Brighton in drought | Photo: Simon Dack News

On July 15, in the middle of England’s driest July on record, a large poultry processing plant in Devon shut down for two days due to water constraints. Having already cut use by almost 30%, the plant’s operator, 2 Sisters, warned that further restrictions would “create a serious and immediate animal welfare risk”.

Off the back of that event, the British Meat Processors Association (BMPA) called for processing sites to have “continuous access to water, irrespective of wider pressures on local supplies”. Water companies are currently required by law to prioritise households over businesses during shortages. The request remains unresolved.

This push highlights the water intensity of the meat processing sector, with new figures obtained by GRILLED showing that annual water use by England’s meat plants exceeds 14.1 billion litres, or 38.8 million litres per day.

That means England’s meat processors use as much water as 285,000 people. If it were a city, the industry would be England’s 13th largest, thirstier than Brighton and Hove.

Most of that water is used for cleaning, such as washing down equipment and carcasses, with much of it required under food safety rules.

The data, produced by the Environment Agency (EA) for the year 2025 and obtained using environmental information rules, covers 84 slaughterhouses and meat processing plants. A further twelve operating facilities did not provide the EA with water use figures for the year so the figure is certainly higher.

Read the full analysis on the GRILLED website

Photo: Francesco Alesi / Greenpeace (edited)

This summer, EU policymakers were invited to the offices of Copa Cogeca, the most influential agriculture group in Europe, for a closed-door briefing about relaxing Europe’s pesticide approval regime.

The “Farmers’ Toolbox” event, co-hosted by pesticide association CropLife Europe, saw industry representatives present a wishlist for the Food and Feed Safety Omnibus, a package of laws to rewrite food and farming rules currently making its way through the Parliament.

Right now, before a pesticide can be sold, its active ingredient (glyphosate, for example, is the active ingredient in the Roundup weedkiller) needs approval at the EU level, and gets reassessed every 10-15 years to check it’s still safe. National governments can also introduce their own extra restrictions.

The Commission already wants to loosen part of that system: under its proposed reforms, most pesticide approvals would no longer expire, they’d run indefinitely unless new evidence of harm turned up. At the event, industry pushed MEPs to go further still.

Documents obtained by GRILLED show Copa Cogeca calling for a measure that would prevent member states from banning pesticides already approved elsewhere in the EU. German farming association Deutscher Bauern Verband (DBV) made the case for revisiting the bloc’s ban on bee-killing neonicotinoids.

“By teaming up with the pesticide lobby in this push for deregulation,” Nina Holland, agribusiness researcher at the NGO Corporate Europe Observatory, told GRILLED, “farmer lobby Copa Cogeca and its member DBV are scoring an own-goal for farmers on the ground.”

Read the full story on the GRILLED website

Thetford is largest power station in Britain running on poultry litter. Photo: N Chadwick | Geograph.org.uk

A version of this story ran with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism

The UK government has ruled out extending subsidies for power stations that burn poultry litter, according to documents obtained by GRILLED, raising concerns over where large quantities of the country’s chicken waste will now end up.

In a letter sent to the chair of the UK parliament’s energy security and net zero committee on September 1, energy minister Michael Shanks MP confirmed the government “does not intend to introduce successor subsidy support” for small-scale biomass generators, including plants that burn poultry litter, as their Renewables Obligation support expires in March 2027.

Melton Renewable Energy claims to currently process 600,000 tonnes of poultry litter a year across three power stations: Thetford, Eye and Westfield. Without subsidy, these projects are highly likely to close; more than half of Melton’s biomass income comes from taxpayer support and Melton chief executive Eddie Wilkinson has warned the firm could consult on closures and redundancies as soon as December.

What this means for the litter currently burned by Melton is still unclear. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is currently conducting an environmental impact assessment for the plants’ closure, but it is not yet complete.

Campaigners fear much of this waste will simply be spread on fields as a fertiliser. This common practice is strongly linked with nitrogen pollution in British rivers, including the ecological collapse of the River Wye. Though there are limits on applying excess manure inside Nitrate Vulnerable Zones, which make up roughly 70% of English farmland,enforcement is lacking and prosecutions are rare. The government is currently developing new rules for the spreading of organic materials.

The 600,000 tonnes of manure Melton burns represents a significant share of the waste produced by the poultry industry. River Action calculates that meat and egg-laying birds together produce over 3.5 million tonnes a year, while the British Poultry Council (BPC) puts litter from broiler chickens at around 1.5 million tonnes. Both industry and government are seeking to expand chicken production as part of the poultry growth plan, but with that comes even greater amounts of waste.

GRILLED has identified three live and recently approved planning applications for poultry farms in England for which the manure management plan is to send waste directly to Melton’s power stations for incineration.

“If Thetford closes, it’s hard to believe that quantity of poultry litter can suddenly be handled sustainably,” Dr Jonathan Scurlock, founder of the consultancy Renewable Energy in Agriculture and an expert in renewables and land use, told GRILLED.

“The concern, of course, is that much of it will end up spread on land, adding to an already significant nitrogen pollution problem.”

Read the full story on the GRILLED website

A version was published in the Guardian here

As Europeans went to the polls in June 2024, Europe’s most powerful farming lobby had settled on a simple demand: “Repeal the Green Deal”.

This message, discussed in a high-level industry meeting on the eve of the vote, was the culmination of a years-long campaign to dismantle the most ambitious environmental effort ever pursued by the European Union.

Now, dozens of documents from inside Copa Cogeca, the federation of European farming interests, reveal how the group undermined and hollowed out the EU’s green farming commitments, one by one.

The archive of meeting notes, obtained by GRILLED, a new investigative journalism project, starts in January 2021, just months after EU leaders unveiled their Farm to Fork strategy, the agricultural centrepiece of the European Green Deal.

In that strategy, EU officials promised to cut pesticide use, restore ecosystems, reduce emissions and improve the lives of farmed animals. Five years later, that agenda was all but abandoned.

This is the story of Copa Cogeca’s pushback.

The files capture the organisation receiving support from EU commissioners in blocking parts of the EU effort to beat cancer, pressuring ministers to weaken protections for wild animals, securing emissions exemptions for factory farms, and prolonging the use of cages for livestock.

Less than a year after Farm to Fork landed, representatives of the group’s nearly 70 member organisations met over zoom for Copa Cogeca’s presidium, held just a few times a year.

There, Pekka Pesonen, the then Secretary General, laid the groundwork for the campaign to follow. They would defend controversial animal products like foie gras and fur, he told the board, “in the same way as tobacco.”

Read the full version on the new GRILLED website

The British poultry industry is planning to build at least 600 new chicken sheds in response to new supermarket welfare standards, an investigation by Grilled and The i newspaper has found.

Producers argue the Better Chicken Commitment and lower stocking density goals mean many more farms are needed just to keep production stable.

But analysis of planning registers has identified 14 proposals making this argument in support of new or larger factory farms that together would increase production capacity by 2.3 million birds and slaughter nearly 17 million more chickens a year.

Harrison Pick, a consultancy from East Yorkshire described in the trade press as “planning royalty”, filed the vast majority of the applications identified.

Across multiple proposals submitted to different councils for different clients - from Lincolnshire to Shropshire to Norfolk - the company used identical justification text, including a recurring grammatical error.

“The major implication of this commitment is that 21% more poultry houses are required in order to continue production are current levels, with no expansion of the industry. It is now of strategic importance for UK food security that more poultry houses are developed to enable the adoption of the higher welfare standard, without creating a major shortage of chicken which will otherwise be filled by imports of chicken from abroad which are produced under lower standards of animal welfare”

One application, for a development in Telford, goes further, estimating that the welfare shift means the industry needs to build around 600 new poultry units and add 24 million new bird places nationally.

Harrison Pick said the similar language across applications was appropriate because “the underlying market driver is the same across all these applications — the adoption of lower stocking density requirements is a sector-wide policy shift, not a site-specific circumstance.”

The company said new shed capacity was “required simply to maintain equivalent output at the new welfare standard” and that it was “factually accurate to reference these commitments as the material driver of demand for new facilities.”

It did not address the fact that the applications it prepared state explicitly that proposed developments would increase bird numbers at each site.

“Better Chicken”

The welfare commitment invoked is the Better Chicken Commitment, a voluntary pledge that requires producers to reduce stocking density from 38 to 30 kilograms per square metre, which is roughly the difference between 17 and 14 chickens in an area equivalent to a coffee table.

Waitrose and Marks & Spencer are formal signatories. Tesco, Sainsbury’s and most other major retailers have committed to lower stocking density but have not signed the BCC over its demand to switch from fast-growing breeds, otherwise known as frankenchickens.

Restaurant chains including Nando’s and KFC previously signed the pledge, but withdrew earlier this year over the same fast-growing breed demand.

The commitment is voluntary and carries no enforcement mechanism. Once a farm is built, there is no way to ensure the welfare standards that justified its construction are actually maintained.

The Better Chicken Commitment was developed by a coalition of animal welfare organisations including Compassion in World Farming and The Humane League, who have spent years pressuring retailers to improve conditions for broiler chickens. They argue that lower stocking density alone is not sufficient without a shift to slower-growing breeds.

Anthony Field, Head of Compassion in World Farming UK, said: “Some planning applications use the Better Chicken Commitment as a reason for more sheds, while the companies behind the applications fail to commit to delivering on all the BCC welfare requirements. Fast-growing chickens are bred to gain weight so quickly that many can barely walk by the end of their short lives, leaving them unable to benefit from the extra space. Better welfare requires better birds, not just bigger sheds.”

Cordelia Britton, Head of Programs at The Humane League UK, said: “To use animal welfare as an excuse to expand the industry in a country which slaughters over a billion chickens a year is the wrong approach. There is a tantalising diversity of plant-based proteins that companies should be investing in.”

Changing the planning rules

Though the poultry industry routinely complains over difficulties navigating the planning process, official data shows broiler numbers in England rose 8.2% last year, and chicken production has grown by 20% since 2010.

The British Poultry Council said consumer demand for chicken had risen around 4.5% in the last year alone and that “the sector will need to expand by 3% year-on-year to catch up with and meet the growing demand,” adding that “growth and welfare improvements are not contradictory.”

At the British Pig and Poultry Fair in May, Avara Foods, one of the country’s biggest chicken producers and owned by American agricultural giant Cargill, told producers the industry needed to lobby government to create a national planning framework that would “take the decision away from local planning officers.”

Earlier this year, Grilled revealed that the government was considering changes to planning rules that would make it harder for councils to block intensive poultry developments. The changes came after intensive lobbying by the British Poultry Council, with internal government notes linking the reforms directly to industry pressure.

Jen Davey, whose parents own an organic farm next to one of the applications in Wragby, Lincolnshire, said the development would be part of a cluster of four or five intensive poultry units within five miles. “It’s not in any way, shape or form what anyone would think of as farming,” she said. “It’s industrial, it’s a factory, everything about it is industrialised.”

Ruth Westcott, Campaign Manager at Sustain, said: “Chicken companies are trying to sell a story of ‘higher welfare’ to win over the public and politicians but it doesn’t change the fact that keeping hundreds of thousands of birds in indoor units up and down the country is a major and growing source of pollution. It is contaminating our rivers and air quality and harming rural communities.”

The British Poultry Council said all poultry farms housing over 40,000 birds were subject to environmental permitting regulations, adding that “linking them to river pollution is fallacious.” It said the planning system “lacks any government oversight for food production, leaving local authorities to make decisions on complex applications on a case-by-case basis with no national support.”

A Defra spokesperson said: “We welcome the shift from some poultry farmers’ towards lower stocking density and wider efforts to reduce reliance on fast growing breeds.

“We understand these factors drive a need for more poultry sheds and we are working closely with industry to manage the risks to the environment and local communities.”

The 14 applications identified span councils across Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Shropshire and Staffordshire. Twelve remain undecided.

A version of this story ran in The i newspaper

Correction: An earlier version of this piece stated that Pret a Manger had withdrawn from the Better Chicken Commitment. This was inaccurate. Pret has delayed compliance with the commitment by several years but it has not withdrawn. The piece has been amended.

The EU is considering an overhaul of how it measures methane emissions from livestock, according to a leaked draft of the European Commission’s Sustainable Livestock Strategy.

The Commission claims existing emissions accounting methods are too blunt, and treat methane too much like CO2. Methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas but has a far shorter atmospheric life.

It singles out tools used by the IPCC, the world’s leading climate body, to calculate agricultural emissions, arguing they treat cattle as effectively interchangeable regardless of breed, feeding regime, or how a farm is managed.

The proposal echoes an approach favoured by the livestock sector, which has for years advocated for a measurement called GWP* that treats stable livestock numbers as producing “no additional warming” over time even as the animals continue to emit methane.

Methane is responsible for more than a third of the global warming the planet has experienced to date, with agriculture the leading man-made source. The EU estimates that methane from livestock accounts for 12% of its greenhouse gas emissions.

The strategy, which sets out the bloc’s long-term direction for the sector, is expected to be presented on July 1st, when Ireland will take over the rotating Presidency of the Council of the EU.

Ireland, which has the highest proportion of agricultural emissions of any EU member state, has previously said it wants to “advocate for the accounting of [methane] to be re-classified at EU and international level”.

Campaigners fear the proposed shift could downgrade livestock’s reported climate impact without requiring any meaningful reduction in animal numbers.

Earlier this year a group of 34 NGOs urged the Irish government not to use a ‘no additional warming’ approach when assessing methane’s contribution to global warming, arguing it “rests on the flawed assumption that current methane levels are acceptable.”

‘Biogenic’

The leaked draft - dated April 2026 and not yet finalised - endorses the idea that methane from livestock should be treated differently to fossil-fuel emissions because of its “biogenic nature... as part of a short-term carbon cycle,” a framing long pushed by the meat and dairy industry as grounds for lighter-touch climate accounting.

On this basis, the Commission says it will develop new, EU-specific “harmonised metrics” and farm-level monitoring tools aimed, the draft states, at reducing “uncertainty” in how Member States report emissions in their national greenhouse gas inventories.

Nitrates

The leaked draft also considers relaxing the Nitrates Directive, the EU law limiting how much manure and nitrogen fertiliser farmers can spread, to protect water quality.

An ongoing Commission evaluation of the directive, folded into a wider “simplification” push, is expected to consider whether further “flexibilities” could be introduced specifically for livestock farming, with the EU’s Nitrates Committee tasked with examining the question once the evaluation report lands.

‘Stress testing’

The document flags two further environmental laws for review: the Nature Directives, which underpin the EU’s protected-areas network, are being “stress-tested” with a report due by the end of 2026, while a separate review of the Water Framework Directive is also under consideration.

The European Commission were contacted for comment but failed to respond

This story was also published in the Guardian

Ministers are rewriting planning rules to make it easier to build intensive livestock farms despite concerns about water pollution, air quality and local opposition.

Documents obtained by the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act show that proposed changes to the national planning policy framework (NPPF) were discussed by ministers and officials in response to concerns of the country’s leading chicken producers, who have been lobbying on the issue for at least two years.

The British Poultry Council (BPC), which represents the sector, told the farming minister Angela Eagle last autumn: “Access to more growing space is the number one priority for the poultry meat sector.”

In its submission to the government’s farm profitability review last summer, it said: “The need for a solution – either through planning reform or land-use policy – and the urgency of that need dwarfs all other issues currently facing us.”

Before a poultry industry roundtable with Eagle in January, the BPC said it needed the government to “develop national planning direction and oversight for food production […] to safeguard the UK’s long-term food security”.

At the meeting, Eagle said: “We have also announced proposals to reform the planning system to more quickly unlock food and farming infrastructure. Planning should enable ambition, not stifle it.”

Read the rest on the GRILLED website