Pipe-laying for Dragon Feeds worm farm, south-west Wales – December 2008.

Problem: You need to create a worm farm and to do so you need copious quantities of sea-water - only your site is over two-miles inland. What do you do?

Solution: Call in Spencer!

In the winter of 2008 Dragon Feeds gained planning permission to develop a facility to produce Ragworms near Pendine in south-west-Wales. These worms are supplied to fish farms to provide a more environmentally friendly source of protein food, rather than the usual meal produced from ground-up fish.

The main issue for Dragon Feeds in establishing its new operation was how to get the pipes to provide the sea-water across tidal marshland, a range of dunes, a restricted military area and a beach that shelves gently and thus cause a huge differential in the distance from the water’s edge between high and low tides.

Because of these issues, it would be almost impossible to install the pipeline using traditional open-cut methods, the trench likely to fill with water or silt as soon as the soil and sand was excavated – not to mention the potential of wall-collapse due to the instability of the surrounding terrain.

Having surveyed the task in hand, Dragon Feeds had no hesitation in contacting Spencer, who own the only operational SpiderPlow in the country and, because of the way it works, this revolutionary piece of equipment provided the ideal solution.

By dropping an installation blade into the ground the SpiderPlow cuts a narrow channel through the soil and, whilst doing so, pulls the pipe (or alternatively a cable) into the aperture and positions it up to two-metres beneath the surface. As the SpiderPlow moves forward the blade closes the channel behind it and therefore, the operation causes minimal damage to the soil and requires little or no reinstatement.

Added to this, because it is pulled by a separate power-winch which is anchored several metres ahead, the SpiderPlow does not have to struggle for grip on soft or undulating surfaces.

As it transpired, the whole pipeline was completely installed in just four days and, because the ground quickly recovered to its natural state, you would never know the pipe had ever been laid.