apply the nitrogen to the soil and that’s about another 24% so about 3/4 of the emissions uh associated with wheat
Production has to do with n nitrogen fertilizer fuel production and use so that’s uh obviously tractors machinery for Harvest about 14% crop residues there it comes in the calculation at about 10% as I said we don’t have local emissions Factor so I think that’s POS possibly over um
Overestimated seed is about 3% and crop protection is about 1% that’s the embedded carbon in in crop protection products that you would apply so in in dermot’s experiment uh we obviously has the cultivation methods uh and this is the the the CO2 emissions for those crops either grown using
Shallow minimum tillage or plowing and you can see there’s not really much difference between the two uh that’s because although you’re using slightly less diesel in the minimum tillage uh compared to the plow when you look across these five years that we looked at anyway there’s a tendency for the
Minimum tillage to be slightly lower yielding so the two things offset each other and overall the carbon footprint is uh is very similar so as I mentioned we’ve built in the ability to account for for carbon sequestered by the straw if you Incorporated the straw now in dermot’s experiment he didn’t incorporate the
Straw but we done the calculations for what would happen had he Incorporated the straw so this is the uh kilogram of CO2 equivalent per ton of grain produced uh and that would be sequestered if you Incorporated the straw from winter wheat winter R sea drape winter oats and
Winter barley and you can see there’s a there’s a higher straw yield on the winter oats so you’re sequestering more carbon and the other at the other end of the range there’s winter Al you rape so we can now superimpose that over the emissions for those crops um so in Brown
Is the gross emissions that I showed you earlier uh for four of the crops and in green is the net so that’s what’s left after you’ve accounted for the carbon sequestered in the straw and you can see there for winter oats if you can account for the carbon sequestered in the straw
You’re getting very close to to uh zero uh in terms of the emissions uh that are left after carbon sequestration so just to conclude uh nitrogen fertilizer use and yield are the main factors affecting carbon footprints we need to do further uh research to revine refine some of the emission
Factors where we’re currently having to use tier one figures the carbon footprint of Irish grain is low by International standards given that we have some of the highest yields in the world that’s not surprising um and you know we’re hoping or what this will do uh once once we can apply
It is it’ll be it’s an endorsement of the sector’s credentials to stakeholders in the value chain so people buying uh grain um you know they can see that what that that what’s being produced on Irish Farms is of low environmental impact and also then I need to just uh make sure to
Thank Turon uh who put in significant funding for the development of this LCA model and apologies to anyone from that company who was here if I couldn’t get my English accent around your new name but it’s your fault for coming up with something that’s hard to uh pronounce
When you have an English accent okay so thanks very much and I’ll I’ll leave it at that [Applause] thanks Johan okay so delighted to welcome chenade moris now from satu Southeast Tech University so Mark mentioned in his talk uh about the potential from Sprint Brewers grain and shenet is talking about exciting work
That we’re doing in collaboration with themselves off you go Shen perfect so I am going to talk about a dafm funded project between Chagas tud and satu Carlo campus named dabbing copper distilling BR building capacity and in this I’m going to specifically focus on what isu’s role so up until recently we
Only really had standard methods for testing molted barley for alcohol yield and and as a push to try and get more distillers to use crops like wheat raw and Maze We Now need new methods that mimic Irish industry standards for determining alcohol yield on a small
Scale so the first thing or the first role foru was to develop these lab scale methods so we take small amounts of Grins and we can put them through an alcohol yield process to determine predicted Spirit yields or alcohol yields from there we know that things like protein are going to have massive
Impacts on alcohol yield so we wanted to start looking at kind of analyzing the protein starches and then any other kind of grain composition that’s going to impact on that kind of final alcohol yield and then after that it’s putting all that information together to see can we come up with suitable characteristics
That’s going to deem these grains suitable for within the Irish dillant sector so looking in particular to Wii why would we want to use Wii so Wii has the potential to replace imported maze within our Irish distilleries it is suitable or very suitable to our crop
It’s a high yielding crop and with that we also have numerous experienced Growers that can produce a very good crop for us to use and it gives very good alcohol production so in terms of kind of what alcohol we’re expecting we’re expecting over 410 lers of alcohol
Per ton of grain on a dry basis there are con concerns with Wei we’ve hard and soft Wei so some Wei is hard like Costello and is perceived as having a lot of difficulties by Irish distillers and then we have soft tws like LJ astronomer that are seem to be easier to
Process but still also have their own concerns in terms of their suitability to our climate but issues then within that production process in terms of process and issues that we see in production is high levels of protein can reduce our alcohol content and having too much pentosans will give us increase viscosities with
Will lower alcohol yield um so the main aim here is to try and figure out how does all those grain compositions like the protein and the starch impact alcohol production and impact a distiller’s decision to use these crops so kind of looking at some of the results that we’re seeing and I’m going
To focus on protein at the moment so protein is a major element um in terms of making alcohol we know for malted barly it needs to be between certain ranges and up until recently we didn’t know what that was going to be for we so
In this graph here this is what has been previously reported in other jurisdictions in particular from Scotland so in Scotland they predicted that as you increase grain protein so grain protein is on the x axis alcohol yield is on the Y AIS as the grain protein increased you lost alcohol and
And lost at a rate of about 7.2 lers um of alcohol per ton of grain which is a substantial amount to be losing from our studies we seen something completely different so again protein along the xaxis alcohol yield on a dryway basis along the y axis and what we’ve seen is
That as we start to increase that protein levels we get this kind of Spike before it starts dropping off what we can say from that is we were predicting that we need about 8 to 11% protein within our grain in order to achieve really high alcohol levels so with high
Alcohol levels we’re talking four to 500 liters of alcohol per ton of grain protein obviously is just one element that we need to look at the the other major element that we need to look at is the starch concentration or how much starch is present in the grain more
Starch more sugars more alcohol so I suppose to first start with how does n rate impact on that startch so our samples were provided from a trial from chagus that looked at various n rates being applied to the Wii we took those samples um and calculated how much
Starch was present as the N rate increased we got an increase in stch up until about 200 kgs of n as it went to 250 a kind of P toed off and we kind of reached our maximum star amount so we’re looking at anywhere from 60 to 80% star
In Irish whe um with about 8 to 10% protein how does that impact on alcohol yield well the more St you have the more sugars you have if you have more sugars these can ferment it and give higher levels of alcohol so what we see here is
That as um start on the x-axis alcohol yield on the y- axis we get a nice linear straight line so that as we increase that amount of starch in in the grain we get higher alcohol yields so to kind of conclude around startch we need
Around 200 kgs of n per Hector to get really high levels of starch in the grain have a nice low level of protein starch increases alcohol um increases the kind of mainting with this is this has all been done on lab scale we now need to move forward to a proof of
Concept and that needs to be done on a pilot scale facility so at this point I will pass these over to Lisa Ryan who’s going to talk about chagas’s role thank you chenade uh my name is Lisa Ry I am the manager of the national Center for Brewing and Distilling in Oak Park
In Carlo um and the aims of this Center um are to develop with academic and Industry Partners a domestic Center of Excellence for Brewing and Distilling that validates the added value potential for Irish grains for malting Brewing and Distilling um we want to support Education and Training H in the in the
Industry um allow the the industry the drinks industry themselves to come in and and rent the center so that they can do their their trials on site so that’s allowing them to do a trial at a lower cost and a lower risk so if it goes badly wrong it doesn’t cost them some
Production um so essentially they can come into the center and rent it and do their trials and obviously we’re working very closely with sat2 and chenade and her team um on the the wheat piece and and optimizing Irish grains uh just the photograph on your left there is um the
Pilot malting plant in O Park so that allows us malt 250 kg batch sizes at a time takes about 7 to eight days to put that through the system and on the right hand side there of the screen is a micro malting plant so that allows very SC
Small scale batches so that just allows you to scale up in terms of your numbers of samples through so the center has has been up and running I suppose since well I started last this time last year really um and what we focused on really is is
The Education and Training piece so we have a joint um strategy with satu so satu were the first university in Ireland to have the honors degree program in brewing and stilling so their students will come into into into our Center and do a lot of their their work
Their classes and some some of their Project work as well um so we’re working very closely with se2 in terms of Designing training courses for the industry as well so we’ve we four or five courses that that the industry need and we will be certifying them through through satu um there’s QC training
Available for industry Partners as well and we’re looking at expansion uh in the center for phase two um and installing uh another column still so what you’ll see there on the pictures is a pot still so that allows us to distill 60 L uh of
Beer in there and we have a column still small column still as well and the picture there to the right was the first distal it that came off the column and the hydrometer is sitting there in the in the water in the front or the alcohol
And that’s telling you that it’s at 85% ABV so then for 2024 the plans are to develop the analytical laboratory further so done a lot of work on the lab um and we’ve a few more bits of kit that we need to get in there so good progress
Been made there and we’ve a sensory room set up for the industry to use as well we’ll continue with the on-site technical support work um for new startups so busy last year with with a couple of new distilleries getting started up and looking for some support
Um and there was a couple of existing businesses as well who looked for some training and support on site so that we’ll just continue to deliver that um in terms of research then again we’re looking at a few interesting areas there so investigating the benefits of fermented non-alcoholic beer and human
Health so we’re we’re we’re supporting that that research um Distillery waste optimization again it’s a huge opportunity in terms of uh the waste products that come off the different processes of distilling so H potta would be one of those and for every one liter of alcohol produced 8 liters of potta is
Produced um and there’s about 14 15% protein in that so we’re looking at that with satu um we’re also looking at trying to expand the utility of Irish grains and bringing added value to the tillage sector and that’s a big piece of of of work and it’s really focusing in around
Irish Hotel whiskey so it’s the only whiskey that unique to Ireland Irish pot still and it’s a unique recipe to Ireland so no other country produce it and currently the recipe allows for 30% barley to be used in that in that recipe so there’s there’s a challenge on on the
Regulations around that to allow more Irish grains to be used in there so we just really want to get ahead on that in terms of optimizing that process we’re working with seu on that so that’s a that’s a big opportunity um and we’re also looking at multing characteristics of Heritage barly varieties
That’s me thanks for list thanks very much Lisa if you want to join us over here please and again please attendees if any questions just send them in through the through the slido app as well so um I have lots of questions and I think we we have a good few coming
Through the panel John I’m going to start with yourself because we’ve heard so much about carbon footprinting uh carbon impact carbon sequestration Etc I suppose the first thing is where does tillage rank relative to Dairy and beef sectors well that’s Lo down in the um National Farm survey sustainability
Report um each year uh and that most point that’s using the ipcc methodology obviously for the national inventory and tillage Emissions per hectare are low they they obviously vary a bit from year to year in terms of the tillage element it’s somewhere in around 1 1.3 tons a
Hectare beef would be about 4 tons a hectare and daer is more like Dairy is more like eight or nine tons a hectare in terms of their emission okay and you talked on your your pie chart about fertilizer manufacturer it’s huge I mean the impact of that is huge so is there
Any way that can be reduced so what we’ve used in there is the is a is a an emissions factor for for fertilizer manufacturer which is the European average so it’s the average of all the fertilizer that’s used in Europe which is 3.7 kilg of CO2 per kilogram of
N produced there’s huge variation in that if you went to some of the most advanced fertilizer factories uh in in Western Europe you could about half that figure to something like 1.8 and at The Other Extreme then if you went over to Eastern Europe or China where they have
Some very inefficient fertilizer plants running on on coal then that figure could be as high as 9 or 10 rather than the 3.7 so if you made sure on your tillage system and you could verify it and that’s the point about the activity data that you were only buying fertilizer
From efficient plants you could about half that that that side of the of the pie chart pie chart okay very good good Mark there there’s there’s a question there at the top but before I take that one I suppose there’s an awful lot of hype about plant protein to be honest um
I mean you know is is it going to is it going to materialize we heard this morning you know very difficult scenarios for Farmers here at the moment they’re looking to put in more uh protein crops is there going to be extra value opportunities down the line yeah that’s a relevant question I
Suppose the first thing is to distinguish between CU people get a big confused in in plant-based products and plant-based ingredients plant-based ingredients Malex and thing has been around for a long time the starches have been around for a long time but they’re Commodities uh but when you valorize the
Entire plant and you take the protein out as well um it it’s much more it becomes much more competitive so the ingredient Market is much bigger so the hype around the plant yes you hear meat products and so on failing and and so on but you know I don’t think Ireland is
Going to be our goal is going to be replicate meat using plant that’s not not but what we do well is is ingredients and we understand the functionality we have a huge infant form the sector and so on so we understand formulations and so on so it’s the
Ingredient space we’re talking which is a more Global Market so then taking that answer to that question at the top there would it be a yes can we replicate it can we replicate the success of the dairy um we can but um currently be careful what I say do we have the
Infrastructure to do it at the moment probably not okay um we have a lot of do because you’re talking about huge investment and we have the expertise we have the expertise and we do have the ders and and membrane Technologies and so on but there is some more to be added
To to valorize it again it’s back to being able to we want to skip forward we just don’t want to take the protein out we want to take the protein the starch the fiber the things all in one go skip What it Took da to do maybe 40 years
Yeah very good okay John the top question there where does the difference in our can emission factor in tier one systems come from big difference uh it it is a big difference I’m I’m glad to say it comes from some some very good science that’s been published which is
How we have it in the National inventory uh and I think the point is with any of these emissions CO2 emissions they’re very uh dependent on uh the climate and the soils in which you’re farming um and we tend to have we tend to have our tillage on lighter land in Ireland which
And that’s not as biologically active and that means you get lower emissions of nitrous oxide from applying fertilizer uh so the tillage factor is35 for can the tier one factor is one the factor for grassland this island is 1.4 so we actually have more than average Emissions on grass from can on Grassland
Which is why there’s a big push to use protected uer on Grassland okay very good chenade um your presentation obviously has lifted lid on the potential of of Wheat and obviously winter wheat is one of our main crops we grow it very well we produce really high
Yields um but the obvious question then is why aren’t why isn’t it mainstream why isn’t it being used to offset maze Imports Etc what what are the challenges with it so I suppose one of the main challenges is not understanding the full grain composition so different elements
Of the grain composition like b glucans or pentant have a huge impact on the production process so the increased things like viscosity and if we get increased viscosity we don’t get even conversion of starch to sugar which lowers their yields and and then with that it kind of kind put some downtime
Onto Distillery if it’s too tick it causes more time to clean it out um and it just we kind I suppose we need more research into trying to utilize wheat within the sector to try and figure out what varieties are going to be the best ones I suppose it’s the first thing and
Then figuring out like what the protein levels what the starch levels need to be to try and kind of mimic what we already have for mted barley yeah very good and Lisa I mean the center as you said it’s only 12 months really getting going it’s
Getting up on its feet but it’s it’s a a good segue from the work in dabbing cap but from your end are is there interest from the industry you know specifically in like winter wheat and other aspects absolutely yeah so I mean yes there are challenges in terms of getting the
Industry to to buy into this and to to change it’s a hugely successful industry and if it’s if it’s not broken why fix it so there’s a little element of that approach um but but I certainly in my own experience worked in a Distillery where we used um imported French Maze
And we changed over to using Irish wheat and while the were were processing issues it was all very D and it’s very successfully run now so where the center comes in is to enable chades trials to be scaled up and then to invite the industry in and say listen this is I
Retweet this is what you need to do to get this yield out of it so um yeah we’re at the early stages but that’s that’s the goal right so I mean it’s it’s basically a an incubation platform for budding businesses that are are starting out so I mean the last question
There any potential in micro malting on farms I mean that’s an open-ended question yeah so um there’s loads of potential huge potential there um so we have a micro moting facility in in Oak Park and if if somebody needs support on on that process uh give me a shout um I I can
Help you out but yeah there’s there’s massive potential there right so John lots of specific questions in regards to the carbon the top one there um impact of plowing has it been counted in there’s been quite a lot of work done particularly on dermat systems trial over the years and on other experiments
That we’ve done comparing plowing and non-inversion tillage I should say it’s it wasn’t particularly direct drilling at the time and whilst if you look at the the international data and particularly places like Canada and Australia if you plow the soil you lose huge amounts of carbon the more you
Disturb the soil but they’re in hot dry climates and that carbon Burns off very quickly what we find in our conditions uh which are far from hot and dry um is that you don’t burn off anywhere near as much carbon from PL compared to to non-inversion tillage as
You would in in other climates so in in terms of Irish specific data the difference between plowing and non-inversion tillage or minimum tillage anyway is relatively small but what was also found was that those nitrous oxide emissions from applying fertilizer tended to be slightly higher on minimum tillage and that offset the difference
In carbon so we have we don’t have data to support putting it into a model uh so it’s not in there okay okay fair enough chenade you you obviously talked about wheat have you done any work on Ry or any other cereals yes so we currently
Have ongo work being carried out on Roy so we’re in the alcohol yield process for Roy and then we’re doing the same for ma once we’ve kind of determined the alcohol yield potentials for them we’ll move on to characterizing the grain compositions and then applying all that
Same stuff that we’ve done on weat to both of those two crops as well and repeat the process yeah very good Mark the bioavailability of plant proteins versus Dairy meat proteins how better our plant proteins well me the dairy as we know for years is is a I suppose from a
Nutritional point of view is designed for animals so uh and the bioavailability of the minerals and so on as a publication just come out to show clearly is better from Mineral Point of View come with it a lot of work been done on the on the digestion of the
Plant proteins now but the interesting thing if you take what the ab and Bev have done um even though the amino acid profile may not be as as balanced in the barely as as a dairy it’s still good and has loosing content you need loosing to produce muscle protein so it depends on
The application but you need loosen for muscle so it actually works very well there so they you know potential is there potenti is there okay great Lisa there’s an interesting question there about potatoes yeah see that um yeah absolutely have we looked at it yet no um but it’s it’s definitely has
Potential so um it’s it’s one of it’s one on the list of us to to do as well yet okay and John carbon offset from straw Incorporation a once off or is it accumulative year after year uh it’s not a once off generally when you change your your system
Um it will take somewhere like 25 or 30 years to equilibri so if you started incorporating straw today your soil carbon would continue to increase for about 25 or 30 years and then it would level off at a higher Point okay so um you’re banking it you’re banking it year on year you’re
Banking it year on year but it will level off in about 30 years time so it’s certainly not a oneoff uh can you achieve it year after year you can do it long enough for me to not worry about it too much in 30 years time okay and and
Why does oil seed rape have have a much higher footprint just because it’s lower yielding I mean the oil seed rape in that trial was probably yielding about five tons a hectare so you’re dividing the total emissions per hectare just by a lower yield but don’t forget I mean
All rpe obviously has a much higher energy content for ton than cereals would so you can work these things out various ways you could look at the the you know you can look at the carbon footprint per unit of protein or per unit of energy we’ve just done it there
In terms of straight tons but a ton of Aly rape is not the same as a ton of Valley obviously okay okay Mark obviously a lot of the talk is around Fab Bean um and I should say uh to attendees if if you want to know more detail and more information obviously
The the plant protein stand is out there but also there’s other stands um in regard to Steven C’s work around IPM and Lis mamaro who’s not here today and grass weeds so please please take the time to engage with with the staff and students out there mark the it’s all
About faban but you know within those projects there’s other crops as well you mentioned Lupin and P Y yeah Lupin worked very sorry Lupin worked very well as well uh chickp works well um we’ve looked at ODS we’ve looked at Barley um p as well some of them not as soluble um
So one of the you know they must be soluble once you produce a powder out of them um not as soluble so that’s something to be worked on uh but uh We’ve also looked at tuber so even things like mash AA yakon and so on with with be aonics so some unusual
Tubers yeah very good John H just to tying into Jack’s comment earlier you know in terms of direct drill systems um carbon footprint potential to be lower um well I’ll give Jack the LCA model and once he’s done his economics he can he can work on the carbon
Footprint I mean uh the the carbon going into the system will be lower if you’re using less Fuel and if you reduce your fertilizer but obviously then you’re dividing by the yield and Jack showed that the yield on those systems was slightly higher so it would depend on
The balance as to how much you’d reduce the carbon emissions and how much should reduce the yield and I can’t say now how that would work out but if you you’ve obviously got a smaller figure to divide those total emissions by but I’m sure Jack once Jack has all the data together
He will he’ll Enlighten us in the future no pressure Jack so uh Lisa you mentioned in your talk there about the education so I mean it’s not just about the pilot processing and scaling up from chenade work but when you say education who wants to be educated like where
Where’s the demand and and what’s needed yeah there’s a huge demand for for training and upscaling um and we have about 40 odd distilleries in the country now and over 70 breweries and a lot of the staff there um don’t have any experience in Brewing and Distilling and
So it’s the it’s the basics around how to optimize their process and and get the most out of it so there’s huge huge uh there’s huge um requirement for for training for for those people yeah great John I’m going to throw the top question to yourself while there’s a lot of focus
On drinks Milling wheat in Ireland I know we we’re doing work on it in O Park we’re in year three of a trial this year now but okay so uh the reason we focused on the drinks industry in particular apart from it being a huge export market
For us is that for alcohol production as Shen has pointed out is you need high starch and relatively low protein okay okay we have a limited amount of nitrogen that we’re allowed to apply to our wheat crops uh you know as part of the nitrates directive and we have the
Highest yields in the world which means we tend to produce high starch low protein most of the Milling we wheat that we use in Ireland is is put through What’s called the chy wood process to you know to produce a p the baker or a Brennan sliced pan and that needs high
Protein and it also needs uh a low Hagberg falling number and to get a low Hagberg falling number which is low alha amalay activity um then you need dry conditions before and during Harvest okay so I guess my view has been We Stand more chance of succeeding getting
Irish grains into a high value drink Market than we do developing a large Milling uh process in Ireland that said for small producers say producing brown bread um you know high value Brown BR bread traditional brown bread then we can produce a certain amount of wheat to
Go into that but the very large market and and I believe it’s about 80% of the market is for that sliced pan yeah and we’re going to struggle okay and I think the last two years would would highlight that 2022 was a fantastic Harvest weather in 2023 was well we best not
Best not think about it so um we’re going to end the session there I want to thank Lisa chenade John and Mark um a round of applause please for their contributions than you