Opinion: Fly-tipping tale has a Netflix-style twist
© Adobe Stock In my previous column, I talked about our new tenancy and feeling like “a proper farmer”.
My hubris didn’t pass unnoticed by the farming gods and, a week after that was published, I was sent a “proper farmer’s problem” to balance the books.
We were visited by our first fly-tipper.
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It is hard to conceive a more dispiriting scene than fly-tipped waste on Holbeach Marsh in winter.
You’ll never see that on a Christmas card.
Fly-tipping is a bewildering crime; the work isn’t significantly easier than doing the job legally, and the hours are certainly antisocial.
Even more bizarrely, it’s the legal responsibility of the victim to clear the mess up.
But I’m not the self-pitying or complaining sort.
You’ll never see me photographed in your local paper pointing at a pothole or leaning disconsolately on an uncollected wheelie bin.
I’m solution-orientated, you see. One phone call and our farm team were mobilised faster than Thunderbirds flying out the top of their volcano.
There were five of us there within the hour, in matching, branded high-visibility jackets with a JCB telescopic loader and a tractor and trailer.
It was like an “If Carlsberg did council workers” TV advert.
I was determined to identify the culprit and led the charge from the front.
I was first in the dyke rummaging in the disgusting debris like the lovechild of Hetty Wainthropp and Stig of the Dump.
Bingo! I found exhibit A – a child’s primary school achievement certificate.
Our suspect was clearly either a five-year-old girl or the parent of a five-year-old girl.
We don’t yet have lab facilities for fingerprint analysis on our farm so now I had to resort to old-fashioned detective work – photographing the evidence and putting it on the village Facebook group.
Amazon discovery
The plot now thickens. Our next discovery was an Amazon parcel with an actual name and address.
It felt like the end of an episode in a Netflix thriller. Had we found our man? (I’m not sexist, but confess I’d had a horse sense that our suspect was a man from the outset).
I updated the Facebook post accordingly.
The rest of the rubbish was duly loaded, carted away and deposited in a skip from which it could be legally dumped, at our expense, in a hole on someone else’s land instead of ours.
Like all Netflix thrillers, there’s a twist.
The next thing that happened was that the suspect’s mother rang us up to dob him in.
It wasn’t some dodgy bloke in a tipping Transit, as I had imagined, he was actually a tractor driver.
His Facebook profile even had one of those “No Farmers, No Food” memes on it.
He was supposedly one of us.
His mother was an apologetic, decent and redoubtable Fen woman, and she left us in no doubt that justice would be served on her son without further action from us.
Anyway, as you already know, I don’t dwell.
I’m solution-orientate. I’ve put heavy-duty steel gates in our 2026 cap-ex budget already.
We are legally permitted to restrict the access on bridleways to a width of 1.5m and so that’s exactly what’s going to happen.
It will be physically impossible to access our farm without permission in 2026 unless you are travelling on horseback or in a Kia Picanto with the wing mirrors removed.