Are plans to drastically cut livestock numbers in Herefordshire for real? No one will quite say.

A report by the Cabinet Commission for Restoring the Wye, approved by the council’s cabinet last month, suggested that among the most achievable options for meeting the council’s “strategic objectives” on the river would be to “drive changes to farming practice, so creating opportunities for livestock reduction and facilitating community-led sustainable agricultural practices”.

At a full meeting of the county’s councillors the next day, Coun Roger Phillips said: “Engagement with farmers needs to be clear about the massive de-stocking that is expected within the catchment area.”

He claimed that in an online briefing to councillors on the issue, figures of a 40 per cent reduction in cattle numbers in the county, and over 30 per cent in sheep, had put forward.

“Clearly that is a huge change to that industry,” Coun Phillips said. “There needs to be honest engagement, and those figures need to be transparent in those discussions.”

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He later explained that “the suggestion was that a reduction of this scale is needed to be achieve reduction in phosphate” – the main cause of the declining ecological state of the Wye.

“However the number of beef and sheep numbers over the last 10 years have already declined, and beef numbers will be reducing [further] due to lack of profitability and staffing,” he said.

In January the county’s Big Economic Plan, also backed by the council’s cabinet, set a goal to “restore some land as a net carbon sink, whilst still retaining productive land for farming” within five years.

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A spokesperson for Herefordshire Council played down the suggestion of targets for reducing livestock, saying: “We are in the early stage of discussing the options available to reduce agricultural pollution, and a detailed scientific, economic and regulatory assessment of destocking as a proposition has not yet been considered.”

Kate Speke-Adams, managing director of Herefordshire Rural Hub which hosts the Farm Herefordshire partnership, said: “We have identified and are working on several opportunities that will help farm businesses to deliver improvements in water quality.

“Herefordshire has always been an agriculturally diverse county, no one size fits all, and there will need to be multiple solutions to accommodate this.”

An NFU West Midlands spokesperson added: “As for destocking, it is not a current conversation we are having with [Herefordshire] council.”