More or Less: Counting Cheap Chickens in Powys

June 2025
Dr Christine Hugh-Jones

CPRW dragged the topic of Powys chicken sheds into the daylight in 2015. A lot of polluted water has flowed under a lot of bridges since 2015. Why did CPRW care about chickens? We first noticed the landscape impacts of the huge sheds, but we soon realised that the risks to rivers and biodiversity were far more worrying.

These threats are not going away. UK chicken consumption is rocketing and gaining from other meats. Chicken is not the tasty Sunday treat of the old days, eked out over the week as leftovers and soup. Shopping centres and high streets are lined with chicken outlets. Supermarket shelves are stacked with chicken meat, snacks, and ready meals. Chicken is promoted as ideal fast food, lean and easy to cook, and above all CHEAP. No wonder the fast-food sector likes chicken wings when they retail for under £1 a pound (Sainsbury’s 31/3/25). The industry magazine, Poultry World, tells us the average UK person consumes 30.5kg of chicken annually. That is roughly 2.5 kilos a month. Many people are eating way more than this because 6 million or so Brits already have a meat-free diet. The UK suffers from cheap chicken-dependency.

Powys is part of the cross-border area, including Herefordshire and Shropshire, called the “Chicken Capital of Europe”. The chicken supply chain grew here alongside the local processing plants, encouraged by pressures for farm diversification and excessively permissive local planning regimes. In 2020, the Wye turned bright green with algae and people suddenly realised that the water crowfoot providing the habitat for so many protected species had all but disappeared. Since then, there has been hot debate about chicken numbers.

This is because polluting phosphates are accumulating in our rivers and are thought to play a major role in ecological decline. Water pollution from sewage grabs most of the media and public attention, even headlining in the BBC’s Archers – “The everyday story of country folk”. We have just learned that in 2024, raw sewage was pumped into England’s rivers for a staggering 3.6 million hours.

We have no Welsh data in hours, but sewage is not the worst issue in sparsely populated rural Powys. The latest robust scientific modelling has shown that in the rural Wye catchment, up to 80% of the phosphate pollution is coming from agriculture.

Chickens are by no means the only cause, but they are important because numbers have increased out of proportion to other livestock. Neither Natural Resources Wales nor Powys Planning Department considered the impacts of so much chicken manure on our soils and rivers until the NRW statutory report that the Wye was failing its Special Area of Conservation phosphate targets in December 2020. The respected RePhoKus team of scientists based at Lancaster University have shown increasing accumulation of phosphate in Wye soils. This has focused attention on reducing the impact of intensive chicken farms.

So what are the numbers and where are they distributed?

In 2020, the Powys County Times published Freedom of Information results showing that in the three years starting from April 2017, Powys had received 95 planning applications for intensive chicken developments, of which 3 had been refused. All the rest of Wales received only 20, of which 2 were refused.

Official Welsh Government regional agricultural statistics over approximately the same period show chicken numbers in Powys to be consistently half the Wales total. There is no regional breakdown since 2020, but the figure for all Wales in 2024 has risen by 2 million since 2020. But how far can we rely on these figures?

The Brecon and Radnor Branch of CPRW decided to collect figures from Powys Planning applications, amplified by a resident’s pre-2015 database. Our interactive data map (on the CPRW or B&R website?) displays each Powys Planning application with the type of chicken product (broiler/egg-laying/pre-lay pullets/fertile eggs), rearing (free-range or full-time indoors), and planning outcome (application approved, refused, withdrawn), with dates and further details. Do have a look. Our CPRW data show 10.5 million birds approved by Powys in 2024.

With Dr Alison Caffyn, who works on the English side of the border, we looked at Powys and Herefordshire, then further afield. We knew that out of our two great river catchments in Powys, the Wye gets more attention than the Severn because most of its watercourses have SAC designation (Special Area of Conservation). But both great rivers flow through the heart of Chicken Capital country.

This is what we estimate from Local Planning Authority applications:

Powys numbers may look small compared with Herefordshire and Shropshire, but Powys chickens are densely concentrated in the east, away from the Cambrian Hills and Bannau Brycheiniog National Park. There are also more egg-production units on the Welsh side with bird numbers in multiples of 8,000 rather than the 50,000 typical of broilers.

We predicted that any overestimates due to obsolescence and building delay would be balanced out by omissions in Planning data. The Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) collect statutory data from individual holdings but withheld this for Data Protection reasons. They have only just started releasing aggregated data on FOI request. The first release for the Severn Catchment shows data very close to ours, supporting our method and reasoning.

If you are yawning by now, just think why the numbers matter. If we want solutions, we need to quantify and publicise the problem. Because the Welsh Government publishes hugely underestimated chicken statistics, it has taken years for authorities to accept the size of the problem. Now public pressure has already persuaded the Cargill/Faccenda broiler enterprise AVARA, the largest operating in the Wye catchment, to produce a 2025 roadmap diverting chicken manure away from land in the Wye catchment. We are waiting to know whether this is actually happening.

All the 12 Powys applications not yet decided (700,000 more chickens) have been referred to be considered by the Welsh Government, where most have been stuck since May 2023.

We need still more numbers to quantify all the other risks to our rivers, but—back to chickens—protection of our rivers means fewer chickens. The “polluter pays” principle demands that the work of river protection and restoration must be included in the cost of not-so-cheap chicken.

“You may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again that you did not know.”
William Wilberforce

Many thanks to Alison Caffyn, Margaret Tregear, and Chris Bruce for numbers and mapping work.