Agricultural Landbank and Organic 'Waste': A National Capacity Estimator (ALOWANCE)

ALOWANCE is aimed at operators who recycle organic materials to agricultural land (e.g. producers of compost and anaerobic digestate). It will show you how much land is available for spreading these materials in the vicinity of existing or planned production sites.

ALOWANCE is a simple but powerful map-based software tool that assesses the potential for the agricultural landbank in England and Wales to beneficially accept organic materials from both farm and non-farm sources. It is designed to calculate the land capacity remaining after 'present day' farm manure, biosolids, compost, paper crumble and digestate additions have been accommodated i.e. the landbank available for ‘new’ organic material additions at national, regional and local levels. However, it does not take into account factors such as farm assurance scheme requirements, which may prevent farmers from spreading certain type of organic materials.

Using the ALOWANCE Tool

ALOWANCE allows you to calculate the agricultural landbank within a specified distance of a chosen point. Results are shown in the form of an interactive map and a graph of the landbank versus radial distance from your chosen point.

For most users no additional software needs to be downloaded to your computer. However, you will need a relatively modern Internet Browser such as Internet Explorer 6, 7 or 8. These are available for download from Microsoft. We have also successfully tested Google Chrome and Firefox which both support most of the features of the ALOWANCE tool. You will need to have Javascript enabled in your browser (this is the default setting).

For further information see our FAQS and information about our approach.

Run ALOWANCE

Help

If you are familiar with GIS/mapping applications you will almost certainly be able to begin using ALOWANCE immediately. However, to make the most of this tool we recommend that you spend a little time familiarising yourself with its operation by reading the online help documentation.

ALOWANCE Help

Contacts

We would like to hear about your experience of using ALOWANCE and if you have any questions or comments then please use our contact us page to send your thoughts.

Funding by Defra of the ALOWANCE On-line software is gratefully acknowledged (Defra project ES0128). For information on Defra R&D, please go to http://randd.defra.gov.uk. We would also like to thank Water UK, AFOR, the Paper Trade Federation and Cranfield University for kindly allowing the use of their data within ALOWANCE.