Two farms have been fined thousands of pounds this week for two separate slurry pollution incidents.
On 10 January at Teesside Magistrates’ Court, C K & D Muir Limited pleaded guilty to a charge of polluting Easington Beck and was fined £8,000. The company, of Grinkle Park Farm, Loftus, Saltburn-by-the-Sea, also was ordered to pay full prosecution costs of £5,926.82 and a victim surcharge of £15.
Jill Fogg, prosecuting for the Environment Agency, said environment officers who attended Grinkle Park Farm on 17 March 2009 found slurry running down the hill from the farm into Easington Beck below, and observed slurry spilling out of one of the farm’s slurry lagoons.
Ms Fogg said the slurry had escaped from the pig shed on 11 March after a door was left open. She told the bench the resulting pollution of the beck killed 220 brown trout and was treated by the Environment Agency as a Category 1 incident, the most serious kind.
In a separate prosecution, on 5th January the owners of a North Devon dairy farm were fined £1,500 for polluting a stream near an important salmon spawning river.
In February 2010 an Agency officer noticed a ‘tide mark’ where dirty water had been discharging into a drainage ditch just below Brendon Farm. The ditch was in poor condition. Barnstaple Magistrates Court heard the Agency had previously received complaints about poor water quality at Matcott Bridge downstream of the farm.
A week later environment protection officers returned to West Brendon Farm and carried out a more detailed inspection of nearby watercourses. The ditch below the dairy drained into a marshy pond that was silted up with slurry solids. Water flowing out of the pond was green and a white detergent foam was visible on the surface.
The stream below the marshy area was blanketed in sewage fungus for a distance of approximately 1,200 metres. Sewage fungus is a sign a watercourse has been polluted over a period of time. The stream is a tributary of the River Waldon.
During their investigation, Agency officers also found domestic and agricultural waste including cardboard, bailer twine, plastic oil containers, barbed wire, furniture, concrete, foam rubber, plastic feed bags and bonded asbestos guttering in a quarry on the farm. The uncontrolled burning or tipping of waste on farms is now illegal following the introduction of new regulations in 2006.
‘Farmers must ensure slurry stores and dirty water systems are of sufficient capacity and in a good state of repair. This is becoming more important as old stores reach the end of their expected working lives,’ said Phil Siddall for the Environment Agency.
The F.M.Ley Partnership was fined £1,500 after pleading guilty to causing polluting matter, namely farm slurry, to enter controlled waters. The Partnership was also fined £400 for operating an unauthorised waste facility, an offence under the Environment Protection Act 1990 and £1,000 costs.