Farming destroyed UK rivers to meet food demand – how to fix (Debate)
| Malcolm Blackmore |
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Tue 20 Jun 2023, 19:04 Here's a subscriber-only article text from New Scientist relevant to "our" Evenlode. As long as it doesn't let The (Water) Man of the privatised sewage treatment systems off the hook... ====================== Farming destroyed UK rivers to meet food demand – here's how we fix it Rivers are awash with manure, fertiliser and pesticides from farming. This is more polluting even than sewage, so what can be done? CF2MRN Sheep grazing on the banks of the River Till at Twizel, a tributary of the River Tweed. Manure from livestock releases nitrogen and phosphorus into many UK rivers, including the Till Jim Gibson/Loop Images Ltd/Alamy THE rolling English farmland of Dorset, Somerset and Devon might look like a bucolic idyll, but looks can be deceptive. These three counties in the country’s south-west are home to hundreds of intensive dairy farms, producing almost a quarter of the UK’s milk. Thousands of cows create a smelly problem for farmers: what to do with all the dung? As I drive along the winding country lanes, the stench drifting off nearby fields offers a clue. My nostrils aside, it is local rivers that bear the brunt. In wet weather, slurry (manure plus water) overflows from silos where it is stored and runs off land into waterways, wreaking havoc on their ecology. The situation is particularly bad in the south-west, but this is a nationwide problem – and it isn’t the only damage that agriculture does to rivers. Over recent decades, pressure from supermarkets to provide plentiful food at low prices has pushed farmers to boost livestock numbers, use more fertilisers and pesticides to increase crop yields and remove hedgerows to make larger, more efficient fields. All these actions have knock-on effects, polluting watercourses with soil sludge, toxic chemicals and excess nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus. As in other countries, the UK has legislation to reduce the ecological damage caused by farming. But enforcing these rules isn’t always easy, even when environment agencies make them a priority. No wonder the UK’s rivers are in such a bad state. It sounds like the perfect storm, but, in my travels around the country, I have found green shoots of hope that we can build on to clean up waterways and revitalise the wildlife they support. Read more: Why saving Britain's rivers means more than cleaning up sewage This problem isn’t unique to the UK. Across Europe, 22 per cent of rivers are significantly affected by agricultural runoff. Things are even worse in the US, where around 46 per cent of rivers and streams suffer from excess nutrients and just 28 per cent are assessed as “healthy”. Agriculture, which accounts for about 50 per cent of land use in the US, is the leading source of pollution in its rivers and lakes. Even in New Zealand, a country renowned for its pristine natural environment, a recent government report concluded that 45 per cent of the total length of its rivers is too polluted to swim in. It pointed the finger at dairy farming, which has seen cow numbers increase by 80 per cent in the past three decades. In the UK, about 70 per cent of the entire country is designated as agricultural land. Around one-third of that is cropland, mainly for cereals such as wheat and barley, with most of the rest used for raising livestock. In many ways, farming practices are well suited to the country’s climate and ecology. In the wet, western parts, livestock farming dominates to make the best use of plentiful natural pasture, while arable farming is concentrated in the drier, flatter east. But farms have become larger and more specialised over the years and those that run them now use the land more intensively to meet increasing consumer demand for cheap food – particularly meat. In fact, there are now more livestock animals in the UK than people, with 85 million cows, pigs, laying hens and sheep on farms across the country and more than a billion broiler chickens slaughtered last year. Cenarth Falls Teifi In 2013, excess spraying of the herbicide MCPA polluted the river Teifi in Wales Madeleine Cuff These changes have put increasing pressure on the UK’s remaining wild places, particularly its waterways. Farming is responsible for between 50 and 60 per cent of nitrate pollution and around 40 per cent of river pollution in general. In June 2021, James Bevan, the former chief executive of England’s Environment Agency (EA) told MPs: “Statistically, the largest sector that is impacting our waters, in one way or another, is the farming sector.” The main culprits are excess nutrients from manure and other fertilisers, as well as pesticide runoff. Once in the water, pesticides can damage the health of animals and plants, and excess nutrients reduce oxygen levels, stifling aquatic life. As I walk along the banks of the river Yarty in Devon, I can see the effects. Independent ecologist Gavin Saunders points out the coating of green algae clinging to the gravel riverbed. “That’s heightened phosphates in the water causing the algal bloom,” he says. “That, in turn, affects the spawning beds of fish and invertebrates.” The UK’s environment agencies are charged with ensuring that farming activities don’t pollute waterways, but cuts to their budgets have curbed their ability to monitor the situation and take enforcement action. Meanwhile, the problem grows. Take slurry. By law, farmers in England are required to have silos with enough capacity to store at least four months’ worth of it on site. But, in recent years, many dairy farms have increased their herd sizes without upgrading their slurry storage in tandem. As a result, there are hundreds of dairy farms across the country where slurry is seeping out of overflowing stores and there are many farmers spreading it onto fields in wet weather, both of which mean the muck runs straight into waterways. Agricultural runoff That explains why, as I crouch beside a muddy brown stream in deepest Dorset, my nose is assailed by the stink. “There are too many cows. End of!” says my guide Andrew Locke, a retired EA official and a member of the Axe Vale Rivers Association. Along the river Axe, algal blooms, as well as sediment pollution and high phosphate levels, have taken their toll, with salmon pushed to local extinction and other fish populations declining. Nevertheless, what has happened here in recent years shows that better enforcement of existing rules can lead to big improvements. Things came to a head in 2015, when conservation group WWF and the Angling Trust took the EA and the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs to court for failing to use its powers to tackle pollution on the Axe, which is designated by the European Union as a Natura 2000 wildlife site and a Special Area for Conservation. In response, the EA admitted that “very little” regulatory activity had taken place in the previous 15 years to ensure farmers followed rules governing water pollution, and began an intensive effort to tackle agricultural pollution on the Axe. Read more: UK river pollution monitoring is 50 years out of date, say researchers An audit of 86 farms, carried out between 2016 and 2019, revealed that 95 per cent weren’t complying with slurry storage regulations and almost half were found to be polluting the river. Winston Perry was one of the farmers visited by the EA. His family has kept dairy cows at Harrison Farm in Devon since the 1890s. But when EA officials visited, they confirmed that Perry’s slurry storage wasn’t up to scratch. “We knew that we weren’t making the best use of our slurry, because we were having to spread [it on fields] at times when we didn’t want to,” he says. The EA visit, which came with the threat of fines and prosecution, pushed Perry to take action. In 2017, he spent £18,000 on a new, bigger slurry lagoon. Perry’s story isn’t unique. Since 2016, EA visits have prompted 33 farmers in the Axe catchment to upgrade their slurry storage, with others carrying out repairs to existing facilities. The EA’s Louise Weller says the threat of enforcement was critical to pushing farmers to make changes. “The threat of regulation has worked,” she says. “So we haven’t had to do a lot of enforcement at all.” Just nine farms have received enforcement notices, legal documents requiring them to take action. The EA is now planning to roll out this approach to other parts of the country, recruiting 84 advisors to visit farmers in other polluted river catchments. “That’s only going to be for the good,” says Iorwerth Watkins at the Westcountry Rivers Trust. He points out that it could take a decade or more for the excess nutrients to work their way out of the system. However, there is cause for optimism: in some other European countries, nitrate concentrations are now falling in rivers thanks to actions taken to reduce farm pollution. DGKTMD Cows in a field in the Lake District National Park. Cattle manure is among the biggest polluters of UK rivers Sebastian Wasek/Loop Images Ltd/Alamy Enforcement is all very well, but to tackle this huge issue, farmers also need to be on board. Most say that, with the right support and technology, their contribution to water pollution can be dramatically reduced. I see this for myself on a dairy farm in Cornwall. When Katie and Andrew Hoare took over the tenancy of Trenance Farm, the existing slurry pit wasn’t fit for purpose. “It was all full and it was overflowing,” says Katie. “But we had to keep putting shit in because we had nowhere else to put it.” Too many cattle However, in 2021, their landlord, Cornwall Council, working with renewable energy firm Bennamann, installed a state-of-the-art methane-capturing slurry pit. It provides the farm with six to eight months of slurry storage along with a constant supply of methane, which is used to power a tractor. “It’s just like a normal tractor,” says Hoare, showing me around the gleaming blue machine. “But when the fuel light comes on, you just drive it down to the pit, plug it in and fill it up.” This is as green as slurry management gets, but it doesn’t come cheap. The Hoares’s methane-capturing slurry pit is one of six planned as part of a £1.58 million pilot project, funded using a green energy grant from the EU. That puts the cost of each at more than £250,000. Of course, the dairy industry isn’t the only major source of agricultural pollution in British rivers. A growing taste for chicken – which now accounts for more than half of the UK’s meat consumption – has led to an explosion in the number of intensive poultry units. Many of these are clustered along the banks of the river Wye, which runs through Wales and then along its border with England to the Severn estuary. Two decades ago, there were just 60 intensive poultry sheds in the English counties of Herefordshire and Shropshire. By 2020, that had increased to more than 1150, according to the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission. Campaigners estimate there are now more than 20 million farmed birds in the Wye catchment and say the river is overloaded with phosphorus from poultry manure, leading to devastating algal blooms. A3A0XJ Kelly Bronze Turkeys at Home Farm Condover Shropshire UK. Image shot 2007. Exact date unknown. A proliferation of turkey and chicken production is harming the river Wye MH Food/Alamy Pesticide contamination is also a growing issue. Campaign group WildFish conducts a regular “Riverfly Census”, covering 12 rivers, and its data suggests pesticide runoff from farms is destroying invertebrate populations. The most recent survey indicated a sharp jump in chemical stress on these communities, with the number of species of mayflies, stoneflies and caddisflies all declining since 2015. When pesticides enter waterways, it isn’t just wildlife that suffers. Even relatively small amounts can be enough to breach strict drinking water standards. As a result, water companies face having to spend millions on additional treatment technology at their plants. This, however, can provide an incentive to tackle the problem at source. As utilities firm Welsh Water discovered a few years ago, such an approach can have additional benefits. Pesticides and herbicides In 2013, water quality tests at several of Welsh Water’s treatment works started to show increased levels of a herbicide called MCPA. At first, officials were stumped as to the cause. They asked local councils if they had started using more MCPA on their land; caravan site owners were also questioned. Eventually, it transpired that farmers had turned to MCPA in their droves following the wettest summer in Wales in 80 years in 2012, which had resulted in rushes spreading across their fields, says Sarah Jones at Welsh Water. “It was having an impact on their grazing, on their forage land.” So the company decided to try to help farmers change their ways. In 2015, it launched the Weed Wiper project across the river Teifi, Wye and Towy catchments. Farmers were offered the free hire of a weed wiper, a piece of farming equipment allowing them to target specific weeds with pesticide rather than blanket spraying an entire area. Over the next three years, almost 300 weed wiper hires were logged and accompanying information about best practice when it comes to using pesticides was handed out to farmers. Subsequent analysis by researchers at the University of Leeds, UK, and their colleagues found that MCPA levels in waterways dropped by 45 per cent across the catchments, compared with a 10 per cent fall in control catchments. On the Teifi, where the majority of weed wipers were hired, MCPA concentrations fell by 55 per cent. “But it wasn’t just about the number of hires,” says Jones, who led the project. “It was about the conversations we started with farmers and the behaviour change it was starting to generate.” New Scientist Default Image Intensive agriculture has had big impacts on the Teifi marshes David Stock Such projects give hope that farmers can be nudged in the right direction. Nevertheless, the rapacious demands of the global food system make it increasingly challenging for farming to be environmentally friendly. The scale of the problem has left some conservationists believing that the only solution is to overhaul the sector. “A lot of farms are getting bigger and bigger,” says Nathan Walton, who works for the Wildlife Trust of South and West Wales managing the Teifi Marshes Nature Reserve. This site has been badly affected by intensive farming practices in the past decade. “As a conservationist, I would love to revert back to the old practices, where you had smaller farms, small fields, managed less intensively and more sustainably.” Walton acknowledges that such reform isn’t just down to farmers. We all need to get behind it and make some tough decisions. “The only way things are going to change,” he says, “is if we, as a society, learn to pay a bit more for our food and give farmers a better return for what they are producing.” Madeleine Cuff is a news reporter at New Scientist Join Madeleine Cuff Exploring pollution on the river Teifi For more details: newscientistlive.com |