powys council only started keeping records from 2018.iscovered the rapid growth in intensive farming started a decade earlier. since 2008, planning permission has been extended to dozens of intensive poultry farms and barn extensions every year. today, there are now more than 300 intensive poultry farms in powys, with the capacity for 9.6 million chickens. many believe this rapid expansion is causing pollution in the wye. but with poor water quality monitoring across the uk, there is currently no evidence of a direct link. hi, how we doing? scientists here approach the problem from a different angle, looking at how much muck is being produced in the wye catchment. where you have these high areas of intensive livestock production, you end up with too much phosphorus available in the manure that's there to go onto the land. they estimate that around 7,500 tonnes of phosphorus gets into the soil around the river wye every year. much of that by spreading muck from poultry farms. but only some of that is absorbed by crops. the rest is excess.

powys council says it isn't them, unless there's been a breach of planning conditions and it's actuallynd to enforce regulations around muck management. but when it comes to muck spreading itself, they've told us they don't proactively check how it's done. if you're not inspecting the actual spreading of muck, isn't that an obvious loophole in the system? well, as i said, it's about how we can be better at doing a lot of this stuff, so, you know, monitoring will pick up issues in catchments. we are monitoring better now than we have done before. so, it's important that we're using our evidence, that we're using the data, and we're responding to that and targeting our visits in the right places. but even if monitoring finally improves, is that enough? we have failure on lots of different parts of the system at the minute. it's notjust about land spreading. have we got sufficient enforcement and regulations on sewer overflows and waste water treatment work discharges? it's a huge cumulative impact to the river wye and i think all of our rivers, and perhaps that is not what's being underst