Straw to Scratch and Eggs to Lay

Herefordshire Planning Committee has to decide whether to approve the erection of another giant Anaerobic Digester in the middle of Herefordshire’s best farmland, which is touted by Avara/Cargill as part of the solution to the pollution of the River Wye by effluent from the operators of giant chicken sheds to supply Avara’s chicken factory in Hereford.

This application goes against more of their planning policies and guidelines than I can shake a stick at, and starts off with equivocation over whether this is an agricultural or an industrial development. It is presented either as agricultural or not agricultural, according to what fits best with the planning regulations, though it clearly cannot be both. Planners are being put under what must feel like emotional blackmail to pass it, on the simple grounds that it will ‘save the River Wye’. Who would want to be blamed for scuppering Avara’s plan to Save the Wye? Since they buggered it up in the first place, alongside various other farming enterprises and styles, who better to undo the damage, you might ask?

Who better? If not the planners, or Avara, or the biogas baron, who better?  Good question, which our local MPs might be addressing instead of simply supporting the Avara plan as if their seats depended on it. And while we are talking of self-interest and ambition, it is to be hoped that there is no-one in County Hall who thinks that claiming to have solved the phosphate problem might be useful when planning her/his next career move. No one in public life, I like to hope, would think advancing her/his career more important than impartially evaluating this anaerobic digester scheme. For they are all, all honourable men. Or women.

Behind the application for a  truly massive industrial biogas plant in the middle of Herefordshire’s deepest and most fertile countryside, masquerading as a farming operation when it suits, and as the solution to the ‘death of the Wye’, are issues which, with the greatest respect to the planners, should be, as they say, escalated. What happens to the chicken manure mountain – or indeed the River Wye - should not depend on a planning application, because at issue are questions of agricultural and environmental policy that are way outside the remit of the planning committee. Or of their officers.

 I can’t say too much about the man applying for the giant digester plant in case he sues me. But I know that having been granted permission for a digester at Hampton Bishop he built one with three times the passed output, because it says so in a planning document you can look up on the Herefordshire Council website: “The output for the original plant was  <500kw; as built the output is 1.5 MW”.  That is, 3 times the output for which he had permission. And they let him get away with it. Other councils have ordered the demolition of digesters in such circumstances, but Hereford Rules are different, apparently. The meeting called was for a ‘refreshed application’ which, although it sounds as if they discussed it over a few drinks, presumably means they met to regularise the fact that he had ignored several planning conditions. There were questions about the road he built to truck digester feedstocks alongside the Lugg Meadows, which was described as a track having been improved, although I can’t find any trace of such a track for most of its length on my old OS maps. For those with short memories, a proposal to build a relief road through here was defeated on the grounds of the environmental vulnerability of these precious meadows. As many locals commented at the time of the planning application, this was yet another case of the applicant doing the work without planning permission and being granted it retrospectively. Claims that there was an existing track might have been hard to disprove since the new road could be claimed to have been built on top of it. The conditions relating to the feedstocks had been broken too, and there were issues with a lagoon inaccurately described as agricultural; but all was satisfactorily ‘refreshed’ at the meeting, and the biogas baron went on to make a lot of money, I presume, and wants now to make some more. The question that needs to be asked is, do we have any evidence whatsoever that he is a fit and proper person to be central to a scheme claiming to offer a solution to the ecological problems of the River Wye, and a very substantial area of countryside on both sides of the Welsh border?  So far the local planners seem to have fallen over backwards to approve retrospectively all his breaches of planning conditions, which casts further doubt on the appropriateness of trying to solve the ‘death of the Wye’ at a parochial rather than a national level..

The other partner in the scheme is the chicken company Avara, a merger of Faccenda Foods, a company with at least two serious environmental breaches on its CV, and Cargill, which has been called ‘the worst company in the world’  for its record worldwide on land grabs and deforestation and reneging on environmental commitments and so on. Again, probably not people you would want to be looking after your cat, or your river. Or the Illinois River, where Cargill has been found guilty after a campaign going back to the 1980s, of pollution similar to that of the Wye Valley. They must have known what they were doing to the Illinois River and carried on doing it for maybe forty years. Are they fit people to devise plans to protect the health of our river catchment?

In between these characters and the local planning committee are the local environmental campaigners. I won’t say anything to the detriment of our councillors, used to discussing plans for local housing schemes, farm buildings, extensions and so on, except to wonder if maybe just for once they are utterly out of their depth, partly because in spite of Avara’s hype the digester application lacks convincing technical evidence to back up their claim that it will be able to deal with the nutrient pollution problems of the Wye catchment.

As for the environmental campaigners, their work has been heroic. Except that it has focussed on the state of the River Wye, and the issues are far larger. It is relatively easy to get people agitated about the state of a river, because local people and local MPs like local issues, and so the local councillors must feel under pressure to sort this local problem by giving consent for this huge biodigester because the promoters say it will solve the problem of the River Wye. How could they refuse that? Except that there is no solid evidence that it will work.

 This application claims to include a method of stripping out the nitrates and the phosphates in the chicken manure, the nutrients that are destroying the Wye and polluting the soil and air of the whole catchment, but provides very sketchy details of the process, and no evidence of their proposed system working anywhere else. If such a system exists anywhere, they would surely have given the details in their planning application to substantiate their claims.  Nor is there any evidence that the chicken shed operators will agree to truck their waste to the digester, especially those operating miles away in Powys, when it is simpler to dump it on their fields, safe in the knowledge that the Environment Agency has neither the will nor the staff to check up on them if they exceed manure regulations in any way. No wonder orchards on good farmland in the vicinity of the digester are being grubbed up to make way for fodder crops for the digester, taking land that could be used better for food production or nature conservation. It cannot even be guaranteed that the digester will receive the manure, much less that it will effectively treat it or remove the nutrients from the catchment.

The real issues are far larger than simply the health of the River Wye, or even the effect of the chicken industry on our air quality, biodiversity, soil health and so on throughout the catchment. The problem is outside the scope of the work of our good local councillors on the planning committee, and could never be simply solved by a biodigester. The principle issues, as I see it, which need to be addressed and are not mentioned in the Avara Roadmap or dealt with by the digester, are:

1)    Sustainability. For farming to be sustainable it needs, broadly speaking, to cycle the nutrients on the farm by growing its own fodder, and recycling its own manure. Industrial chicken farming is by definition unsustainable because it houses huge numbers of animals and has to import feed from a distance, often overseas. This, as we see, creates a mountain of manure that is a polluting waste product because it is not possible for the farm to use it or absorb it. Chicken farming does not even have to be on a farm – many units have no land whatsoever and nowhere to dump the manure, much less utilise it. There are also questions about the sustainability of other farm chemical inputs, which I shall ignore here except to suggest that a genuine working plan to extract the nutrients from chicken manure, separately, as nitrate and phosphate fertilisers, might contribute to making farm fertiliser use a bit more sustainable. The industrial nature of the Avara factory farming business model is unsustainable by definition, but that does not excuse our agricultural policy makers from promoting sustainable farming. A simple vote in the planning committee for the digester as proposed is a vote for industrial farming, doubly so because growing crops for digesters is part of a power-generation industry that is neither green nor sustainable and takes good agricultural land out of food production.

2)    Worldwide ecological damage. We do seem to care a bit about the loss of the Amazon rainforest. Like the River Wye, it probably gets the word ‘iconic’ attached to it. Most of us have not heard the huge Cerrado region of Brazil being called iconic, although it is a vibrant savannah ecosystem being gobbled up to feed our chickens with soya, replacing a unique ecosystem with a chemically grown and biocide-drenched monoculture that releases huge quantities of carbon dioxide. A vote for the digester in the planning committee is a vote for the destruction of more of the Cerrado region, and a vote for whatever passes for family values among the 18 or so members of the Cargill clan for whose benefit all this is being done.

3)    Pandemic danger. There is no doubt whatever in scientific circles that industrial farming poses a pandemic risk. Lots of us were very unfortunate to die of Covid, and before we who survived forget all about them and the heroic national health staff who saved so many lives, it would be as well to remember that these pandemics, developing like bird flu in overcrowded unsanitary conditions among animals that are genetically very similar, can both jump species and mutate to be very dangerous. Already bird flu, which can affect humans, kills around half of those humans infected, so it doesn’t take much imagination to fear another pandemic where half of us may die. It may be only one mutation away. A complex issue, of course, and well outside the pay-grade of either the planning committee of our local council or even the paid planning officer handling the case, whose speciality is, I believe, waste management rather than pandemic risk. You may say that if we stop factory farming, the Chinese and the Americans will still carry on. That is not an argument that would comfort me much if a deadly pandemic virus started in my chicken shed, supposing I had one, wiping out my family before going on to devastate humanity. Our national approach to pandemic risk is outside the remit of the planning committee. For that we need someone near the centre of government, like Therese Coffey. Someone pretty smart would be good too…

4)    Nutrient Management. If we are going to have factory farming for the foreseeable future, we will continue to have a national manure management issue. Manure need not be a problem. It is full of plant nutrients, and of carbon-based plant material that can be used to sequester carbon in soil to reduce global warming and act as a soil conditioner. But for this to happen we need national co-ordination. We need investment in plant designed to actually solve the problem. This digester plan is likely designed to make a lot of cash for the biogas baron and to get us environmentalists off Cargill/Avara’s back for a year or two. I can find no convincing evidence that it will work as claimed. We need plants like those already operating in the Netherlands that combine biogas production with complete separation and purification of the nutrients so that they can become an alternative to other less green chemical fertilisers. We need a plan at government level involving science and ground-breaking green technology, not this half-arsed unproven technology. For proper green processing of manure to work here, the regulation of manure use and processing needs to form part of a national strategy that will stipulate what can be done with manure and be enforced by an Environment Agency with enough staff to make it work and the will to close down industrial farm units that don’t comply with manure management rules. Instead we have a plan cobbled together on behalf of the promoters that is full of omissions, contradictory statements and proposals that seem to reveal ignorance of or contempt for planning law and regulations, a plan that might have been more competently designed and presented if the polluters did not think they have the planning committee over a barrel.

5)    Did I mention inhumanity to living creatures? Sad that I think that the argument with the least power with the planning committee is that these farming techniques treat living sentient beings as factory raw materials and breed them all the better to be so. You may not have seen the videos of fluffy newly-hatched chickens hurtling along a production line where the females go one way – to the factory egg farm – and the males straight into the mincer. Or the chickens sitting passively side by side on piles of their own excrement, pecking listlessly at the food conveyors…

The chicken producers and many others in positions of power in Herefordshire would like you to think this is a simple issue which can be solved by reducing the amounts of phosphates that get into the Wye. They would also like us to think that a hugely profitable but environmentally damaging digester will solve the phosphate problem, but their planning application provides no properly presented evidence that their plan will even do that. It should be rejected and replaced with a holistic strategy to deal with all the issues.