Recent examples of farm pollution

SEPTEMBER 2015 Farm slurry was blamed for the deaths of fish, including salmon and trout, in Skitwath and Dacre Becks, near Penrith in Cumbria. Skitwath Beck was completely stripped of fish.

APRIL 2016 A Somerset dairy farm was ordered to pay £9,425 in fines and costs for allowing dirty water to escape from a lagoon that stored milking parlour washings.

AUGUST 2016 A farmer responsible for polluting the river Witham in Lincolnshire with 6,000 litres of liquid fertiliser, killing an estimated 2,000 wild brown trout, was ordered to pay £36,000 to Grantham Angling Association.

DECEMBER 2016 More than 1,000 fish died, including all salmon and sea trout in a two-mile stretch, after a suspected slurry leak in the Tregaron area on the Teifi, Wales.

APRIL 2017 A tributary of the Honddu river in Monmouthshire was hit by a significant discharge from a lagoon containing up to 450,000 litres of slurry.

JUNE 2017 A North Somerset farmer pleaded guilty and was fined £22,000 after a slurry lagoon overflowed into a ditch, polluting a river in Frome, Somerset, killing 1,700 fish. Wales’ largest dairy farm was fined £36,000 after cattle slurry waste overspilled from a lagoon and left part of a brook in Carmarthenshire 80-90% covered in sewage fungus.

SUMMER 2017 Guisborough Angling Club received £3,000 compensation after poorly managed slurry spreading at a pig farming complex in North Yorkshire resulted in a major fish kill.

SUMMER 2017 Fish Legal secured £5,000 in compensation for the Bolton and District Angling Society after a serious fish kill in 2011, when neat silage liquor, mixed with dirty water from a farm yard, entered a feeder stream.