The county’s waterways along with rivers across Herefordshire and Powys are at risk, the Soil Association claims.

Analysis from the food and farming charity has revealed that the British public is blind to the scale and growth of the industrial chicken meat sector, which has been expanding at a rate of one million birds per month since 2014.

Today, it has reached more than a billion birds per year.

The industry is a leading cause of “dead zones” in the River Wye, where the muck from 20 million chickens has contributed to phosphate pollution that causes algal blooms, suffocating plants and starving wildlife that depend on them.