Once voted the UK’s favourite river, the River Wye flows from the Welsh mountains to the Severn estuary – 150 miles through an officially recognised “national landscape”. But this idyllic picture is changing, as the river is gradually choked by waste from industrial chicken farming.
The Wye is perhaps the most extreme example, but the nearby River Severn, the UK’s longest river, is also at risk, along with rivers in places such as Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Yorkshire.
In the land that feeds into these rivers, millions of chickens are being reared in intensive units to supply supermarkets with cheap meat and eggs. But all those chickens produce vast amounts of manure which can end up in the rivers.
