Repeat slurry pollution costs Devon farm nearly £20,000

A Devon farm partnership has been ordered to pay £19,468 after repeated slurry pollution incidents affected a tributary of the River Yarty.

D I & R Dyer Farm Partnership, a family-run business operating at Crawley Farm in Yarcombe, was sentenced at Exeter Magistrates’ Court following pollution offences in 2024 and 2025.

The farm was fined £6,600 and ordered to pay a £2,000 victim surcharge and £7,368 in costs after pleading guilty to causing two pollution incidents.

One of the partners, 76-year-old Derek Dyer, of Crawley Farm, was fined a further £2,500 and ordered to pay a £1,000 victim surcharge.

He pleaded guilty to failing to apply organic manure properly and to storing manure too close to a watercourse, creating a risk of pollution.

The Environment Agency said the farm had a history of contact with officers and had previously been given advice and warnings.

Mr Dyer was given a community order in 2024 after contaminating a private water supply and polluting a stream when a slurry store built from farmyard manure collapsed.

The court was told there had also been relevant previous offending resulting in a conviction in 2009.

The judge noted that the defendants had still not built a slurry store, despite permission being granted in January 2025.

The first of the latest pollution cases was reported on 1 May 2024, when a member of the public contacted the Environment Agency’s incident hotline.

The report concerned slurry and manure being spread on bare soil across five fields on rented land at Street Ash, Somerset.

Officers visited the site and found the fields were saturated with water, with run-off entering a ditch and then a tributary of the River Yarty.

They found the fields had been saturated with slurry for three weeks during April and May.

The watercourse was brown, smelt of slurry and had high ammonia levels.

Under Farming Rules for Water, manure must be spread according to crop and soil need, and not on waterlogged land where there is a pollution risk.

A second pollution event occurred on 20 May 2025, when officers visited the farm after monitoring equipment detected high ammonia levels in the River Yarty.

Several fields owned by Crawley Farm had been spread with slurry.

Officers also found slurry being pumped and discharged from a pipe onto a field rather than into a slurry store.

Silage effluent was running from silage clamps and being allowed to enter the tributary.

The tributary was covered in a thick blanket of sewage fungus.

The pollution was found to have harmed aquatic invertebrates in the watercourse.

During an inspection, officers also found a pile of farmyard manure less than 10 metres from the watercourse, with no provision in place to collect slurry run-off.

The Environment Agency said organic manure must be stored at least 10 metres from waterways.

An Environment Agency spokesperson said: “This farm’s reckless attitude to the storage and spreading of manure and slurry led to two pollution incidents and the risk of far greater harm.”

The spokesperson added: “Derek Dyer has failed to learn his lesson despite multiple prosecutions and formal warnings over almost two decades.”

They said the outcome showed the agency would “not hesitate to prosecute repeat polluters” who failed to follow its advice and warnings.

The offences related to unpermitted water discharges and breaches of agricultural diffuse pollution rules.

The Environment Agency said the case showed repeat polluters who ignore advice and warnings risk prosecution.