EcoNomad Solutions, an AgriTech business based in Harpenden, has secured £400,000 — approximately €466,000 — to develop and scale technology that converts livestock waste into energy on small farms.
The package includes £230,000 from the British Design Fund, alongside support from the Innovate UK Investor Partnership and Beeches Group.
Scaling a technology down rather than up
Anaerobic digestion is well established, but its economics have historically favoured large installations: capital cost, engineering complexity and permitting requirements all reward scale. The result is that the majority of small livestock holdings — which collectively account for a substantial share of agricultural methane — have no practical route to capturing it.
EcoNomad's BioNomad system is designed for that segment. It captures methane from slurry and manure, producing biogas for on-farm energy use and a biofertiliser by-product that can be returned to the land in place of purchased inputs.
Two revenue arguments in one machine
The commercial proposition rests on cost rather than subsidy. Energy generated on site displaces purchased electricity, heat or fuel; digestate displaces bought-in fertiliser. Both are direct reductions in operating expenditure at a time when UK farm margins are under sustained pressure from input costs and shifting support arrangements.
The environmental case runs alongside it. Methane released from untreated slurry stores is a potent short-lived greenhouse gas, and capturing it converts an emission into a usable fuel. That dual effect — an operating saving and an abatement outcome from the same equipment — is what distinguishes the proposition from technologies that require a farmer to pay for a climate benefit.
Deployment plans
Initial deployment is focused on the United Kingdom, with longer-term ambitions to scale across the UK and into European markets. The company has not published unit pricing, installed-base figures or a target deployment number.
The allocator view
Agricultural decarbonisation technology occupies awkward ground for investors. The addressable market is large and fragmented, sales cycles are slow, and customers are individually small and capital-constrained. Distribution — not engineering — usually determines which companies in this category succeed, and the routes that tend to work run through cooperatives, machinery dealers and existing farm-supply relationships rather than direct sales.
Regulation is a further variable. Handling and spreading of digestate, permitting for on-farm gas generation and the treatment of any exported energy all sit within frameworks that differ between UK jurisdictions and again across European markets. Products designed to fall inside the simplest applicable regime tend to deploy considerably faster than those requiring case-by-case consent.
Design capability is central to the proposition rather than incidental to it. Equipment intended for small holdings has to be installed without specialist contractors, operated by people whose primary occupation is farming, and maintained in conditions that industrial plant rooms are spared. Backing from a fund focused on product design reflects that the engineering challenge here is as much about usability and manufacture as about the underlying biology.
For family offices with land and agricultural holdings, the relevance is often operational as well as financial: the same technology that constitutes an investment opportunity may also be applicable to assets already owned. That dual lens — investor and prospective customer — is a recurring feature of real-asset portfolios, and one reason AgriTech attracts family capital disproportionately to its share of venture funding overall.
UKFOS editorial · published 23 August 2026