Five days before the end of 2024, the Government of Castilla-La Mancha has published a decree that regulates the management of manure from pig farms in Castilla-La Mancha.
The rule comes to end the moratorium on the installation of new pig macro farms or expand the existing ones that the Executive of Emiliano García-Page enabled in 2022 and which will end on December 31. Ecologists and citizen platforms from the towns affected by this type of agricultural facilities have always maintained that this norm with the status of law was of little use and that it was a “sinkhole.”
The Minister of Sustainable Development Mercedes Gómez announced last March in an interview with elDiarioclm.es that work was being done on this standard and that, once the brakes on intensive livestock farms were put to an end, the conditions for opening them would be more “restrictive.”
The decree published today recognizes that “the generation and application of slurry from pig farms in Castilla-La Mancha can cause odor problems and social rejection”, in fact it has caused it and that is why the Castilian-La Mancha Board considers it “essential” to adopt the “necessary measures” for this type of livestock farms to carry out their activity “in a sustainable way” to also avoid the “inappropriate use of these by-products as agricultural fertilizers.”
To begin with, the regulatory text will allow a new ten-year ‘moratorium’ for existing pig facilities to adapt to it. It is the same period that is given to adapt the excrement ponds to the regulations.
That is another of its highlights, slurry ponds may not be less than two kilometers from urban or residential developable land.
Consecrates biogas plants to give “viability” to regional agriculture
In parallel, the decree itself highlights that “the valorization of slurry” can be a “factor of agricultural production of great economic importance” and that it has “agri-environmental benefits”, for example related to the carbon footprint. The decree considers slurry “local products.”
Hence, the moratorium that is now ending has been allowing new macro farms to be opened as long as they incorporated “appropriate technological systems for treatment”, that is, biomethane plants. Now they are proliferating in Castilla-La Mancha, generating more social rejection, which is added to what existed due to industrial pig farms.
The regional government is promoting a Regional Biomethanization Plan 2024-2030. He says that it is a way of “looking for alternative solutions to the high prices of fertilizer products and their dependence on imports.” He also suggests that the implementation of biogas plants will allow the regulation of organic matter and fertilizers in areas vulnerable to nitrates, “by centralizing control in the digestate to be able to manage the doses and calendars of the different areas in need of fertilization.”
According to the new decree, the application of digestate (the result of the treatment of slurry in biomethane plants) “improves the quality and health of the soil by increasing its water retention capacity and its biodiversity.” It also maintains that it will contribute “to greater agricultural productivity and ensures the long-term viability of regional agriculture.”
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