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Planning permission for a poultry megafarm in Shropshire has been overturned in a ruling that campaigners have welcomed as a win for cleaner rivers.
The judgment on Tuesday upheld a judicial review by Dr Alison Caffyn, who argued that Shropshire council had failed to take into account all the environmental impacts of an industrial chicken unit containing 230,000 birds at any one time when it granted planning permission.
In particular, she said officials had failed to take into account the impact of spreading manure on land.
Mr Justice Fordham in the high court in Cardiff quashed the planning permission. He said in his ruling that the council had failed to lawfully assess the impacts of spreading manure or digestate – a byproduct of the anaerobic digestion of poultry manure – as indirect effects of the development.
Fordham also found that the council had failed to properly assess the reality of having multiple polluting poultry units in one area, especially in light of the high density of existing large poultry units in the River Severn catchment.
Caffyn, who brought the judicial review on behalf of campaign group River Action, said the case highlighted systemic failures to account for the environmental toll of having clusters of industrial-scale poultry farms in one area. She said: “There are nearly 65 chickens for every person in Shropshire and yet the council still thought we needed more.”
Emma Dearnaley, River Action’s head of legal, said the case was a “big win for our rivers … The reckless spread of intensive agriculture must end now”.
She said the ruling had consequences for other councils who must now take the health of the wider area into account and look at the broader consequences when it comes to agricultural waste.
“No more megafarms without looking at the bigger picture,” she said.
The case argued that a rise in large intensive poultry units, known as IPUs, in the valleys of the Rivers Wye and Severn was a key cause of river pollution as chicken droppings contain more phosphates – which starve fish and river plants of oxygen – than any other animal manure. Intensive poultry farming also causes air pollution, submissions to the court say.
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The counties of Shropshire, Herefordshire and Powys are home to more than 50 million chickens at any one time, and Caffyn, who has researched the scale of IPUs in the area, argued this was placing huge pressures on the Rivers Wye and Severn.
Caffyn argued that the increase of industrial-scale poultry farming in Shropshire would inflict a similar ecological disaster on the River Severn as that suffered by the Wye. She said the location of the proposed unit in Shropshire is just 400 metres from an existing one, which appeared to be in breach of government guidelines that say IPUs should not be built within 3km (1.9 miles) of each other because of the biosecurity risks of bird flu spreading between sites.
Shropshire council approved the planning permission after the applicants promised they would transfer the manure to a third-party anaerobic digestion unit. But the ruling said the spreading of digestate, which still contains high levels of phosphates and nitrates, had an indirect impact that the council had failed to assess.
