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The River Wye intertwines the border of England and-Wales. Once the nations “favourite” river it now probably has more designations than actual fish and continues to regularly feature in the media as the poster girl for agricultural pollution. In this article I hope to provide some insights in the complexities behind the headlines.

WHY THE WYE?

It is designated as a Special Area of Conservation (SAC) and a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), it contains an Area of Outstanding National Beauty (AONB), Nitrate Vulnerable Zones (NVZ) and Drinking Water Safeguarding Zones (DWSQZ) yet none of these protections have prevented its deterioration. SAC rivers have to meet tighter water quality targets to, in theory, protect their sensitive and rare ecology. So the Wye along with about fourteen other SAC rivers in the UK are trying to metaphorically tighten their belts much more than others.

Is it as green as they say? Algal blooms are caused by a combination of factors, including periods of warm sunny weather and low flows. However when these conditions are combined with a source of nutrients, and in particular phosphorus which acts the same in water as it does in soil, it fuels algae growth. Algal blooms have occurred for decades in the lower reaches of the Wye and are generally attributed to soil and nutrient losses as a result of decades of reasonably intensive agricultural production in Herefordshire, we’re an innovative and industrious lot. However algal blooms are now also occurring in minor tributaries way up in the catchment, which indicates that the pattern of nutrient loss is changing and becoming more widespread. 

Thick algal blooms can have severe effects on the river’s ecology. By discolouring the water, essential sunlight is prevented from reaching plants like our precious river crowfoot (ranunculus). Plants play a vital role in the river’s ecology, providing food and habitat for a range of invertebrate, fish and bird species.

SO WHERE IS IT ALL COMING FROM?

The predominant cause of pollution historically in the Wye was due to the poor quality of sewage treatment, however investment over the decades has improved this significantly and source apportionment indicates that Welsh Water are now responsible for only 25-30% of the nutrients in the river. On the other hand, agriculture as an industry is responsible for the lions share at 60-65%.

If you stand behind the “its not us Guv” rhetoric of the farming unions, or simply have no faith in our Government and their statutory bodies to undertake their roles effectively (more on that later!), you may question the datasets and dispute these figures. So let me assure you that the same if worse conclusion was also reached by a team of independent researchers at Lancaster University. After a three year study called “REPHOKUS” the Lancaster team have provided significant insight in to the root cause of the Wye’s green waters, detailing how the phosphorus (P) burden in the catchment accumulates and how losses are compounded by our circumstances. Their conclusion was that agriculture accounted for 70% of the P load and that we were accumulating an excess of approximately 3000t of P every year in the Wye.

WHY ALL THE CHAT ABOUT CHICKENS?

The REPHOKUS project identified the largest import of P into the catchment as livestock feed (ca. 5000 t P/ yr), nearly 80% of this is attributed to poultry sector, then 18% to cattle and sheep, and 2% to pigs. Fertiliser P imports to the catchment are just over 1000 t yr. From Sun Valley in the 1960s, to Cargill and subsequently Avara, Herefordshire has long been a major producer of broiler chicken. And with the move from cages, a significant number of free range sites have been established to keep up with consumer demand. We are indeed, for want of a better word, a hotspot. The figures thrown around are 20million birds, but no one yet has been able or willing to calculate the exact number. The fact that its chickens we have a lot of is neither here nor there; a lot of anything isn’t good for you.

I alluded to compounding circumstances earlier; the Wye soils are predominantly sandy and silty so are less able to hold on to nutrients, they are “leaky”. And despite what I was taught, P can be lost in solution like N. Once the soils capacity to hold nutrients is exceeded, which for much of the Wye soils appears to be anything above a P Index of 2, it can be lost in soil pore water and starts coming out in the drains. And having an excess of 3000t P every year for quite some time means that we have been building our P indices fairly rapidly.

And there you have it, the perfect storm; an ecologically sensitive river, leaky soils and an intensively farmed catchment with a huge excess of Phosphorus.

WHO THE HECK AM I ANYWAY?

I grew up in Herefordshire, in the nutrient rich fields of my family’s dairy farm for the sake of transparency, a love for rivers sparked way back in school Geography lessons which led me to spend my working life to date trying to improve their condition. (Early retirement looking less and less likely!) Desperate to learn about how other countries had used finances, education and regulation to address issues with soil and water I applied for a Nuffield Farming Scholarship in 2015. My studies allowed me to see regulatory approaches, funding models, voluntary and educational programmes around the world. I rapidly came to the conclusion that no single mechanism, if implemented alone, could achieve the long-term positive change we needed. There is a sweet spot somewhere in the middle and in the 7 years since my scholarship we still haven’t managed to secure it in the Wye…

What’s actually being done? With my team of advisers at The Wye & Usk Foundation, a charitable rivers trust, we provide support to about 300 farm businesses a year. This work includes the submission of more than £20m worth of Countryside Stewardship Schemes in the last 4 years to help deliver the recommendations we make. In a normal year we hold about dozen on-farm events with local partners, plus provide facilitation for three farmer groups. These enable peer to peer learning, farmers learn best from farmers, those who have changed practices are best placed to explain what motivated them, how they overcame barriers, provide insight to their methods and moral support for others following suit. Much effort has been put in to work more collaboratively between partners operating in the same space. The Farm Herefordshire partnership brings together NGOs like ourselves and Herefordshire Meadows with local delivery staff for the AHDB, Catchment Sensitive Farming and CLA to name but a few, to share resources and deliver more effectively together.

Through our Wye Agri Food Partnership, part of the wider Courtauld Commitment instigated by WRAP, we are delivering collaborative projects with key businesses sourcing or producing food in the Wye. With the support of the Rivers Trust and WWF our work in the Wye currently involves projects with Tesco, Coop, M&S, Muller, Avara, Noble Foods, Stonegate, Kepak and most of the major soft fruit growers. We are working proactively with these businesses to reduce pollution risk at all levels of their supply chains, see our Project Case Study as an example. Several businesses are also independently exploring new technologies to enable the export of excess P from the catchment. If these are successful they could take our P load back in to balance, and ideally in to deficit so that we can start to run down the P backlog…

To do that we need a funding framework that facilitates farming within the limits of our environment. I hoped DEFRA would agree with this ambition and submitted an application to Landscape Recovery Scheme but it was unsuccessful. We now need to find alternative routes to deliver solutions. Along with a significant number of like minded farmers, my vision is to develop long term funding streams that would support us in delivering two key actions: 1. Running down existing high P levels by farming at low or no P input on soils at high risk of losses, and 2. Construction of wetlands downstream of high P fields to buffer the nutrient losses in the meantime.

WHAT’S MISSING?

One of the essential ingredients from my Nuffield learnings that is still lacking is regulation. Our Governments have little appetite to deliver on their promises and therefore their agencies have no capacity to do so either. Our Ministers and their teams in DEFRA are delusional to think that generic nationwide legislation like Farming Rules for Water could secure the necessary improvements for specific issues like those faced in the River Wye, especially when they instruct their agencies not to enforce and allow farming unions to lobby the life out of them. As a result, we are left with yet more ineffective legislation and the need for more and more layers to be added on top of all those that have gone before in the hope that one may finally do what should have been achieved long ago.

Any conclusions? The river is in a poor state. Portions of blame can be placed far and wide; water company, local authorities, farmers, processors, retailers, all of us living in or eating food produced from the catchment. But the greatest share of blame falls squarely at our Governments door. There is much good will amongst farmers, retailers and processors to deliver the necessary change and if improvements are secured it will likely be despite our Governments not because of them. In the meantime we continue to persevere, idealistic or not I believe a balance is achievable where food can be produced within the limits and to the betterment of the local environment.

Kate Speke-Adams, Head of Land Use, Wye & Usk Foundation.
@HfdshireKate

With sustainability being placed higher and higher on consumers’ agendas, people are turning to high-emitting
industries to ask how they are playing their part in reducing environmental impacts on the planet. The food industry
alone accounts for one third of emissions globally – and with population rising, the challenge of feeding the planet
while lowering our footprint is becoming more real than ever.

By Laura Nolan and Cliona Howie, Foundation Earth

An increasing number of brands are making efforts to green their products, be more sustainable and communicate that to their buyers in a credible way. Many green claims are being made left, right and centre – but how do you back up and qualify a food product’s ecofriendliness in an accurate, transparent way? What is being measured exactly, and what information and data can we access to verify such claims? How can we move towards a food system that doesn’t just reward client-facing brands, but also farmers and producers who contribute to making value chains more sustainable?

The role of ecolabels

One example is the use of ecolabels placed on products, that show consumers just how much that item costs the environment in an easy, accessible way (you’ve most likely seen those traffic light systems on your home appliances!). This trend isn’t new: 84% of consumers believe it’s important for each person to contribute to sustainability (Source: Kerry Group, “Sustainability in Motion”), and many companies are starting to respond to the demand for corporate transparency – from fashion, to beauty, electronics and of course, food.

But what do ecolabels show exactly? Well, there are over 500 environmental labels out there: a lot of them focus on carbon footprint (CO2 emissions), some will tell you if a product is organic or not, and others try to look at a broader range of measures like water use, water pollution and biodiversity. Some even include other ethical indicators such as working conditions or animal welfare. The scopes are large and diverse, there is no “one size fits all”, and there isn’t a consistent, harmonised approach.

Regulation is underway – the European Union has worked towards the development of a unified method to communicate environmental information of products across the European Union – the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) Method – since 2013. PEF, for example, measures 16 different environmental impact categories. The French government has also been building a national environmental scoring system for food products, and similar initiatives are underway in The Netherlands and Denmark.

We need better data!

And yet, current approaches to assess the environmental impacts of individual food products remain limited. Often, proxy data is used to generate an estimate of a product’s impact, and the true impact of a specific product is never known. That means that if an actor in the value chain (for example a farmer) is making active efforts to green its processes, that most likely won’t show up in the final score due to the use of averages. 

Impact scores based on secondary data are easier, quicker and cheaper to obtain, but without accurate information on a product-by-product basis, environmental impacts cannot be meaningfully managed and the climate crisis will intensify. And without an accurate. per-product understanding of where the highest environmental impacts are in a supply chain, food producers are not incentivised to grow, manufacture, transport or sell their products more sustainably.

Here’s the thing: ecolabels don’t only help consumers choose a product – when the assessments are done accurately and in-depth, using methods such as Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) for example, they can also help food producers reduce the environmental impacts of their production and produce in a better way. They act as key source of intelligence to help industry players pinpoint where their highest impacts are, and what can be done to improve them. That’s when ecolabels also become a powerful data-driven tool to build more sustainable food systems.

At Foundation Earth, we are working to develop a method that scores food products in the most accurate way possible, based on LCAs using the highest quality data available. We map the supply chain, assess the impacts throughout and tell brands where they might be going wrong. At the same time we are comparing different existing methods to pull out the best of them all and create a single method that will allow brands to have a comprehensive view of their supply chain and know where improvements can be made.

Recognising actors across the supply chain

So, brands are starting to place more and more emphasis on their sustainability efforts – but what does this mean for the other actors along the supply chain? The nice shiny label is sitting on the product pack, but how does that help all food players, from farmers to marketers, to demonstrate their sustainability efforts?

For now, it doesn’t really. Everyone in the chain has contributed to that final score (either negatively or positively!), so why do they miss out on the acknowledgement? At Foundation Earth we believe there is a real gap here, because to transform entire food systems we need to recognise the do-gooders and incentivise others to join in these efforts. If a farmer is doing their best to place sustainability at the heart of their business model, and probably even seeing the direct benefits of their actions on biodiversity around them – for example – this should be celebrated. Because every effort counts.

That’s why we are launching new pilots calling all pioneers to be part of Foundation Earth’s trials and pave the way for food system transformation. We are aiming to deliver a standard, scalable product footprinting system not only for brand owners but also producers and retailers, that will connect entire value chains and give recognition where it is due by delivering our label across the chain. This will in turn unlock commercial value for businesses and support all actors in achieving their net-zero goals.

A food ecolabel for all

What will this look like concretely? We already have our scoring system for final products – remember that traffic light system mentioned on your home appliances? Our Foundation Earth Eco Impact labels apply a similar system: our scores range from A+ to G (A+ being green and representing the lowest environmental impact, G being red and representing the highest) and are recertified yearly, making it possible for products to improve their grade. But instead of labels just being on final, packaged products, ingredients and processes could be certified at each step of the value chain as well, bringing recognition to all those businesses applying sustainability principles and helping business-to-business (B2B) buyers find alternative, sustainable options.

Transforming food systems for the better will take active participation from us all. And it’s only by recognising and celebrating efforts that we will build a movement big enough to create actual change and leave way for food systems that won’t harm the planet.