My father Bill Cash MP is not the Member of Parliament for the local Shropshire area. Our local MP is Philip Dunne, the well regarded defence minister, who is popular in Shropshire for his hard work promoting local interests. He has called for the Council’s South Shropshire Planning Committee to make sure they make the appropriate site visits to Upton Cressett before making any decision with regards to allowing intensive pig farming within 500 metres of the Grade 1 heritage and tourist assets of Upton Cressett.
However, my father – with whom I am fighting the pig farm application – recently received a worrying letter from a constituent of his in Staffordshire who has first hand experience of the perils of pig farming. In a letter articulated below, the constituent – who is a respected farming expert – has identified several of the key areas of concern that the Planning Committee need to look at in making thier decision – as well as Case officer Thomas Cannaby.
The letter is worth quoting at length as it seriously contradicts much of the contents of the letter sent in to ‘support’ the pig factory proposal by the National Pig Association. Much of the contents comes from a ‘farming science’ expert at Harper Adams University.
The concerns you will need to address in relation to the pig farm are:
- Its location in relation to your property and the distance between – the distance will be around 400 metres from the pig units to the nearest home – Rectory Lodge – and the muck spreading will be within 20 metres of the entrance gates to Grade 1 Upton Cessett; and 10 metres from tje back kitchen door of Bill and Biddy Csh, who live at the old Tithe barn, right next to fields owned hy the Cantrills and targeted for much spreading and storage.
- The direction of the prevailing wind which could carry smells, noise and loose debris from the site and any area to be used for effluent spreading; the prevailing wind will carry the smell and debrid from the storage areas used for the pig muck directly towards the historic Hall, Gatehouse, Coach House, Stable Cottage, Tithe Barn and Rectory Lodge – not to mention the Grade 1 Norman church and seven other residents at Upton Lodge.
- How visually intrusive the location will make the building etc from your property? It will be clearly seen from The Gatehouse windows, the main Hall, the Moat Lawn where heritage visotrs have tea and the grounds of the Norman Church of St Michael.
- The method of operation of the proposed use:
Is the proposal to make the business sustainable by growing and harvesting crops on the surrounding land to provide the pig feed and manure disposal, or is the intention to import these raw materials from elsewhere and export the waste?
These options have a marked impact on the transport to and from the site, with large heavy vehicles tending to degrade narrow lanes, break up the road surface and destroy verges and drainage.
Visually, the building required would be substantial and not the sort of structure that could be easily hidden. However, careful design can ameliorate the impact, by such devices as: ·
Siting the building and its accoutrements at a low level in the landscape, sinking the building in to the surrounding land to reduce its effective height and surrounding the sunken building with earth bunds to reduce its apparent height even further;·
Influencing the choice of colour and finish of the cladding applied to the building to avoid bright reflective surfaces, using colours that are similar to the colour of the background features you will see from your viewpoint;·
Ensuring the design provides effective barriers to the noise generated by the pigs themselves, from the ventilation machinery, the reversing plant with their bleepers and other mechanical devices on site such as pumps;· using landscape planting to soften the outline of the building and break up repetitively located features such as grills, ventilation outlets, lighting poles etc.; making sure that items such as storage silos for feed and supplements, hoppers for waste, silos or covered lagoons for holding effluent and sheds for machinery storage and maintenance activities etc., are properly sited within the layout and do not become a clutter of untidy sheds attracting vermin.
Be aware that operations of this type are industrial in nature and often require permanent on-site management staff and usually need adjacent accommodation for those managerial and manual staff who will each require a vehicle close by, a location to park it and a social outlet to visit. They will probably be responsible for livestock security, which will probably require access control gates, CCTV surveillance and 24hr lighting at some level.
The operation will require a range of mechanical and electrical services which may need a small electrical sub-station to be provided, fed by attendant pole-mounted cables and transformers or underground ducts and cables. An operation of this size could require a standby generator to be installed to be sure the systems and lighting are reliable in an emergency to avoid high stock losses.
A reliable water supply will be essential, with sufficient storage on site to provide back-up in the event of an emergency.
Similarly, everything that goes in will need to come out and that includes the manures and liquid effluent, recognised to have a particularly offensive odour. The effluent could be taken off site daily by large tanker, but is more likely, for economic reasons to be pumped and spread as a slurry on the surrounding fields, be they owned or rented, to improve their fertility. This activity inevitably causes problems during rainy periods, often requiring a silo or covered slurry lagoon to be built to overcome these and tends to be the part of the operation that has the biggest impact on those living nearby. That would come from the covered effluent storage, the spreading system employed for effluent disposal, the overall nature of the operation and the attitude of the farmer to his neighbours.
Regrettably, from my experience many pig farmers have a naturally insensitive overbearing personality, appearing to believe that if the operation ‘is good enough for me, it should be good enough for them’ and can be set up without a valid legal challenge, they have a right to impose it on a locality and anyone not liking the effect, has the choice of moving elsewhere.
As we found out to our cost you may recall, many years ago that unscrupulous bully boy approach can be very attractive, by forcing down local property values, allowing the farmer to buy at a reduced price and then occupy the desired property himself or close down the antisocial operation and sell at a profit. There is the indication that industrial scale soft fruit growing by creating an enormous acreage of continuous polytunnels, using East European labour, tax haven finance and lax or no control by planning authorities, may be seen as an easier way of achieving the same benefits for the farmer, than through pig keeping.
Importing the appalling Southern Spanish style operations of this type into the UK, would not have seemed conceivable 10 years ago, yet now they are seen as a sign of economic activity to be encouraged and the sheer incompetence of those in local and central government not awake to the dangers, that makes Starbucks tax dodging a mere side show, have yet to realise that the countryside is being raped.
Are you not ideally positioned and equipped to champion this cause?