“The large increase in livestock numbers has created a long-term problem by adding significantly extra phosphorus loading on to the land area in the Wye catchment. Withers told MPs last year that the phosphorus surplus in the Wye catchment was nearly 60% greater than the national average because of the large amounts of livestock manure being produced locally.
Graph of applications for new intensive chicken units in Herefordshire from 2001 to 2021 Then, in 2013, a deal to supply extra chicken to Tesco, the UK’s biggest supermarket, was given to Cargill, which owns a major processing plant in the county.Īround the same time, Cargill announced a £35m expansion of its Hereford plant to boost the number of chickens it could process. The hotspot for chicken farming in the Wye area is Herefordshire, where the numbers of birds began soaring in the early 1990s. Waste from chickens has been identified by scientists at Lancaster University as one of the largest sources of phosphorus pollution in the Wye catchment, which causes the “pea soup” algal blooms. The role of human sewage and wastewater in polluting our rivers has been strongly criticised, but chicken manure from a soaring number of intensive poultry farms plays a huge role too.Įxcrement from the birds is rich in phosphates and is spread on the land as a fertiliser to encourage crop growth, but the land can no longer absorb the amount of manure being spread along the Wye, and the runoff is turning the river into what campaigners describe as “pea soup”.
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