Adrian Tear

Category: Ascog Farm

  • Ascog Farm

    Ascog Farm

    Ascog Farm on the Isle of Bute, Scotland, is run as a partnership between Adrian and his wife, Elspeth. Day to day the farm is managed by Elspeth’s father, Joe, a sturdy veteran farmer.

    A lot of effort has gone into improving the land and buildings at Ascog Farm.

    Attempting to harness the average 8m/sec windspeeds, an application for wind turbines at the farm was lodged in 2013.

    The whole process was somewhat fraught, failed at planning, and has been detailed at length on Adrian’s Ascog Farm website.

    The family now concentrate on sheep-farming operations, including the production of excellent undyed wool and woollen garments.

    Earlier, cattle and sheep farming at Ascog led to the partial development of the database-driven HerdManager website, an application that probably could have grown much bigger with more time invested in it.

    Further details of the Ascog Farm and HerdManager websites are given below.

    • Ascog Farm

      Ascog Farm

      Adrian’s family own Ascog Farm on the Isle of Bute, Scotland. The farm is one of very few that is not owned by the Mount Stuart Trust, the ‘Bute Estate’ which describes itself as ‘the custodian of 87% of the Isle of Bute.’ At Ascog Farm, a particularly windy spot close to the Eastern coast…

    • HerdManager

      HerdManager

      Not the prettiest of sites, and more of a What might have been than anything else, HerdManager was partially developed as a demonstration of the sort of data management that is possible with a ColdFusion-based site, a database and a whole lot of Structured Query Language (SQL) statements. The functionality to add new records to…

    Ascog Farm now uses Agriwebb for flock management, in many ways a competing product to our earlier self-built efforts.

    Agriwebb raised $14 million in Series A funding so perhaps we should have put more time in to HerdManager!

    The farm itself is unlikely ever to make millions but is a beautiful place to spend time, especially if the weather is kind…

  • Ascog Farm

    Ascog Farm

    Visit now!
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    Adrian’s family own Ascog Farm on the Isle of Bute, Scotland. The farm is one of very few that is not owned by the Mount Stuart Trust, the ‘Bute Estate’ which describes itself as ‘the custodian of 87% of the Isle of Bute.’

    At Ascog Farm, a particularly windy spot close to the Eastern coast of the Isle of Bute, Adrian and his family attempted to develop a renewable wind energy generating scheme consisting of three Enercon E48 wind turbines.

    The project was designed to offer a much higher level of community pay-out than is normal. Adrian also told the local councillors that he welcomed community ownership of two out of the three proposed turbines if the funds could be raised (approximately £ million/turbine) to pay for their installation.

    A great deal of geographical research went into the Environmental Impact Assessment into the scheme, some conducted by Adrian and yet more by SAC Consulting, the consultancy arm of the Scottish Agricultural College, now part of Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC).

    Despite all this detailed work some predictable hostility to the scheme, whipped up locally, and a far from imaginative Landscape Wind Energy Capacity Study (LWECS) conducted by Argyll & Bute Council more or less doomed the prospect of gaining planning consent, even before the plans had been submitted.

    Sure enough, the application for wind turbines at Ascog Farm was rejected at planning and at appeal, solely on the basis of views.

    Adrian has produced a set of slides covering the whole project, these are shown below.

    Adrian presented the slides at Portsmouth’s Pint of Science festival in May 2017 and has since incorporated this knowledge into his teaching, notably on The Green Economy course he designed and delivered at the University of Portsmouth.

    Needless to say, since the planning application was refused, global CO2 emissions have continued to rise and no meaningful green energy has been developed on the Isle of Bute.

    Interestingly, other communities in Scotland that did bite the bullet and build wind turbines themselves have done rather well out of it!

    Perhaps there is hope yet…

  • HerdManager

    HerdManager

    Visit now!
    , ,

    Not the prettiest of sites, and more of a What might have been than anything else, HerdManager was partially developed as a demonstration of the sort of data management that is possible with a ColdFusion-based site, a database and a whole lot of Structured Query Language (SQL) statements.

    The functionality to add new records to the herd has been disabled with this restored version! The rest of it (sort of) works.

    Farm management is a complex business and, since this prototype was developed in around 2000, things have evolved substantially.

    At the time neither the capacity nor the funding existed to turn HerdManager into a fully-fledged product.

    It is interesting to think, however, that this idle exercise in how to learn ColdFusion could have turned into something much bigger…

    The software we now use at Ascog Farm, the Australian Agriwebb website and application, has raised $ millions in funding and acquired competitors as it has expanded.

    It even enables farmers to upload KML boundaries of their ‘paddocks’, or ‘fields’, as we call them in the Northern Hemisphere…

    According to a CB Insights page found online, Agriwebb’s 2021 valuation sat at $77.09 million!

    What might have been, had Adrian not been so busy with everything else at the time…