We spent this year's ADBA World Biogas Expo and Farmers' Breakfast talking to AD operators, and one theme came up in almost every conversation, whether we were asking about it or not: how to get more value out of what's already coming through the gate. Not one big idea, but dozens of small ones. Farmers asking feed and additive suppliers how to lift yield. Operators comparing notes on kit they'd tried, and on the companies now offering AI-informed plant output modelling. Conversations about feedstock that had nothing to do with subsidies at all, because the people having them had stopped waiting for a policy to solve the problem for them.

One story stood out enough that we kept coming back to it.

A farmer producing straw pellets and briquettes started supplying bedding to local chicken farms. Chickens need a two-week clear-out between flocks, so someone has to strip the shed. He took that job on too, as a paid removal service. Then he fed the used bedding, now nitrogen-rich with chicken manure, straight back into his own anaerobic digestion (AD) plant.

One input. Three revenue lines: the pellets he sells, the removal service he gets paid for, and better-fed digestion at his own site. None of it depends on a subsidy tariff or a policy decision made in Whitehall, and none of it needed a grant to get started.

That independence matters more than it might sound, because most farm-scale AD sites are still built on ageing support schemes with a shelf life. The Renewables Obligation closed to new capacity in 2017. The Feed-in Tariff closed to new applicants in 2019. The Renewable Heat Incentive closed to new applicants in 2021, replaced by the Green Gas Support Scheme, which itself is only open for applications until 2028. Every one of those has an end date attached, even for sites already receiving payments.

Layer on the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation's crop cap, which limits how much of a fuel supplier's obligation can be met with crop-derived material. That cap has been shrinking every year since 2021, and by 2026 it will be down to 3%, heading for 2% by 2032. If your AD plant runs on energy crops, the policy landscape is quietly narrowing around you regardless of what you do.

What we heard at the Expo wasn't panic. It was a room full of people who'd already worked out that waiting for policy to catch up wasn't a strategy, and had gone and built something else instead. The pellet farmer is one version of that. We heard smaller versions of the same instinct all day, most of them starting from the same question: how do you get more out of what you've already got, rather than needing more of it? One conversation was about dosing trace elements, the micronutrients that keep the digester's bacteria healthy, to lift gas yield without buying in more feedstock. Manure and slurry carry these naturally. Food waste mostly doesn't, so getting the dosing right is often the difference between a digester running efficiently and one working harder than it needs to for the same output.

That kind of diversification, whether it's new kit, a dosing programme, or building a removal service from scratch, takes capital most farms don't have sitting around. The farm has to borrow against future income, or fund it out of margin it doesn't currently have to spare. Both of those depend on one thing: knowing what your core AD income actually is, not what you're eligible for on paper, but what actually lands.

Up to 10% of what a plant's power is worth is absorbed before the operator is paid. Output leaves the site and passes through an aggregator, a utility's trading desk, and the wholesale market. Each layer takes a cut. tem built infrastructure to remove those layers, so more of that value comes back to you.

If the price you're paid for exported electricity has already been quietly reduced by margin taken further up the chain, that's not just a smaller number. It's a smaller, less certain number to plan a loan or a new revenue line against. Get paid closer to what your power is actually worth, and the maths on investing in the next thing starts looking a lot less like a gamble.

The subsidy clock is real, and it's not stopping for anyone. But the farmers doing best out of this aren't the ones with the biggest plant. They're the ones who worked out what their power is actually worth, then built from there.