So reading the spate of reports regarding its imminent death is like receiving bad news about a friend. It is not even a gentle demise: the Wye is being murdered. It is the totemic case of our national pollution problem as two newspapers launch campaigns to clean up rivers. Fair enough. I learned to swim in the Wye, and fished it for silver minnows; now I would not go into its waters wearing chest-waders. In 2010, the Wye was voted the nation’s favourite river — and celebrated with adjectives including “magical”, “timeless” and “unspoilt”’. In 2020, a thick algal bloom caused by pollution extended along more than 140 of the river’s 155 miles, blocking out sunlight and killing much life below the surface. Now, the Wye’s local cognomen is “shit creek”.

But such was the river’s beauty that following the publication of the Reverend William Gilpin’s Observations on the River Wye in 1782, the British tourist industry was born. The long watery southing miles enthused Wordsworth (“Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”) and prompted JMW Turner to get his brushes out several times. It was renowned across the globe for its Atlantic salmon. Kings and prime ministers have fished from its banks of appropriately salmon-pink sandstone. Once, rod catches exceeded 7,000 a year, with the record fish being a 59lb 8oz leviathan — landed by Doreen Davey at Winforton on March 13, 1923. In 2021, only 326 salmon were caught from the Wye, the smallest number since records began.

That was the year the spotlight on the Wye’s parlous ecological state was switched on with Rivercide, a documentary by George Monbiot, which was complemented by his Guardian article, “Britain’s rivers are suffocating to death”. Plaudits to Monbiot for bringing the death of the Wye to public attention. But his forensic environmental investigation immediately hits the banks.

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Monbiot’s argument, which now dominates the “Why oh Wye” discourse, flows roughly thus: the 20 million chickens intensively farmed in the Wye’s catchment area produce more than 2,500 tonnes of excrement a year, and this mountain of manure is “the most intense and extreme cause” of the Wye’s pollution. It’s the phosphates in the manure. When it is spread on fields, they leach and leak into the river, and promote algal bloom.

Monbiot is not totally wrong. Indisputably, the phosphates in the run-off from intensive poultry units (IPUs in the jargon) are harming the Wye. The Ithon, one of its tributaries in mid-Wales, contains phosphate levels up to 10 times higher than what you’d expect in a healthy upland river, according to an analysis commissioned by Fish Legal, a non-profit organisation of lawyers who fight water polluters. However, when it comes to the question of who is killing the Wye, simply pointing the finger at poultry farmers lets other culprits off the hook. The gallery of rivercide rogues stretches from the Wye’s source on the bleak slopes of Plynlimon to the Severn estuary.

Humans have been killing the Wye for centuries. If you wished to really get to the bottom of whodunnit, you’d begin with the Romans, who introduced the watermill to these isles. Watermills produce pollution — for instance, if used for fulling, the making of woollen cloth — and hamper the spawning of key fish species, including the Wye’s renowned Salmo salar. Salmon in the Wye, and other rivers in the Palaeo-Rhine basin, may have been reduced by as much as 90% between 450AD and 1600AD.

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Then there was overfishing in the 19th century, with 100,000 salmon traps in the Severn and net after net up the Wye to Hay; in 1906, the rod catch of salmon was about 500 fish. Fast forward to the 20th century and acid rain from heavy industry in South Wales was severely impacting the Wye’s headwaters, the quiet brooks where the salmon spawn. Indeed, had The Wye and Usk Foundation not started liming the waters to restore the pH balance in 2003, Wye salmon might well be extinct. The ecosystem of the river has yet to recover from past acid rain.

And there’s the human crap. This year, the Wye has achieved the dubious distinction of appearing at number 14 in the Top of the Poops chart, which ranks England and Wales’s most sewage-polluted rivers. An ITV News analysis of data from Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water, the water company responsible for the areas through which the Wye flows, revealed that in 2020 alone, raw sewage entered the river system for 17.4 million minutes — that’s the equivalent of 33 years. Endlessly blaming the death of the Wye on chicken shit is chicken shit. Environment Agency modelling suggests that raw sewage is the source of 28% of the Wye’s pollution, which is no small matter.

Sewage is also known to cause algal bloom: in 2021, the United Utilities Staveley sewage works, near Windermere, spilled untreated sewage into a nearby stream 80 times for a total of 1,172 hours. The result was a literally sick-making algal bloom on Lake Windermere. But sewage isn’t only to blame. If we are to save the Wye, we may also need to look to the Heavens. Climate change is expected to make algal blooms more common.

So how guilty is the notorious chicken excrement? So extreme is the phosphate runoff from poultry farming that George Monbiot requires us to give up eating chicken to save the Wye. “We do not NEED chicken”, he says, adding: “It’s time conservationists became bolder and spoke out against the world’s greatest cause of ecological destruction: animal farming.” But let’s pluck the Wye’s chicken problem a little. The expansion of IPUs in the Wye’s catchment area over the past five years is clearly a driver in phosphate pollution, but the phosphate overload in local soil is a legacy issue, dating back decades.

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The most authoritative analysis, “Re-focusing Phosphorus use in the Wye Catchment”, attributes 60-70% of said mineral pollution to agriculture, but is careful to enumerate the various culpable parts of agriculture, not just the IPUs. The major culprits include potato-growing, which, last time I checked, was a vegan-approved crop. Phosphate is an ingredient in the artificial fertilisers widely used in large-scale potato-farming, and excess runs off the fields along with the soil when it rains. It all goes into the river. With not a chicken in sight.

Monbiot’s anti-poultry agenda is a diversion, not an answer. You absolutely can have your chicken and your Wye. Small-scale poultry production, with organic free-range hens scratching around apple orchards, naturally manuring the earth: there is no evidence whatsoever that this model is anything but beneficial to the environment. Having your intensively-farmed, £3.50 chicken from Tesco and having your Wye is another matter. It’s not the chicken, it’s how you farm them.

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The greatest environmental problem for the Wye is not the warming of the planet, acid rain, or excrement, whether human or avian: it is chemically-addicted conventional farming. The phosphates in chicken manure leach into the upper Wye for the same reason that phosphates from artificial fertiliser on potato fields enter the river downstream near Ross: the parlous state of the soil, caused by overuse of pesticides, herbicides, molluscicides, fungicides and compaction from machinery. Some potato-growing farmers I knew — whose liking for herbicides and pesticides always made me think of them as “The Chemical Brothers” — lost tons of topsoil per annum from a single 40-acre field. Into the brook, which ran brown, which joined the Wye, which ran brown. There are fields in Britain losing 47 tons of soil per acre per annum. As Natural England notes, “soil and nutrients washing off agricultural land is the most common reason for our rivers and streams becoming unhealthy”. Good, healthy soil, by contrast, can hold huge amounts of water, and is not saturated with phosphates — or indeed that other chemical killer of fresh water, nitrates — because it has been “husbanded”. That is, farmed properly.

Call me cynical, call me biased, but doesn’t the “It’s all the fault of poultry farmers” argument stink a bit of a vegan agenda? In an age when whole cities are trying to erase meat from school menus, it’s fashionable and easy to blame the livestock farmer, and answer every complex environmental problem with: “Go plant-based!”

But you could close all the IPUs in the Wye catchment area and turn them over to cabbage production for vegans, and you would still have phosphates streaming into the river. It will continue to die unless the area’s agriculture, be it livestock or crop, adopts en masse soil-aware, sustainable and nature-friendly principles. What’s more, you could say the same about almost every river in the country. Meanwhile, quiet flows the Wye towards its grave.

Is it not curious how carnivorism is subject to endless negative news and analysis, whereas the same rules do not apply to vegan food? As a keeper of livestock in sustainable, ethical, regenerative farming systems, may I say I find it hypocritical to be lectured by those who fly on polluting jets to Egypt, Mexico, Peru and other places I will never see? Has the COP jamboree not discovered Zoom yet? So, for once, let us turn the dinner tables, put vegan food under the knife and fork, and examine its impact on the environment. Where better to start than with tofu?

An ancient, soya-based ingredient in Asian cuisine, tofu came to the West with stoned returning hippies, and was an obscure item in Whole Food shops until the early 21st century, when it started to appear on the shelves of every middle-class supermarket as the meat-free, climate-healing superfood. Suella Braverman’s recent rant about “Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati” was not without its truth; tofu is as much a right-on political choice as a potential ingredient in tonight’s family dinner.

Tofu, for those unacquainted with the stuff, is curd made from soybeans that have been soaked in large tanks and churned into a slush, which is then heated, filtered and coagulated into slabs, before being chopped up, packaged, and pasteurised. All these steps require a lot of carbon dioxide-emitting energy.

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The amount of soybeans grown in the UK is negligible (3,000 tons in 2019: our isles are insufficiently warm for the crop), meaning the soybeans imported for any national tofu-maker come with enough travel miles to get them from Japan, say, or the US. The Tofoo Co. might come over all artisanal  — their tofu is made “int Yorkshire”, as they declare on their website — but the raw product is shipped from Canada and Italy.

Then you have the packaging. Tofu is sloppy, wet stuff, invariably sold wrapped in thick plastic you could use as kids’ shoes at the beach. Selflessly, your author, in the interests of “method research”, ate 200g of Bjorg smoked tofu; the plastic packing weighed 10g, actually measurable on analogue kitchen scales.

The Tofoo Co., meanwhile, earnestly informs us: “We don’t pack ours in a ready meal tray in water (the only other way we know tofu can be packed) as we think thermoforming gives a MUCH BETTER, less soggy product, that is ready to eat.” (Amusing, no? They admit tofu is inevtiably soggy, even if you can get less soggy versions.) But “thermoform packaging”, lovely as it sounds, is plastic, and plastic is derived from fossil fuels. The production process involves heating plastic until it is pliable — can you imagine the kilowats of energy required? And extraordinarily, you cannot recycle Tofoo’s wrapping.

Despite all this, if you run “tofu” through the BBC’s climate change food calculator, you will be informed that your “personal consumption” accounts for 12kg to your annual greenhouse gas emissions, on the basis of two servings a week. Two servings of beef come out at a whopping 604 kg per year. A clear win for tofu? Well, no.

The BBC calculator is based on work by Oxford-based environmentalist scientist, Joseph Poore. He who appeared in a promo for the “Go Vegan for Lent” campaign, organised by pressure group Million Dollar Vegan. Poore’s claims to have calculated the universal carbon footprint of an entire food type based on air miles and packaging, as well as production, are nonsensical: it is impossible to do so, given the diversity of packaging and the global nature of distribution. (Were your onions loose and local, or from Spain wrapped in a nylon net?)

Worse, climate change calculators based on crude protein or calories, such as the BBC’s, are flawed in a way that would be amusing if the consequences were not tragic. Tofu has a seemingly respectable 10g of protein per 100g — but not all protein is equal. For humans, soy protein is less digestible than meat protein. In other words, you have to eat proportionately more tofu to get the same protein allowance. Tofu also has significantly less riboflavin, niacin, pantothenic acid, vitamin B6 and vitamin B12 than meat. To make up these deficiencies, tofu-eaters have to either take supplements, or eat additional food — both of which produce greenhouse gases. The Vegan Society, for instance, encourages any breastfeeding meat-free mothers to take supplements of B12, iodine, vitamin D and omega-3, as well as to increase their calcium intake.

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The deficiencies of tofu go beyond its nutritional value. The stuff is tasteless: although venerated by vegans, in classic Asian dishes such as Mapo tofu, the tofu is actually mixed with meat in the hope it will imbibe meat’s tastiness. Tofu is used as filler. Nobody ever said: “I could murder a nice juicy lump of tofu.” The result of this tastelessness is that consumers in the US throw away 30.5% of all tofu purchased; this food waste increases its environmental impact by a whopping 43.9%. The figure for meat thrown away is 20%.

By now you may understand why the Rothamsted Institute’s Dr Graham McAuliffe, an expert on modelling the environmental impacts of food over their lifecycle, has concluded that:

“If you look at tofu, which is processed so there is more energy going into its production, when you correct for the fact that the protein in it is not as digestible compared to the meat-based products, you can see that it could actually have a higher global warming potential than any of the monogastric animals. To get the same amount of protein, tofu is worse.”

On and on goes the list of tofu’s environmental sins. While it is true that most soy grown in Brazil goes to animal feed, some makes its slippery way into the human food chain, and thus into tofu — so add deforestation of the Amazon to that list. If you’re eating it in the UK, tofu from the tree-felled Amazon would cost you double the amount of CO₂ than chicken farmed on these isles.

According to the dear old BBC food calculator, “even the most climate-friendly meat options still produce more greenhouse gases than vegetarian protein sources”. The same lie is broadcast by groupthink governments and the vested interests of the Big Vegan food industry. It’s a lie because you can buy meat from a grass-based, carbon-neutral provider. Indeed, you can buy meat from farmers who, due to sensitive, sustainable pasture management, are sinking more carbon dioxide than their operations emit. You can buy meat wrapped in paper from a butcher, meat which comes from a carbon-neutral factory.

Also, cows produce manure, which feeds insects: an organic, outdoor cow feeds more than 2 million insects a year, dramatically aiding biodiversity as well as the soil. Manure can reduce, or even eliminate, the need for artificial fertiliser, which is responsible for no less than 2.1% of global GHG emissions. Most soy, meanwhile, is chemically drenched. Indeed, the story of contemporary soy production is the biography of agri-business giant Monsanto and its patented, controversial weed-killers.

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Back in the mid-Nineties, Monsanto’s chemists genetically engineered soy to be immune to sprayings from Roundup, a herbicide supplied by… Monsanto. The Roundup Ready soybean could effectively only be grown with applications of the company’s glyphosate weed-killer. However, weeds being weeds proved resistant to Roundup. So in 2015, Monsanto began producing soybean seeds, branded “Roundup Ready Xtend”, engineered to tolerate dosings of both glyphosate and another chemical, dicamba.

Let’s be clear: genetically modified soy, specifically developed to withstand one Earth-polluting chemical, was sprayed, when yield dwindled, with another Earth-polluting chemical. Anything sprayed with both Roundup and dicamba certainly died — including soy not grown from Monsanto-supplied beans. Farmers not using them soon discovered such was the drift from the volatile dicamba that if they were within half a mile of other farmers using it, their crop was impacted.

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, there were 3,300 dicamba “incidents” in 2019 alone. Faced with a choice of no crop or Monsanto crop, US soy farmers shifted en masse to being Monsanto clients. The report of the US Center for Food Safety on soy, Monsanto, and the “dicamba debacle” makes for sobering reading:

“Sprayed in large quantities over-the-top of resistant crops in the summertime heat, dicamba vaporised and drifted long distances to cause enormous damage across the landscape… Pesticide expert Andrew Thostenson of North Dakota State University said it was unlike anything that ‘has ever happened in the history of pesticide use in this country’.”

Today, around 94% of the world’s soy is genetically engineered, mostly to be resistant to Monsanto’s Roundup. Alas, as Roundup’s efficacy diminishes, the more it gets sprayed; soybean farmers are currently doubling glyphosate applications per season. Soybeans produced on commercial farms in the USA, Brazil and Argentina accumulate an estimated 2,500–10,000 metric tonnes of glyphosate per year. The adverse effects of glyphosate and dicamba on the environment only begin with the destruction of soil microflora, bee colonies, and aquatic organisms.

Anybody who believes that tofu is a green alternative to meat has no idea how industrialised soybean farming works. Anybody who believes it has a light carbon footprint needs to look again. The soybean is the most environmentally dangerous agricultural crop in the world, and the production of tofu is a drain on our precious resources. The thermoform packets of tofu on the shelf of your local supermarket ought to come served with a warning: this product is harmful to the Earth’s health.

The UK is a world leader in veganism, the first country to have a Vegan Society. Here, more than a million people will stop eating animal products this month as part of Veganuary, of which Monbiot is an “Ambassador”. After that, who knows? You may want — and the Ambassadors certainly desire — that you embrace the whole vegan testament, and deny yourself not just meat, fish, eggs and dairy, but all animal products. The wool jumper on your back. The leather shoes on your feet.

Of course, the success of veganism is no mystery at all. Vegans are absolutely correct in maintaining that plant-based food can be healthy, and that the welfare conditions of much of the globe’s livestock are pitiful. (On ethical grounds alone, I wouldn’t touch an intensively-reared pig with a bargepole, let alone with a knife and fork. And I’ve farmed for 20 years.) True too: Daisy the cow is implicated in climate-change. No sane or caring human could disagree.

Such is lower case veganism. Sensible, and sensitive. The problem comes with majuscule Veganism, which rages beyond animal ethics, diet and environmental concerns into a fundamentalist crusade untroubled by science, untouched by rationality. When humans killed God, they needed a replacement for religion. Upper-case Veganism is the latest faith for the lost middle classes.

A certain proof is offered by THIS IS VEGAN PROPAGANDA (& OTHER LIES THE MEAT INDUSTRY TELLS YOU) by animal rights activist Ed Winters, published by Vermillion this salutary month. A cursory glance down the contents list is sufficient taster of Veganism’s salvationism: “Veganism is the Moral Baseline,” “Our Past Shows Us Why Veganism Must Be Our Future,” “There’s No Such Thing as a Happy Farm Animal” (if you go to the website of Veganuary, there is a photograph of a woman petting a cute cow; if the cow is not contented, then Veganuary is exploiting the cow. ) “Veganism Could Save Your Life,” “A Vegan World Would Be Better for Everyone.”

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Where does one begin? With The Fall, I suppose. For Vegans the omnivorism of early humans is an inconvenient truth, to be negated by counterfactuals (such as PETA’s memorable “We Don’t Have Carnivorous Teeth”), or avoided by the “That was history” excuse, as with the author’s, “Whatever happened tens of thousands of years ago… should have no bearing on determining whether or not what we do to animals is justified now.” Actually, human anatomy has changed remarkably little in the last million years. We still have canine teeth, and a stomach more resembling that of a dog than a sheep. Meat-eating is natural. It’s why you salivate over a plate of bacon.

Veganism, in rejecting our animal essential, elevates us above the creatures of the earth. It is speciesism disguised as correct-thinking. Ironically, we would not be the verbal, intelligent humans of Vegan perfectibility without meat. Harvard University evolutionary biologists Katherine Zink and Daniel Lieberman, nailed that truth in their paper “Impact of meat and Lower Paleolithic food processing techniques on chewing in humans,” Nature, 2016: “Whatever selection pressures favored these shifts [the bigging of the brain, development of speech], they would not have been possible without increased meat consumption combined with food processing technology.”

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As with any half-decent religion, Veganism has an end-of-Eden story. “Huge amounts of the forests of the UK have,” Winters writes, “over time, been cleared and replaced with grass pastures to feed artificially produced, selectively bred animals, all so we can produce what is an absurdly damaging product.” (He means meat.) But are grass pastures intrinsically ecologically evil? Hardly. A traditional hay meadow can boast 40 different plant species per square metre — one of the most botanically rich habitats you are ever likely to find. Grazing by livestock is essential to their biodiversity; without grazing, the trees and the most vigorous grasses take over.

Just don’t expect a Vegan to tell you this. On the altar of Veganism, the meadow pipit, the meadow brown butterfly, and meadowsweet will be sacrificed. For all of their fine talk against exploitation, vegans are no friend to the animal. Because, if we all go Vegan, there will be no farm beasts outside specimens in unsustainable populations in zoos. Ermintrude, Chicken Little, and Shaun the Sheep will have to be mass culled.

And this extermination would have a calamitous effect on ecology. I have no wish to be a nerd about turd, but a cow produces, via its poo, a fifth of its own body weight in insects annually. In the British countryside an upwards chain of wild creatures feed on said insects, culminating in the apex predator, the fox (a determined scavenger of beetles in dung.) There are dung beetles which actually specialise in types of farmyard manure, such as Onthophagus joannae, which favours sheep poo. Get rid of the poo, and you get rid of the dung beetles. Why the decline in swallows in arable East Anglia where bovines are a rare sight? Not enough cow shit, in all likelihood.

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What you can expect from a Vegan is the catechism that meat and dairy take up 83% of global agricultural land and provide only 18% of global calories. But there is good reason for the planetary extent of livestock. About two thirds of farmland is “marginal,” meaning little apart from grass and scrub will grow there because it is too dry, too steep, too rocky, too wet, too wind-blown. As a Masai cattle-herder and a Shetland shepherd will delight in explaining, livestock are extremely efficient when it comes to transforming stuff humans cannot eat into tasty stuff they can.

Veganism knows the cost of livestock farming, but not its value; it knows the value of plant-based food, but not its cost. Not all the soya for which Brazilian rainforest is felled goes into cattle feed, it goes into “meat free” burgers too. The intensively farmed arable lands of East Anglia — which grow the Vegan’s daily bread — suffer soil erosion to the tune of tonnes per acre annually. A recent study in the Environmental Science & Policy journal calculated that about 3.07 tonnes of soil are lost per hectare of agricultural land per annum in Europe, with the vast bulk coming off crop-land. At that rate Vegans will die of hunger before they drown in the rising sea of climate change.

Ah, climate change. Will Veganism save the planet by killing off methane-emitting farm animals? Ruminants do indeed produce methane, but then so does rice; methane from rice farming causes 3% of anthropogenic global warming. Ruminant methane from grazing cows, however, is virtuously recycled into the soil by being broken down into CO2 and absorbed by new grass. Unlike the methane produced by water-logged paddies. If the Vegan dire prophecies scare you, it’s worth mentioning that seaweed additives for cattle may reduce emissions by 82%.

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We cannot eat our way out of climate change by going Vegan. Professor Frank Mitloehner of the University of California, a world expert on air quality, calculates that if the entirety of the US were to go vegan for one year, the overall reduction of greenhouse gas emissions would amount to 2%. Something. But not the salvation of the planet.

And again, will no one consider the costs? Consider this: when did the West start getting ill? In the Seventies, when Western governments issued nutritional advice that demonised the saturated fats in meat, dairy and eggs and promoted carbohydrates as healthy food. The consequence is an epidemic of obesity. Winters talks about the “meat industry” as a monolith that puts profits before people, but what about the Vegan industry? Investors are pouring billions into alt-meat and dairy brands. Nestlé UK & Ireland supports Veganuary. Harrods and Volkswagen are taking part in Veganuary’s “workplace challenge.” Veganism has the fingerprints of Big Food all over its robes.

According to Mintel, Gen Z consumers are Veganism’s great hope, with over half (54%) of under 25s seeing the reduction of animal products as a good way to lessen humans’ impact on the environment. Big Vegan has done a job on them, and got them “flocking to the smell of ‘progress’”.  But Gen Z should be wary of the false prophets of Veganism.

If they really do care about the environment, they should  celebrate January by ditching the trainers in favour of a pair of leather shoes; synthetic trainers cause 1.4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Then cancel the flight to Amsterdam; two years of Veganism would be required to offset the trip. Hell, buy a woollen jumper too, instead of a nylon one; nylon manufacture creates nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 310 times more potent than carbon dioxide. And then put back the supermarket’s Jasmine rice from Thailand, and tuck into a slice of local organic beef. Farm bullocks are not the problem. Fundamentalist Veganite bollocks are.