A farmer has been ordered to pay nearly £40,000 for polluting a quarry lagoon with dairy slurry, a court heard.
Philip McDowell, 38, of Willoughbridge Lodge Farm, near Market Drayton, admitted allowing it to flow into Lordsley Wood Quarry without an environmental permit at a hearing in July and was sentenced on Wednesday.
The Environment Agency, which brought the prosecution, said it had received a report of the tenant farmer pumping slurry into the quarry in January 2023.
It sent officers to the site, who found the lagoon contained “thick and dirty floating foam which smelled of cattle slurry” and that it had spread across “a significant area”.