Factory farming is turning this beautiful British river into an open sewer
The longer this goes on, the deeper the mystery becomes. It’s as if the public authorities had set out to destroy an entire region’s economy. Last year, a group of us tried to raise the profile of an astonishing scandal: the impending collapse of one of the most treasured and “protected” rivers in Europe, the Wye, which flows through Wales and England. We showed how chicken factories in the catchment are turning this beautiful river and its tributaries into open sewers.
The two county councils through which the river mostly flows, Powys and Herefordshire, have between them granted planning permission for giant steel barns (factories, in reality) that contain an estimated 20m birds. Many were approved on the grounds that they would probably have no significant environmental impact. Amazingly, at no point was the cumulative impact considered: every decision was taken as if in isolation.
When a giant processing plant that could handle a million chickens a week was opened in Herefordshire, the council must have known that 90 new chicken factories would need to be built nearby to supply it. Chickens cannot be moved far, or they die in transit. Yet no planning guidance was issued, and chicken units weren’t mentioned in the county development plan. So when farmers applied to build them, the council had few legal means of stopping them. A paper in the journal Land Use Policy claimed that “delaying tactics from Conservative politicians” had allowed the new chicken units to get planning permission “before the policy void might be filled”.
The manure from this vast flock is spread by the farmers on their fields, but the grass and soil cannot absorb the nutrients it contains. The surplus ends up in the river. The result is devastating:
Read more on theguardian.com
