A prosecution brought by the Environment Agency has ended with a Cornwall farmer being ordered to pay £3,765 after a digestate spill at a farm near Warbstow led to a major fish kill in the River Ottery. At Truro magistrates’ court on 13 May, Norman Osborne, 57, of Tobarn, Jacobstow, pleaded guilty and was fined £215, with £3,550 in prosecution costs. According to the government case summary, the offence was causing a water discharge activity contrary to regulation 38(1)(a) and regulation 12(1)(b) of the Environmental Permitting (England and Wales) Regulations 2016. The case provides a clear example of how routine farm waste handling can become a regulated pollution incident once material enters a watercourse.
The court heard that on 20 May 2022 Osborne was transferring digestate from a tank into a tanker for spreading on farmland when a connecting hose broke. The Environment Agency later estimated that about 2,300 gallons of digestate escaped from the tank system and entered the nearby watercourse. The official account states that the material ran down the road and that the impact was worsened when the spilled digestate was washed into the watercourse. Osborne did not report the incident to the Environment Agency at the time, removing the chance for early advice on containment and immediate mitigation.
Digestate is the wet residue left after the anaerobic digestion of food waste and other organic matter, and it is commonly used as a fertiliser. The Environment Agency’s description in this case is significant: although digestate can be used beneficially on land, it is highly polluting when it escapes into surface water because it can contain very high ammonia and nitrogen levels. That risk was reflected in the damage recorded in the River Ottery. Some 3.5km of watercourse was affected. Officers counted 471 dead fish, while the true mortality was estimated at 1,610. Species affected included Atlantic salmon, brown trout and bullheads.
The longer-term ecological effect also formed part of the prosecution. The court heard that, two years after the incident, fish populations had still not recovered to historic levels. That point is important in regulatory terms because the seriousness of a pollution event is not judged only by the immediate spill volume or the financial penalty imposed, but by the extent and duration of environmental harm. The investigation also found sludge and microplastics in the watercourse, alongside the high ammonia levels associated with the digestate spill. Taken together, those findings help explain why a single loss-of-containment event can trigger both criminal enforcement and prolonged damage to aquatic habitat.
For operators, the legal point is narrower than the environmental story but no less important. Regulation 12 of the 2016 permitting framework restricts water discharge activities unless they are authorised, while regulation 38 provides the offence structure used in prosecutions involving unauthorised discharges. In practical terms, if polluting material from a site reaches a river, stream or ditch without lawful authority, enforcement can follow even where the underlying activity was part of ordinary farm operations. The Environment Agency said Osborne’s failure to report the incident quickly worsened the outcome. That reflects a standard regulatory expectation in pollution cases: prompt notification is not a procedural detail, but part of limiting damage and allowing the regulator to direct containment action before further harm occurs.
The River Ottery case is therefore less about the size of the fine than about the operational duties attached to storing, transferring and spreading digestate. A broken hose, an uncontained runoff route and delayed reporting were enough to turn a fertiliser handling task into a prosecution with measurable ecological consequences. For farmers, land managers and waste operators, the message from the government summary is direct. Equipment used to move digestate must be maintained and monitored, routes to drains and watercourses need to be considered before transfer begins, and any escape must be reported immediately. The case shows how the Environmental Permitting Regulations work in practice: through enforcement after an unlawful discharge, and through an expectation that operators act quickly enough to prevent further damage.