I have swum and rowed and fished and frolicked in and around the River Wye much of my life, the river I loved when I was a boy, where I have rowed boats (and even coracles) that I built myself, and watched the great floods of the sixties bring willow trees and chicken sheds barrelling through the village, floods that resonated with boyhood reading about Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer on the great Mississippi. I have seen eels and salmon swimming in the flooded fields, and found the wooden fishing-fly-towing water kites called ‘otters’ left behind by poachers when there were enough salmon to make poaching tempting. I have risked my life fishing for fingerling eels in the treacherous tidal waters below Tintern, and my children have all swum and canoed on it, eager to see blue-streaking kingfishers. I could have lost my life in it one Saturday afternoon, saving my eel traps from the fast-rising floods caused by the tail end of Hurricane Charlie years ago, floating great rafts of crowfoot down the river like haystacks, tearing at my ropes and buoys. Many of you will feel a similar love for this great river, having camped or canoed or walked along it; some of you will be old enough to remember damsel flies dancing above expanses of white-flowering crowfoot, in the days before the crowfoot was choked by the algae feeding on the chicken effluent. The crowfoot has gone now.
Avara/Cargill have issued a Roadmap for the reduction of the pollution of the Wye Valley by the chicken manure produced in their chicken sheds. The Roadmap seems a clear admission of their culpability for the state of the River Wye, though it seeks to blame others for some of the pollution. They have had a major impact on the soil and air quality of the whole region and the general ecology of the entire Wye catchment, and in particular are endangering salmon, trout, the rare Twaite Shad, otters, swans, herons, freshwater mussels, crayfish, eels, dragonflies and damsel flies, as well as much of the economy of the region, driven by recreations such as walking, swimming, fishing and canoeing. Cargill, the parent company, have recently been found guilty of similar destruction of a river in the US and it seems clear that they knew what they were doing 20 years ago and chose to tough it out. It is possible that the US judge’s ruling prompted Avara/Cargill to publish the Roadmap, a tacit admission of guilt, in the hope this might ward off legal action in this country.
This admission is the result of the superb work done by citizen scientists, environmentalists, nature trusts, and a few newspaper reporters and film makers which demonstrated beyond doubt that Avara (Cargill) and their suppliers were responsible for much of the state of the Wye catchment. Bodies like the government’s Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, or the Environment Agency, seem not to have concerned themselves overmuch with this situation. And although the NFU represents an industry that depends on the health of the biosphere for its prosperity, they tend to focus on the health of farmers’ bank balances more than the health of the farming environment. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) seems to defer to the landowners rather than to environmentalists, notably in the case of the badger cull, although farmers are relatively insignificant both in terms of actual numbers and contribution to GDP. The government certainly deserves little credit, having presided over the defunding of the Environment Agency to the point where it scarcely functions, and over the sell-off of the water companies who now make their money by deliberately allowing wholesale pollution of our seas and rivers with raw sewage.
Cargill’s proposed ‘plan’ appears to be to deliver 100,000 tons of chicken manure annually to a huge biodigester to be operated by the local biogas baron. It needs to be made clear that biodigesters do not get rid of the nitrates and phosphates in chicken manure, the nutrients that are killing the Wye. It is by no means clear whether the few ancillary tanks and reed beds mentioned in the planning application will actually be capable of stripping out the harmful nutrients. The planning documents are very tentative about this, and my gut reaction is that if we are to have reed beds, let them be full of bitterns and reed warblers, not farm effluent. If the whole huge Wye catchment cannot cope with the nutrient waste of the chicken industry, I wonder whether a few reed beds will do any better. And – and this is the really crucial point - the plans for reed bed treatment do not seem intended to result in the ideal green solution, which would be to recover and recycle the phosphates, a rapidly diminishing world resource. There are established and proven methods of methods of stripping nitrates and phosphates from animal waste which produce soil conditioners and comparatively green fertilisers, which are described below. If the digester plans were part of a serious attempt to solve the problems caused by the intensive farming of animals, it seems inexplicable that the digester complex does not plan to incorporate such proven technologies.
The idea that the Wye Valley can be cleaned up by the company that caused the problem in the first place by its lack of any moral or ethical concerns and by the very nature of its business model, is unrealistic to the point of irony. We know that in the past Cargill has generally reneged on environmental pledges. “As one of the largest companies in the world, Cargill has a responsibility to address its outsized impact,” Mighty Earth CEO Glenn Hurowitz has said. “Mighty Earth runs campaigns around the globe to advocate for sustainable business practices, and Cargill kept showing up when our investigations identified bad actors. Whether we were working on palm oil in Southeast Asia, cocoa farming in West Africa, or soy cultivation in South America, Cargill was always there, ready to thwart progress and impede joint conservation efforts”.
Nor have I seen any evidence of the green credentials of the farmer who appears to see chicken shit digesting as a money-making venture. This may not be altogether surprising. I was told only yesterday of local established orchards being pushed out to make way for growing maize not for food or feed but especially for biogas production. A harmful and wasteful land-use, but doubtless profitable, which we subsidise because the Renewable Heat Incentive was badly drafted.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2014/mar/14/uk-ban-maize-biogas.
What is perhaps most disappointing is that while citizen scientists were getting up at dawn to take river water samples, the government agencies seem not to have been so active. The Environment Agency appears not to have been protecting the environment… And the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs appears not to have been planning any strategy for dealing with the devastation of the Environment caused by chicken farming in the other part of its portfolio, Food and Rural Affairs. Meanwhile countries like the Netherlands have been seriously tackling these problems for more than 20 years, taking the long view and looking for ways to reconcile food production with safeguarding the environment. (See below).
For many years the soils, the atmosphere, the groundwater and the watercourses of the Wye Valley catchment and other rivers, meandering through a very large area of Mid-Wales and the Welsh Marches, and also parts of the Severn catchment and the seas beyond, have been being overloaded with excessive quantities of nitrates and phosphates and ammonia gas emanating from the chicken sheds. The farming community, and the government departments responsible for agriculture, the environment and food production, seem to have acted as if this was not their concern, bizarre though this may seem. Why did the farming community and the NFU take no action to safeguard the health of the soils, waters, atmosphere and rivers of the countryside where they made their living? Why did agriculture ministries not work towards making poultry farming sustainable? Why did Departments of the Environment and the Environment Agency need citizen scientists and people like Feargal Sharkey and George Monbiot and the Save the Wye Coalition to inform them that our rivers and coastal seas were full of both human and chicken shit? Why did planning departments not ask questions about the likely environmental impact of the chicken sheds they approved, too often merely concerning themselves with access and screening and other ‘planning matters’? You have to ask yourself what actually were these government agencies and departments doing? Did they think that if they removed regulations or de-funded and de-staffed the enforcement of regulations, the market would sort everything out? Has the thinking of people like Liz Truss somehow seeped into the fabric of this country? Do we rely not on government efficiency but on a deregulated market to keep the planet in a habitable state (and our high rise buildings safe to live in?)
Bizarrely, while governments (both England and Wales) looked on as the detectives of the environmental citizen army piled up the evidence against the (potential) murderer of the Wye catchment, the (potential) murderer came up with a mitigation plan. Avara foods have a plan, a Roadmap, to use a giant biodigester to mitigate the Wye back to some kind of life, a plan that should make money both for them and their sidekick biogas baron. Is this the market sorting the problem out? Forgive my cynicism.
In countries like the Netherlands there has been for many years awareness of the problems of industrial farming, and the need to both reduce farm animal populations and to deal with the manure to prevent it becoming a source of pollution. The Netherlands has developed the concept of Green Mineral Mining Centres, where flows like manure, sewage sludge, food and feed waste and other organic residues are used as a source to produce new ‘bio-based’ mineral fertilisers, organic fertiliser or organic soil improvers and energy from biogas. At Green Mineral Mining Centres, businesses, governmental bodies and knowledge institutes such as universities work together on the development of a circular nutrient economy by new concepts for the processing of biomass waste streams into valuable products. The central goal is to close nutrient cycles and to provide a sustainable solution for surpluses of minerals in agriculture. The plant at Beltrum in the Netherlands was initiated in 2004 and processes over 100,000 tonnes of pig slurry, a very similar amount to the projected Whitwick Manor digester. Instead of a reed bed it has a seriously technical nutrient recovery installation, processing and separating the digestate into phosphorus (P) fertilisers, nitrogen-potassium (NK) fertilisers, organic soil improvers and clean water. This uses (in series) decanter centrifuges, membrane filtration units and ion exchangers to produce the NK concentrated fertiliser and clean water from the liquid digestate, while the solid fraction, after treatment, is separated via screw presses and precipitation tanks into potassium-depleted soil improver and solid phosphate (P).
https://www.groenemineralencentrale.nl/nl/english
The technology to deal with a problem the size of the Wye chicken shit disaster is apparently up and running in the Netherlands, where working initiatives date back to at least 2004. Clearly we need a similar plant to deal with our manure problem. The Dutch solution, collaborations involving progressive green industry, universities and government, seems a better way to organize this solution than a plan cobbled together by Avara and a local farmer. I doubt this will happen unless significant pressure is put on local and both national governments to follow the example of the Dutch and support a similar national collaboration. It seems likely that a successful plant would be economically viable, producing biogas, fertilisers and soil conditioners, even without taking into account the incalculable economic as well as spiritual loss that would result from the death of the River Wye.
Now that the environmentalists and citizens have made their case, won the argument, and while they still have their dander up, may I suggest that this is the time for a change of direction, for them to continue by campaigning for real green working technological solutions. I have pointed out an obviously practicable solution to the problem, one that is already tried and tested, up and running, but there may be others. The amazing people of the Wye Valley can start to make things happen if they continue with the inspired energy they have shown so far. It is not for me to suggest how they might proceed, but in my dafter moments I dream of starting off with a site visit to a Dutch Green Mineral Mining Centre, where environmentalists and Avara executives and local councillors get together and find inspiration and common ground and share a few Dutch beers. Hell, we might even get Jesse Norman MP to come along. It might be time to make peace and make plans. I haven’t started to imagine this disparate bunch ending up in some Amsterdam café yet. I’ll leave you to think about how that might go.
Quite hard to get in touch with these big names, I think
I'm sad to say I don't think we are on the same bus as Cargill. But thank you for your support and kind words.