Editor,

I feel I must write in the strongest possible terms in response to the article by Abi Reader (Food production and the environment are not competitors, Cambrian News, 3 March).

I am particularly incensed about her claim that Natural Resources Wales stated that the pollution of rivers like the Wye has nothing to do with poultry farms. There is surely no denying that stretches of the Wye, also its tributaries, are now heavily polluted. If not from poultry farms, where exactly is the pollution coming from?

Surely at least some of it must be coming from the 150 or so poultry farms close to the Wye.

Are readers aware that there are now eight million chickens in Wales?

The reason, of course, that there is such a proliferation of intensive poultry units is the demand for cheap food.

People are told that chicken is a lean, healthy source of protein, but that really depends on how you cook it. Also, I am not so sure that intensively reared chicken, full of antibiotics and such is really so healthy.

The TyNant application is for 110,000 chickens to be housed in two large sheds. This kind of intensive livestock production is surely a great reservoir for disease. How can we allow this kind of industrial production when we are scarcely out of the Covid pandemic which was probably caused by too close mingling of domestic and wild creatures.In addition, the working conditions in these poultry units can hardly be healthy for us humans. In fact, I know of one person who developed emphysema after working in an IPU in his younger years, probably as a result of the concentrations of ammonia released from poultry litter.

We are all facing starkly higher fuel prices and this can only be made worse by the horrific war in the Ukraine. With higher fuel prices the economics of IPU’s and intensive farming in general will make less and less sense. For such enterprises, everything has to be brought in by road transport often from far away. It is the exact opposite of what we need here in Ceredigion and in Wales generally.

As someone who was brought up in Gwynedd and has lived most of my life in Wales, I am now pleading with Ceredigion Planning Committee to take these concerns seriously and turn down this badly thought out and very anti-social planning application.In the short term it might financially benefit a very few farmers but what about the rest of us? If you have not done so yet, please sign the Senedd petition calling for a moratorium on intensive poultry units in Wales.

Just go to the Senedd petition site https//senedd.petitions and search for moratorium on poultry units; the petition number is 244997.

Dorothy E. Wilson, Talybont