By Gary Ford, head of policy and engagement, BFREPA
Every winter, thousands of litres of perfectly usable water run off the roofs of Britain’s poultry sheds and disappear straight into ditches, drains and watercourses. At a time when water scarcity is becoming one of the defining challenges for UK agriculture, this is a resource the sector can no longer afford to ignore.
Living in Worcestershire – and with the help of AI – using long‑term climate data for Worcestershire, I looked at what that would look like for a 1,000 m² (12,000 bird) poultry shed roof. The roof will collect around 370–380 cubic metres of rainfall between 1 October and 1 April. That’s nearly 400,000 litres of clean water – enough to provide meaningful irrigation for high‑value horticultural crops such as potatoes, carrots or onions, or to supply neighbouring farms during dry spells. Multiply that by the number of sheds across the country and the poultry sector is sitting on a vast, largely untapped water asset.
The irony is that while farmers debate abstraction licences, reservoir construction and summer irrigation bans, the industry is already catching the water it needs – it just isn’t keeping it. With modest investment in guttering, filtration and lined storage lagoons, poultry units could bank winter rainfall and release it when the rest of the industry is desperate for supply. In a hot, dry year like this one, that stored water becomes not just a farm resource but a marketable commodity.
Yet the conversation is not straightforward. Open water storage brings an unavoidable challenge: waterfowl. Any lagoon, however well designed, risks attracting ducks and geese, and with them the spectre of avian influenza. For poultry producers, the idea of deliberately creating a feature that might draw waterfowl closer to sheds is understandably uncomfortable.
But this is where the sector needs a more nuanced debate. Covered lagoons, floating deterrents, netting systems and off‑site shared storage offer ways to reduce risk while still capturing the value of winter rainfall. The alternative – continuing to let millions of litres of clean water wash away unused – feels increasingly hard to justify.
As climate volatility intensifies and water becomes a limiting factor for crop production, poultry farms could play a pivotal role in local water resilience. The question is no longer whether the sector can collect and store winter rainfall, it’s whether it can afford not to.