I live very close to the River Wye, which runs 150 miles in total from the Cambrian Mountains in mid-Wales to the Severn Estuary, making it Britain's fourth largest river.
It also used to be one of the finest, it meanders through the beautiful countryside of the Welsh borders and much of its length it travels through areas of outstanding natural beauty.
However, thanks to chicken shit it has recently been downgraded by Natural England to 'unfavourable-declining' status.
The main reason for this is the large algal blooms you can see at times which turn the water in a pea-soup, which de-oxygenate the water and crowd out all other lifeforms.
Back in the 1960s 50K trout used to run the Wye, now it's just 2-3000 a year.
It's industrial chicken farming!
70% of the pollution in the Wye is because of chicken manure. Roughly 25% of the 18 million chickens slaughtered for meat are reared on the banks of the Wye.
One local plant produces 1.6 million chickens a week. (!!!)
These produce a lot of shit high in nitrogen which is either left on the chicken farms or sold locally as manure.
The problem is all it takes is heavy rain fall and much of this is washed into the river, and it rains A LOT around here!
Chicken manure is full of nitrogen and phosphorous and the phosphate levels in the Why are five to ten times their legal limit.
The problem....
There is a loophole in the law which allows chicken farmers to break rules on applying polluting fertiliser when they think it's 'reasonable' to do so.
And chicken farmer's margins are dragged down by the supermarkets they sell to.
And ultimately this problem is down to consumer demand for cheap chicken, all the farmers are doing is meeting that demand.
A solution...?
It seems quite simple... we just need to keep on top of that chicken shit... move the birds further away from the river and collect their manure more frequently, and make sure it gets spread miles away from the river's catchment area...
Although this would require some joined up thinking, as it stands it's just a matter of leaving the farmers free to exploit that loophole which is killing one of our rivers.
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