Fighting agricultural pollution in England’s waterways | FT Food Revolution

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According to an Environment Agency survey, published in 2019, only 14 per cent of England's rivers were in good health. While water companies and sewage releases get much of the blame, some farming practises are also severely damaging the UK's ailing waterways.

Water running off land is often polluted with agricultural chemicals it's picked up along the way

Nearly two-thirds of England's failing rivers have been impacted by agricultural pollution. So what can be done to clean them up, and who are the farmers leading the way?

We're at Whittern Farms, which is on the Herefordshire/Welsh borders, fantastic farm beautiful place. Jo Hilditch is a fourth-generation poultry, fruit, and mixed-arable farmer. Her land is connected to the River Wye, despite being 10 miles away.

You've got the tiny, tiny little capillaries that are all underneath the fields, like land drains. Then you've got the pieces like this. These are the small brooks that are the capillaries that then run down into the River Arrow, which is a bit further down east of here, and then eventually into the river Wye. You can see how the whole landscape completely links up together.

Jo's farm is engaged in England's countryside stewardship scheme, which subsidises good practises such as grass buffer zones between fields and watercourses.

We need to be supported, though, for these things that we're doing because obviously we're taking land out of production.

Jo also has 22 chicken sheds on her farm that produce around 5.5mn chickens a year. The Wye Valley has become the centre of UK poultry production with more than 1,000 intensive farms raising 20mn birds a year. But, according to campaigners, this has come at a cost. They claim that the River Wye is overloaded with phosphorus from farms. A key ingredient in many fertilisers and animal feeds, it can also lead to suffocating algae growth in rivers.

On her farm, Jo is using technology to make sure the phosphates in her chicken manure don't enter the river system. Every eight weeks on rotation 180,000 birds are sent to be processed.

We take all the chicken litter, and we put it all in this store here. So in a year, on the whole farm, we would have 6,000 tonnes of chicken litter.

Using a government loan of £3mn, Jo has installed three special burners that incinerate the chicken litter and heat the sheds. Before the burner was installed, 2,000 tonnes of chicken manure would have ended up on the land. Now this is reduced down and sold on to other farms as fertiliser.

We've got about 20 tonnes of really good ash, 14 per cent phosphorus, which ends up going off to be granulated and put on farms in the east of the country, which really, really need phosphorus.

The solution, although effective, has come at a cost.

So to invest in the three chicken litter burners that I've got here at Whittern Farms, it has cost me about £3mn. Now, I've borrowed all that money, and I originally borrowed it on a seven-year loan. Unfortunately, that has turned into a 10-year loan.

Consumer demand for cheap food means farmers' margins are tight, with little left over for investing in sustainable practises.

There needs to be investment, by the government, in systems such as this or by the consumer in paying a little bit more for the chicken.

In 2023, the River Wye's health status was listed as unfavourable to declining, the lowest for a protected river. A few miles from Jo's farm another farmer is using nature to try and reverse this trend.

We've been sort of changing the way we farm, over the past five or six years, trying to work with nature a bit more.

Billy's part of a broad movement known as regenerative agriculture. It aims to restore soil health, reverse biodiversity loss, and increase agricultural productivity.

We're trying to do away with the use of artificial fertilisers, pesticides, diesel, and machinery, really.

Billy uses winter cover crops in some of his fields to absorb water and retain soil health.

We've had double our average rainfall in the past month. This cover crop has prevented all of that running off the field taking with it our valuable topsoil and nutrients.

New government subsidies for farmers using regenerative methods could reduce farm pollution getting into rivers.

I feel doing things like this is providing a massive public good. We're holding more water in our farmed landscape preventing it rushing off the fields, down the ditches, and into the rivers.

Financing models between farmers and private companies might also be part of the solution. In Wiltshire a partnership between Amazon Web Services, the River Arc Trust, and local farmers has seen the introduction of a new wetland.

It is beautiful here now. It really is, and when those trees grow up, it's going to be a very special place.

David Lemon is part of Southern Streams, a collective of farmers committed to protecting the rare chalk rivers in the area.

The idea is to stop all the pollution upstream from farming going downstream into the River Kennet, which is a very special river.

Each cell in the wetland cleans the farm's run-off using different filtration plants. It was designed by Charlotte Hitchmough.

Water gradually moves its way through the cells by which time the nutrients and the sediment have all dropped out. And the water that comes out of this is clean, and it's flowing really slowly.

The water from the wetland eventually flows into the River Kennet, seven miles away.

We have well over 80 per cent of the world's chalk streams just in this part of the world.

The mineral content and rare conditions create unique ecosystems. Yet only 17 per cent of England's chalk streams were in good health, according to the 2019 Environment Agency report. Over time, the water in the wetland and the river will be tested for the presence of agricultural chemicals that have proved so damaging.

Some of the solution is to work in the river itself, but a lot of it is looking at how we manage the land and water around the river.

As well as more wetlands, campaigners are also calling for improvements to sewage and water supply networks.

It's all possible, but it can't be done by one person or one organisation. It's got to be a joint effort.

Farmers keen to play a role in protecting the UK's rivers say they need help with both expertise and financial support.

We do need somebody else to come in and help, I think, and say, look, this is what you could do. Have you thought about doing this? This is how it can be done.

I think we all need to look at what we can do just to make things a little better, whether it's wetlands, whether it's regenerative farming, or indeed, whether it's great technologies. We are part of the solution, and we shouldn't be seen as part of the problem.

We could change the way we manage the land and have these amazing beautiful spaces. It's a win for the wildlife. It's a win for the river.