How a Tesco chicken deal may have helped pollute one of the UK’s favourite rivers

theguardian.com:

A major deal to supply chicken to Tesco from nearly a decade ago may be linked to the ecological demise of one of the UK’s favourite rivers, according to a Guardian investigation.

As the River Wye flows through mid-Wales to the Severn estuary, it passes through the so-called chicken capital of the UK, where an estimated 20 million birds are farmed in the river’s catchment.

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.

Excrement 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”.

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 hotspot for chicken farming in the Wye area is Herefordshire, where the numbers of birds began soaring in the early 1990s. 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.

Around the same time, Cargill announced a £35m expansion of its Hereford plant to boost the number of chickens it could process.

The two events appeared to spark an increase in new chicken sheds being built in the area, according to a Guardian analysis of publicly available data.

There were 22 applications to build intensive poultry units (IPUs) in Herefordshire in 2014 (14 of which were for broiler chickens), leading to an