Council to make decision on pig farm

Antrim and Newtownabbey Borough Council is set to decide on whether a proposed pig farm on the Reahill Road gets planning approval.
Mossley Mill.Mossley Mill.
Mossley Mill.

Members of the council’s Planning Committee are set to decide on the divisive issue at their meeting at Mossley Mill on Tuesday, November 22. The meeting will take place in the council chamber, commencing at 6:30pm.

A recommendation to grant planning approval has been put forward.

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Opinion has been divided for the proposal, seeing party colleagues at loggerheads with each other over the farm.

Plans for the controversial development were first submitted in March 2015. The original proposal stated that the farm would have four pig sheds, a mill building, an office building, two anaerobic digester tanks, a silo bay, a digestive lagoon and an attenuation lagoon and ancillary works. A revised proposal was submitted on Thursday, July 21 2016, reducing the scale of the development and pig numbers.

The amended proposal stated that the facility would have four pig houses with air scrubber units and associated water and waste holding tanks, a slurry scraping system, pedestrian hand rails, an anaerobic digester plant, two digestive tanks, slurry tanks, combined heat and power and carbon scrubber, gas flare, a control and pump room, a standby generator, silo clamp, a silo bay with digestive loading area, an office, a store, gates and security fencing, dead stock storage, wheel wash facilities, a weighbridge, sheugh alterations, a septic tank, reed bed, a pond, fuel storage tanks, petrol interceptors, fire hydrants, new access onto Reahill Road, proposed widening of a section of Reahill Road, across site frontage, recontouring of land within the site with landscaped bunds, tree and shrub planting, lighting to include bollard, bulkhead and column fittings.