21/07/2021
"Over the 21st century, livestock units have consolidated into giant factories. Vast buildings now house hundreds of dairy cattle, thousands of pigs or tens of thousands of chickens. Regions now specialise in particular animals. The catchment of the River Wye is the UK’s chicken capital.
These factories gather nutrients from a wide area and concentrate them into a small one. The chicken units draw soya from huge tracts of Brazil and Argentina, with devastating consequences for rainforests and savannahs, and pour it into chickens housed along the Wye and its tributaries. The nutrients in the feed then come out in their dung.
Animal dung is high in water and low in value, so it can be shifted economically across only short distances. This means, if you are not to spend more on diesel than the manure is worth, spreading it in the catchment of the river. The soil soon saturates. The nutrients in the dung from then on wash into the river whenever it rains. It doesn’t matter whether farmers illegally pump the dung directly into the river or follow the rules to the letter in spreading it on their fields. Eventually the phosphate, nitrate and other pollutants it contains end up in the water.
So once a certain number of chicken, dairy or pig units have been built in a catchment, rivercide is inevitable. Even if there were effective government monitoring and enforcement, which there isn’t, it would make little difference.
The crucial decision point is the granting of planning permission for industrial livestock units. The local authorities granting it, and the regulators issuing environmental permits, sign the river’s death warrant. Astonishingly, from their responses to our questions, we discovered that neither the two county councils giving these permissions (Powys and Herefordshire), nor the Welsh and English regulators (Natural Resources Wales and the Environment Agency), appear to have any idea how many chickens are now housed in the catchment or even how many factories there are. This task was left, as so much crucial data gathering has been, to citizen scientists. Alison Caffyn, an academic researcher, and Christine Hugh-Jones, a retired GP, set out to map the factories, and estimated that they house, at any one time, 20 million chickens.
Because none of the authorities have kept score, they cannot assess the cumulative impact of these factories. In granting permission for new units, they treat each one as if it were built in isolation, with no attempt to determine what the extra increment of dung will do to an overloaded river. Worse still, in many cases no environmental decision is made at all, because below a very high threshold (40,000 chickens or 2,000 pigs) a livestock unit does not require an environmental permit. It’s a scandalous regulatory failure."
Water that should be crystal clear has become a green-brown slop of microscopic algae because of industrial farm waste, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot
