BRACKEN, the scourge of many hill and upland farmers and land managers, may be about to finally meet its match – capitalism.

Controlling the unwanted expanses of invasive and noxious weed has become increasingly unviable in recent years, with the single best chemical treatment, asulox, under constant threat of withdrawal, and its means of delivery either prohibitively expensive, via helicopter, or labour intensive, via roller.

To make matters worse, climate change is letting bracken spread ever higher above sea level, reducing the availability of grazing land, hampering tourism, encouraging the spread of ticks and providing a build-up of dense litter to fuel wildfires.

But what if these vast plantations of bracken had value that could pay for new technologies purpose-built to harvest bulky vegetation from the hillsides? That is the prospect to be explored at a series of exceptional machinery demonstration days next month, hosted by Annandale and Atholl Estates.

On show will be the cutting edge of hillside harvesters, brought over from Germany by Oakland Biofuels, a company which believes that bracken can be viably cut, gathered and transported bracken off the hill to use as a feedstock for biofuel.

Working trials of the specialist hillside cutting equipment, provided by Brielmaier GmbH of Southern Germany, were held in Wales, Shropshire, Cumbria and Yorkshire in 2015 as part of a feasibility study, where they proved 90% effective in being able to cut bracken over two metres high on slopes up to 60 degrees.

Following that successful trial, the machines went back to Germany to be modified and are now ready to return to the UK for a series of demonstrations in 2016, with the aim of creating baled and wrapped material for final bioethanol quality testing. Dry Bracken, states the firm, can have a higher calorific value than hardwood.

Even where insufficient quantities of bracken are available for biofuels, the project leaders want to demonstrate that opportunities could be created for younger people in rural areas to become contract bracken cutters for the benefit of their communities or neighbours, or for smaller energy projects such as biomass pellet production.

There will be two demonstrations in Scotland in September, the first at Annandale Estates, Lockerbie, on September 7 by permission of David Johnstone, and the second at Atholl Estates, Pitlochry, on September 9, by kind permission of Atholl Estates.

"Being able to manage and control bracken and other soft biomass throughout the UK will have many benefits to rural areas not only from an employment and sustainability point of view but in being able to produce renewable energy and biofuel, in reducing the reliance on agrochemicals, in helping areas to return to natural environments and in improving rural tourism," said an Oakland spokesman. "This series of demonstrations will show that there are now efficient and viable alternatives to leaving these areas to spread unchecked."