Farmer pollutes pond with milk

A CHESHIRE FARMER has been given a three-year conditional discharge at Crewe Magistrates‘ Court after pleading guilty to polluting a neighbour‘s ponds with milk.

The farmer was also ordered to pay £1,768.09 in costs to the Environment Agency, which brought the prosecution.

The issue was brought to the EA‘s attention in May 2003 when the farmer‘s neighbour called and said he had found about 50 dead fish in his interlinked ponds.

An EA officer visited the scene and noticed a strong smell of sour milk and noticed a pool of white substance on the grass in the adjacent field.

During the course of the investigation, the EA found that the white milky pool in the adjacent field had tracked into his neighbour‘s garden.

A further 58 fish died before the EA decided to rescue the remaining 133 fish and take them away until the water quality in the ponds had improved.

When the EA interviewed the farmer, he said that he had been left with a surplus of milk after the dairy had refused to take it.

According to the EA, he had told his son to spread the milk on the fields over the course of three days, at a rate of about 2,000 litres each time.

The court heard that milk is extremely polluting. Like sewage, it strips oxygen quickly from the water. Hence the fish in the ponds died of suffocation.

When the EA analysed a sample taken from the farmer‘s neighbour‘s garden, it proved to be about 100 times as polluting as raw sewage.

The farmer pleaded guilty to having caused milk to flow into waters containing fish to such an extent as to cause the waters to be poisonous or injurious to the fish.