Devon farm fined £19,468 over River Yarty slurry pollution
According to the Environment Agency, a Devon farm partnership has been ordered to pay £19,468 after slurry pollution hit a tributary of the River Yarty in two separate incidents. Exeter Magistrates Court heard that D I & R Dyer, a family-run business at Crawley Farm in Yarcombe, pleaded guilty to causing pollution in 2024 and 2025. The partnership was fined £6,600, with a £2,000 victim surcharge and £7,368 in costs. Derek Dyer was separately fined £2,500 and ordered to pay a £1,000 victim surcharge after admitting offences linked to manure spreading and storage.
This was not treated as a one-off mistake. The court heard that the farm had already received advice and warnings from the Environment Agency on several occasions, and that Derek Dyer had been given a community order in 2024 after a separate pollution case involving a collapsed slurry store, a polluted stream and a contaminated private water supply. There was also an earlier relevant conviction in 2009. The court noted that a slurry store approved in January 2025 still had not been built. That matters because proper storage is one of the basic things meant to stop waste washing into streams when the ground is wet or the weather turns.
The first incident came to light on 1 May 2024, when a member of the public reported slurry and manure being spread on bare soil across five fields at rented land in Street Ash, Somerset. Environment Agency officers who visited found the land was already saturated, with water running off the fields into a ditch and then into a tributary of the River Yarty. Officers said the fields had been saturated with slurry for three weeks across April and May. They found brown water that smelt of slurry, along with high ammonia levels. If you are new to this issue, that is a warning sign: once farm waste gets into flowing water, the damage does not stay neatly inside a field boundary.
**What this means:** slurry can be used as a fertiliser, but only when soil and crops can actually make use of it. The Farming Rules for Water say farmers should spread it according to crop and soil need at the time, take steps to cut pollution risk, and not spread it on waterlogged land. That may sound technical, but the idea is simple. If the ground is already soaked, more liquid waste has nowhere to go except sideways and downhill. What looks like 'just runoff' on a farm track can quickly become pollution in a ditch, a stream and then a wider river.
The second incident followed on 20 May 2025, when monitoring equipment picked up high ammonia levels in the River Yarty. When Environment Agency officers went to Crawley Farm, they found fields that had been spread with slurry, and slurry being pumped from a pipe on to a field rather than into a store. They also found silage effluent running out of clamps and reaching the tributary. The stream was covered in what the Environment Agency described as a thick blanket of sewage fungus, and the incident was found to have had a detrimental impact on aquatic invertebrates.
**Why that matters:** aquatic invertebrates are the small creatures that help keep a stream alive, and they feed fish, birds and other wildlife. When pollution hits them hard, it is often a sign that the water is under severe stress. During the farm inspection, officers also found a pile of farmyard manure less than 10 metres from the watercourse, with nothing in place to collect slurry runoff. That is another rule written in plain terms: organic manure must be stored at least 10 metres away from inland freshwaters. In simple English, the partnership admitted two unpermitted pollution discharges into inland freshwaters, while Derek Dyer admitted failing to plan manure application properly and failing to store manure far enough from the water.
After the case, the Environment Agency said the farm's reckless approach to storing and spreading manure and slurry created the risk of far greater harm, and said it would continue prosecuting repeat polluters who ignore advice and warnings. This is not about catching farmers out on a technicality. It is about whether waste is being managed safely before it reaches water. If you are wondering why a small tributary matters, think of it as the start of the story, not the edge of it. A brown ditch, a strong slurry smell or a blanket of sewage fungus can be early signs that something has already gone wrong. Clean water rules are there to protect wildlife, nearby communities and every river that depends on those smaller streams upstream.