I am George Rist, a Monmouth based Management Consultant. Beyond consulting, my commitment to social responsibility has taken me to volunteer in Malaysia and the Philippines, where I’ve worked on climate action initiatives and disaster preparedness.
The River Wye was voted Britain’s favourite river in 2010. It is the fourth longest river in the UK, rising in Plynlimon, in the Cambrian Mountains in Mid-Wales and flowing for around 150 miles before meeting the Severn Estuary.
The Wye Valley is responsible for the birth of the British tourism industry, owing to its spectacular natural beauty, including limestone gorges, dense woodland and the river Wye itself. The river was historically famed for its salmon, among other fish, fowl and fauna, serving as a sort of anglers’ paradise for centuries. Wordsworth wrote the self-explanatory Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey in 1798, while JMW Turner was among the artists who travelled to paint the Abbey and its immediate environs. Boat trips travelling from Ross on Wye to Chepstow began in the 18th century, and continue, in one form or another, to be a popular tourist activity to this day. It is therefore no surprise that the lower Wye Valley is today classed as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB). It is, however, an extremely unwelcome shock to find that the river is dying or, rather, being killed.
I will admit to being partial in the debate over the future of the Wye. As a boy growing up in Monmouth, I spent more than a little time “messing about in small boats” on the river, whether in a canoe, kayak, or a coxless four. Taking a kayak down to Symonds Yat over the course of a leisurely summer afternoon is still one of my favourite pastimes. It has become undeniable, however, that the health of the Wye is in precipitous decline. Indeed, as George Monbiot stated powerfully in 2021 “The Wye is dying at astonishing, heartbreaking speed. When I canoed it 10 years ago, the stones were clean. Now they are so slimy that you can barely stand up. In hot weather, the entire river stinks of chicken shit, from the 10 million birds being reared in the catchment”. The nature writer John Lewis-Stempel stated in 2023 that “It is not even a gentle demise: the Wye is being murdered”.
The Save the Wye campaign attributes the death of the river to the “high levels of phosphates that pollute the river causing algal blooms that then starve the fish, plants and invertebrates of oxygen. This leads to a collapse of the whole ‘web of life’ in the river”. To put the ‘web of life’ in layman’s terms, Simon Evans of the Wye and Usk Foundation explained “If this goes on, we will lose everything we treasure about the Wye. It will turn a horrible, ugly green every time it gets sunny. The fish will go, and they will be followed by our kingfishers, our dippers, and our herons”.
Indeed, a few years ago an algal bloom extended for over 140 miles of the river, so around 90% of the river length. The campaign, along with Monbiot, Lewis-Stempel, and apparently everyone else with an interest in the topic, places the majority of the blame for the rise in phosphate levels on farming. Opinions differ, however, over what sort of farming is principally responsible for killing the Wye.
Monbiot, Save the Wye and River Action, among others, hold poultry farming chiefly responsible for the rise in phosphate levels. Save the Wye estimates that there are 20 million chickens in the Wye catchment at any given moment, with more than 16 million in Herefordshire and the remainder in Powys and Shropshire. The reason chicken farming is held to be responsible is, bluntly, the excrement that the chickens produce. The 20 million chickens farmed mostly in Industrial Poultry Units produce industrial quantities of excrement. Some 4,000 tonnes of phosphates enter the Wye catchment area as chicken feed, and more than 2,500 tonnes are turned into chicken waste. As this manure accumulates, it is often spread on fields adjacent to the river. With the passage of time, rainfall, and sometimes deliberate action, the phosphates end up in the river, promoting algal bloom, and from there, the death of the Wye.
Lewis-Stempel argues against solely or chiefly blaming poultry farmers. As a traditional small-scale organic farmer, he argues both online and in his magnum opus England: A Natural History that responsibility can be more broadly attributed to a range of human interactions with the Wye. Somewhat implausibly, given the rapid recent changes in the state of the river (within the last 10 years or so), he cites the Roman occupation of Britain as prompting the first major change in the Wye, with the introduction of watermills, and then cites overfishing in the 19th century, where only 500 salmon were rod-caught while 100,000 traps were laid in the river. This may be the case, although it is possible that earlier human interactions shaped the state of the Wye, much as Neolithic peoples fundamentally altered the landscape of Britain, particularly England, but it is clear that there must be more proximate causes for the river to change so dramatically in such a short space of time. Lewis-Stempel is on firmer ground when he cites the discharge of treated and untreated human sewage into the river and its tributaries, as well as climate change being expected to make algal blooms more common. He also points out that potato farming has been alleged to be a major culprit in phosphate run-off, due to the artificial fertilisers used on the crops.
The question, then, is what is to be done in order to save the Wye? The Wye Manifesto is supported by many environmental organisations both local and national, including Save the Wye, River Action and the Soil Association. The manifesto calls for strengthening regulations, improving funds and resources for agencies to tackle pollution and ensuring that supermarket pricing rewards river-friendly farming and that consumers are empowered with honest labelling. I feel that it is the final point that will have the most impact on saving the Wye. The general public has been shown to care deeply about the wellbeing of the British countryside, particularly areas that are as charming as the Wye Valley. A concerted campaign to raise awareness and change consumer behaviour would seem to be the best possible approach for the moment, particularly given the failure of River Action’s case against the Environment Agency in the High Court. Indeed, if reports from the Oxford Farming Conference are accurate, it would seem that the government are proposing to rebuild trust with farmers in the wake of the Inheritance Tax changes, by relaxing planning regulations further around poultry farms. “Put not your trust in princes”, better place it in the people instead.
About George Rist
I’m George Rist, a Monmouth-based Management Consultant, dedicated to helping organisations achieve transformative change through strategic, sustainable, and measurable solutions. With expertise in digital transformation, project management, and operational excellence, I’m passionate about making a positive impact across industries.