According to the Environment Agency, Exeter Magistrates' Court has ordered D I & R Dyer (Farm Partnership) and one of its partners, Derek Dyer, to pay a combined £19,468 after offences linked to two slurry pollution incidents in 2024 and 2025. The family-run business, which operates at Crawley Farm in Yarcombe, Devon, admitted causing pollution in a tributary of the River Yarty. The published court outcome says the partnership was fined £6,600, ordered to pay a £2,000 victim surcharge and £7,368 in costs. Derek Dyer was separately fined £2,500 and ordered to pay a further £1,000 victim surcharge after admitting failures in the application and storage of organic manure.
The Environment Agency's account places the prosecution in a longer compliance history. The regulator said the farm had previously received advice and warnings on a number of occasions, and that Derek Dyer had already been sentenced in 2024 after a slurry store built from farmyard manure collapsed, contaminating a private water supply and polluting a stream. The case summary also records a further relevant conviction in 2009. That background is important because it shifts the case away from a single operational mistake and towards repeated non-compliance. The court also noted that a slurry store for which permission had been granted in January 2025 had still not been built by the time of the hearing.
The first incident began on 1 May 2024, when a member of the public reported slurry and manure spreading on bare soil in five fields at rented land in Street Ash, Somerset. Environment Agency officers attended and found the land was saturated, with water running off the fields into a ditch and then into a tributary of the River Yarty. The agency said the fields had been saturated with slurry for three weeks during April and May. In the Environment Agency's summary, officers recorded that the watercourse was brown, smelt of slurry and showed high ammonia levels. The significance for policy and enforcement is clear: the Farming Rules for Water require farmers to spread organic manure only in line with crop and soil need at the time of application, with weather conditions and pollution risk taken into account. The same rules prohibit spreading on water-logged land.
A second incident followed on 20 May 2025, after monitoring equipment showed high ammonia levels in the River Yarty. Environment Agency officers visiting Crawley Farm found that a number of fields had been spread with slurry. They also observed slurry being pumped and discharged from a pipe on to a field rather than into a slurry store. The same visit identified another route by which pollution was reaching the watercourse. Silage effluent was running out of silage clamps and being allowed to enter the tributary, and the tributary itself was covered in a thick blanket of sewage fungus. The Environment Agency said the incident had a detrimental effect on aquatic invertebrates, showing that the damage extended beyond visual pollution to ecological harm.
During the farm inspection, officers also found a pile of farmyard manure less than 10 metres from the watercourse, with no provision in place to collect slurry runoff. That detail formed part of the case against Derek Dyer and is a straightforward compliance point under the Reduction and Prevention of Agricultural Diffuse Pollution (England) Regulations 2018. Those regulations, widely referred to through the Farming Rules for Water, set basic controls on how organic manure is handled on agricultural land. One of those controls is distance: organic manure must be stored at least 10 metres away from inland freshwaters. In practice, the case shows that storage failures and spreading failures are treated as connected risks where runoff can quickly reach a ditch, stream or tributary.
The legal structure of the prosecution is as important as the facts on the ground. The partnership was prosecuted for causing unpermitted water discharge activity under the Environmental Permitting (England and Wales) Regulations 2016 in relation to both pollution incidents. Derek Dyer was separately prosecuted under Regulation 11(1) of the 2018 diffuse pollution regulations for failing to ensure that manure application was properly planned and for storing organic manure too close to inland freshwaters. That distinction matters for farm operators and advisers. One set of offences addresses the discharge into water; the other addresses the management decisions that created the risk in the first place. The River Yarty case shows how the Environment Agency can use both routes together when it considers that warnings and earlier interventions have not changed behaviour.
For the farming sector, the message is operational rather than abstract. Storage capacity, field conditions, weather forecasts, runoff controls and the location of manure heaps are not secondary matters to be dealt with after spreading decisions are taken. Under the Farming Rules for Water, they are part of the legal test for whether an application of manure has been planned properly. The Environment Agency said the outcome demonstrates that it will prosecute repeat polluters who fail to respond to advice and warnings. In that sense, the case is a clear account of how enforcement works in practice: poor infrastructure, spreading on saturated ground, unmanaged effluent and repeated regulator contact can combine into a prosecution with separate penalties for the business and the individual partner.